From some comments and discussions I’ve read, I have noticed that: Some identifiers dislike being tagged, as it makes them feel like they are performing a robotic task. Many observations, even of very common species, remain unidentified for years. Some identifiers do not use or are unaware of the …

[image] vbjanos: lack any bias While I get your point here, I don’t think CV is completely unbiased. It will naturally pick up biases because the data it is trained on is based on humans with biases (if I understood how CV works correctly, at least). Unlike a human it’s consistent with the bi…

Instead of reward mechanisms and facing Goodhart law, I believe the best solution is to allow people to source and have some global notes page for each taxon. Maybe it would be so haphazard at the start, but knowing little tricks for species goes beyond the Wikipedia page linked to taxa or even enti…

I was imagining this (especially the regional aspect) in my suggestion here https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/proposal-for-a-new-filter-option-the-id-tips-button

As spring ramps up here and I’m trying to finish all my winter projects/help organize my local CNC/deliver specimens to the herbarium/collect more bryophytes/start a flora survey with colleagues/rip out and replace my kitchen/whatever this week throws at me, I sort of wish making IDs was NOT so inhe…

A simple free text community editable notes on taxonomy nodes would be very useful indeed. As you proposed, these could provide identification clues. It would be a good place for references for public domain keys and other resources and also what to record in an observation to make it identifiable…

I imagine this would be hard to quantify, but I’d be curious whether the identifier profiles posted periodically on the iNat blog have a positive effect on the overall IDing activity for the identifiers’ taxa of interest – i.e., do they increase awareness or waken interest in those taxa, encourage o…

[image] vbjanos: what to record in an observation to make it identifiable. Totally. Just today, I came across this dolphin observation, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/207876252 , which adds the comment about teeth, fortunately, having the teeth pic to ID better.

[image] spiphany: I think most people would tend to simply dismiss a pop-up warning to not rely solely on the CV, the same way we don’t read data privacy notices on websites or “contents may be hot” warnings on food items. Yep, that would definitely happen. I spent a year believing that there…

The hard thing about that is most of the time, a casual person without too much knowledge on a species would have no idea that photographing that part of (insert species here) would be that important for identifying. Or maybe the creature ran away before you could photograph it well enough to show t…

Should There Be More Reward Mechanisms for Identifiers?

General

austin_ajit March 30, 2025, 12:51pm 120

Then again, you could just get a long-range camera to get decent identifiable pictures from a distance, but those things cost a fortune.

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The Pleasure of Identifying General	24	1056	July 21, 2024
Identify identifiers IDs General identify	126	3669	September 13, 2025
Paper about inaturalist The benefits of contributing to the citizen science platform iNaturalist as an identifier General	67	3977	January 8, 2023
Rampant guessing of IDs General	135	9155	July 21, 2021
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Should There Be More Reward Mechanisms for Identifiers?

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