Of all the things this seems like a line to me. Even unacceptable. This literally means with our current system, incorrectly identified images can be permanently stuck in the gallery. How can this be justified? Its one thing to do something for yourself (if you wanna opt out, they are your observations, so you have the right to), but its another thing to then have their own decision influence everybody else on the site like this. Nobody should have “the right” to permanently fix images to a taxa with zero ways to deal with incorrect ones.
This also easily could be abused by trolls if they just set opt out on and upload whatever they want to whatever taxa. Unless those observations are removed by staff those images are staying in the gallery.
If the community corrects the ID and the observer’s ID becomes “maverick”, then the observation becomes casual grade and by default won’t show up in the photo browser.
The photo browser should default to show only photos from resarch grade observations, but the settings are “sticky” so if you chose to see photos regardless of observaiton data quality, you might see this photo.
Maybe it’s because I tend to look at old observations that are at a pretty general id level (like kingdom-Order), but I rarely see any opt-out users react to my ids. In my experience users frequently go dormant or just ignore finer ids. Some do, but it’s rare for me.
Yes, I’m aware, and even wrote a paragraph to mention that and then make the point that there are good reasons to browse photos which are Needs ID, particularly in genera which are difficult to ID to species from photos, but ended up deleting it after I started to write other counterarguments and rebuttals and realized I was burying the main issue I wanted to bring attention to.
There’s no option to view “Needs ID” but not “Casual” in the photo gallery. It’s either RG or everything.
I can count on one hand, or maybe both hands if I think hard enough, how many people this would apply to. I still insist there is a far greater amount of users who use it ‘properly’, but maybe I’m mistaken since I don’t have enough experience on a global scale to comment for every corner of the globe.
However even if I’m wrong there I do still think there’s no such thing as a “wasted” ID, since consensus can be educational to others looking in. If an obs that is opted-in gets enough IDs it becomes casual anyway, which creates an end limit to how much identifier time could in theory be wasted.
I think this is only true if they’re disagreeing IDs. I recall one I came across once that had an observer ID of plants (ironically with the correct ID in the description??), and about 6-7 subsequent IDs vainly trying to move it down by varying amounts, and it still hadn’t gone casual or moved a millimetre. I can see your point about identifiers learning, but realistically I think there are enough things waiting in Needs ID that any ID on an observation that can’t change is wasted.
In the case where the observer’s ID was wrong, he opted out, and now he’s dead, you can always mark the record “No, it can’t be improved” and get it out of everybody’s way, into casual. That’s a waste of data, of course, but there isn’t any good way to make that data useful.
I use mainly the Identify feature to examine observations even when I’m not identifying them. There, one can choose RG, NI, or Casual, all separately. So I wasn’t aware of this problem.
By photo gallery, do you mean using the Explore tab? Or something else? (I’ve been using iNaturalist a while but it still has lots of features I don’t understand.)
I think a search function that allows for easy filtering of observations in this situation would go a long way to solving this problem. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to search for Casual observations that would be RG if the user had opted in to CID- in other words, observations with 4+ agreements on a species ID with only 1 disagreement, but stuck in Casual purgatory because of an opt-out. I know these are currently “edge cases” and most opted-out observations don’t end up in this category, but we’re all going to die some day, and taxonomy will keep changing after we die, so with a bunch of us leaving behind tens of thousands of “opted-out” observations for the iNatters of the future to deal with, this will become a larger and larger problem as our IDs become posthumously wronger and wronger with time. At the very least, it would be nice for someone researching a species to be able to sort for observations that “everyone else” thinks is their study study species that is Casual forever due to the observer leaving the platform, dying, failing to notice a notification, etc.
When looking through old insect collections from 50+ years ago, for some taxa the vast majority of names on the det labels are wrong by modern standards. iNat records don’t have to be like that. Sure, “taxon swaps” solve some of this on iNat, but a user who opts out of CID, opts out of automatic taxon swaps, and then passes away is in essence dooming all their observations to eventual meaninglessness as taxa get split, lumped, shifted to new genera, etc. Maybe that’s what some users want, but I doubt it. It would be nice to at least be able to see forever-Casual would-be-RG observations in one place, since the number of them can only increase over time.
There’s apparently no way to look through casual observations that are not captive, either. I know a ton of mine get marked as “location inaccurate” (which I have to guess is a shortcut mistake), or sometimes “cannot be identified further” (which I feel about the same way some people feel about opt-out as a whole).
edit: apparently there was a way all this time, ignore this.
Surely something should get figured out. Taxonomy is constantly changing. Chironomid taxonomy just 40 years ago was quite different in a number of places. Any observations permanently stuck at an ID is likely to become useless. Is it even possible to search for observations of inactivated taxa? Or search for inactive taxa? How many observations are currently stuck there? Even if its small, the number will continue to grow and grow.
Lol, this was perfect. I just gained about 120 species from fixing all these. Most of them locations marked incorrect, or taxon swaps that gliched and turned them casual.
This is a prime example of why I brought this up in the first place. We’re talking about the fact that the user is deceased, and it was only after he died that 5 individuals attempted to correct the id. We have no idea how this user would’ve responded to this correction, so why should opting out still be an option in this situation?
This is why we reconsider whether or not opting out still applies if users are deceased.
