This is a blatantly erroneous statement. The data is there and usable – “community ID” or not – ready to be picked and assessed and IDed and published by anyone interested in it, e.g. researchers who happen to look for stuff – “community identified” (and sometimes wrongly so) or not. No data is lost, no data is hidden, no data is unusable. The only difference with the “average iNat observation” is that these observations will have the “collector’s ID” displayed more prominently than the “community ID”. Just like with any herbarium: leave it to curators and taxonomists, not to “a majority of voters”.
Oh, no, not necessarily wrong - you’re right if you agree with me! ;-)
Yes, I realise that it’s a very very uncommon reason for opting out, but I think it should be acknowledged that it does occasionally occur.
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Actually, for all practical purposes, opting out means that only the observer’s ID is displayed in searching and browsing; it is not simply “more prominent”. The other IDs are, in effect, hidden unless one is on the observation page itself, which is useless for scientists trying to find records of a particular taxon.
The only way to find IDs other than the observer’s for these observations is if one is familiar enough with URL manipulation or the API to find IDs that do not match the observation ID. This is not practical for most uses, because it will also provide many irrelevant results.
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Just wanted to throw in something I just ran across recently, where a user was opted out but had no idea. With a bit of back and forth it got fixed (hurray!), but I wonder how many others may be accidental/unknown opt-outs? It might be worth trying outreach when you run across this. It would be nice if there was something that could give users a heads-up when they are opted out (did you want to remain opted out?), but how to do it without it being overly irritating for anyone who intends to be…?? Maybe on one’s iNat anniversary you get a communication, happy anniversary, review your settings…? There have been plenty of times I’ve very belatedly learned I was doing things wrong. 
When I first learned of iNat I just couldn’t wait to dive in to using it. Anyway - here is the anonymized discussion:
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If iNat is ever going to be fully useful as a long term system of record, the status of orphan records needs to be coherently addressed.
We solve the problem for Ohio Odonata records by annually updating our own database, pulling in new iNat records. It’s a lot of work, and ultimately, it shouldn’t be necessary.
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Suggestion (for researchers): define a Consensual Taxon, just like the Community Taxon but ignoring the effet of opting out, never display this Consensual Taxon (so that no one can claim ownership and no one can complain about it), but make it searchable with a specific URL filter. Everyone happy with this?
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I sort of like this idea, but couldn’t a simpler version just be that the Community ID (apart from the opted-out user) is accessible via a filter? For opted-out observations, the CID is still calculated (we can click on the algorithm and see it). So I don’t think that there’s a need to calculate another ID?
Also, in response to
Staff (sadly) declined a feature request for such a filter, though I understand some of the reasoning.
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Not all observations are “hidden, lost”. But if an observation is stuck at a family ID and there are 1000s of observations of that family in the area. It takes a decent amount of work to actually find it. You may have to sift through thousands of observations.
I don’t see how it is blatantly false. An Axarus festivus permanently IDed at Chironomidae is not going to provide data to the species, training data for the CV, get exported to the GBIF, be easily findable, etc.
That depends if its even IDed. I don’t ID observations that are permanently stuck becuase there really isn’t a point. There are 1000s of other observations I can ID where I can make a difference to the observation.
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This discussion has alerted me to another problem. Not to go off on a tangent or take the thread off-topic, but after I’m gone, there won’t be anyone to withdraw my mavericks.
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I see. My suggestion was incorrect. Update:
Suggestion (for researchers): define a Consensual Taxon, just like the Observation Taxon (the one displayed at the top of the observation page) but ignoring the effet of opting out. Never display this Consensual Taxon (so that no one can claim ownership and no one can complain about it), but make it searchable with a specific URL filter.
For instance, with this taxon filter, I get this observation in the results:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?on=2019-04-26&taxon_id=82742
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/23250672
But with this taxon filter, I don’t get this observation (but I would like to):
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?on=2024-12-29&taxon_id=58907
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/256678125
In other words, my suggestion is about a new URL filter consensual_taxon_id=58907 that would provide observation 256678125 in the results.
Make this ID (to be computed from the IDs in the observation page) searchable but never display it (so that the observer can’t complain about that ID they don’t want to see in their observation page, and so that no one can claim they own it).
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I believe iNat stuff only adds amendments etc when they know the deceased person well. It’s understandable.
I think I already commented earlier (running on low sleep, apologies), but opt-out meaning “I’m right, and you are all wrong”, while it happens, does not correctly attribute the full power of how and why opt-out is useful.
Aside from the example when an observer has additional evidence on an ID that they cannot supply to the observation itself, and have good reason to stick to their ID, these are other good reasons opt-out can be useful:
- Manual review for learning or archive purposes. This gives users the power to look at new IDs and learn about the species involved, which for me is one of the most informative parts about the iNat system. It also means people using a personal archive such as their own spreadsheet or photo labels can make changes to their archive of choice as they go through. With opt-in everything changes without you being present, and it can quickly become overwhelming or impossible to keep up.
- Defense against incorrect or “student” IDs. When I first started I had a lot of issues with random student accounts putting blatantly incorrect IDs on things. Or people who meant well identifying something as “common green lacewing” where it was a complex of indistinguishable species, but the common name had them think it was that. I am not including cases where the observer stubbornly sticks to their own ID and ignores feedback in this point.
- Mediating consistency. Some experts will identify at genus only until they are 90% confident of a species. Some will identify at species as early as only 50% confidence. This creates inconsistent data treatment overall, which can be undesirable. Speaking of inconsistent data…
- Control over where the observation occurs. Because of the way community ID and opt-in works, the observation label can be more specific than the overall consensus. For instance, 1 genus and 1 species ID will label that observation to species, and even though it is not RG that observation now appears and counts as that species in checklists, life lists, and in many site applications including data export. This can be quite undesirable, and I see many researchers or project managers complain about it regularly.
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Also a scientist working on a new sp. - using an ID to Genus, until the new description is published. Good intentions adding a Species ID - is counter-productive.
It’s great that you follow up on IDs you receive, but I can’t think of a single instance I have encountered of a user who globally opts out and does so responsibly in the manner you describe. This is why many of us get frustrated with globally opted out users.
The typical profile that I see is an experienced, high-volume observer, often an active IDer themself – sometimes a taxon specialist, sometimes a generalist with only moderate knowledge about the IDs they are providing. Probably there are also new users who globally opt out without understanding what they are doing, but in terms of numbers of observations, virtually all the ones I encounter are from users who are amply familiar with iNat. They do not observe exclusively in their area of expertise – thus, for some portion of their observations they provide only a very broad ID or use a CV suggestion that is often of dubious quality.
Almost invariably, they respond to refining or disagreeing IDs in one of two ways:
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Doing nothing. This is not a matter of simply missing the occasional notification or being offline for a couple of days or waiting to get additional feedback or doing their own research before they update their records; the 5th or 6th ID, comments, and @ mentions are similarly met with no response in most cases.
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If they do respond to repeated attempts to get their attention, they do not opt back in to community ID, nor do they ask questions about the ID – even the taxon is clearly out of their area of expertise. They simply agree to the most recent ID (in other words, the result is no different than if they had remained opted in, except that IDers waste an inordinate amount of time trying to get their attention merely to correct egregiously wrong IDs or refine broad IDs for common, easy taxa).
So if the motivation for opting out is to be able to assess the IDs one receives before having the ID applied to one’s observation, these users are not acting in accordance with their principles. If the motivation for opting out is bad experiences with getting wrong IDs by unskilled users, a better response would be to opt out on an as-needed basis.
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Yes! But in this popup the observer is guided to the global opt-out, the opt-out on an as-needed basis not explained (only iNatters already aware of both modes can understand, when the word observation is used in the singular, just after the plural):
If you don’t like is not a good suggestion…
Why I wouldn’t like it? Should I?
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I actually went looking for how to opt-out on an observation basis yesterday, just to test how it worked, and couldn’t find it (to be fair, I didn’t try looking at the help, and I see the answer above now) - whereas the overall opt-out I found relatively easily. I don’t think we want to encourage either, but it’s definitely better for people to be opting out for individual observations than a blanket opt-out.
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I had the same issue! It took me time before I could respond to this question:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/issues-when-a-suggestion-is-made-that-a-species-is-the-same-as-another-species/62328
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The opt-out option is only available for individual observations after they have a community ID; you can’t opt out if the only ID is your own. So there is no way to preemptively opt out on observations that one knows are likely to attract wrong IDs while still accepting community ID for everything else. I have wondered whether fewer people would globally opt out if it were possible to opt out for a specific observation when uploading it.
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It’s also only available when your ID differs from the community taxon. There was a feature request to show the link to reject the community taxon at all times on each observation but staff decided not to move forward with it.
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Mostly I have no issue with users opting out, but it does bother me that this causes the community taxon to be ignored on a few pages where it probably should not be ignored. For example, if I’m browsing photos of a taxon, photos where the user’s ID is maverick but they’ve opted out still show up in the gallery for the wrong species.
E.g. when browsing photos of Parasteatoda tepidariorum (Common House Spider): https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/120583-Parasteatoda-tepidariorum/browse_photos
This observation shows up:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/78420022
It doesn’t bother me that this observation is “Needs ID”, because I can just mark it as reviewed and don’t have to see it again. But opting-out of community ID should not make it impossible to remove misidentified photos from the gallery. In this case the observer died in 2022, so commenting or messaging to ask that the ID be reconsidered or the opt-out be removed can’t accomplish anything.
(Maybe this should be a bug report for the gallery page?)
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