Problem is, we almost never know why they are concurring. They may have hit the agree button as a “like” or “thank you” to the identifier, or may have selected a Computer Vision suggestion because they didn’t know a better option to use. Or, they may have done either of those things because they actually knew what the organism was, and it was a convenient short-cut for adding their own ID.
I think the better solution is to provide a “like” or “thumbs-up” option on IDs and comments, and to rename the Agree button to something that more clearly describes what “Agree” is supposed to mean.
Exactly. There are plenty of “research grade” scientific specimens in herbaria and museums that are not (yet) correctly identified. They still have great value for research - arguably more value for the very reason that they may be difficult to identify because they don’t fit existing taxonomic hypotheses very well.
In that sense, every observation on iNaturalist is “research grade” if it contains any discernable evidence at all of what the organism was, and where and when it was seen. On iNaturalist, the “proxy” for sufficient evidence has been whether more than 2/3 of the identifiers can agree on what it is. But lack of such agreement doesn’t mean that there is lack of sufficient or valuable evidence.