Speed of IDs and Annotations

Good to know.

I don’t understand. Why would it be a issue if someone already went in and annotated the observation before the uploader gets to it? If the annotations are correct, no problem, if they are wrong, the observer has the power to delete those and add a correct one. I really fail to see the problem here.

Same with projects and actually even IDs. I know, someone tried to explain to me once why early IDs can be annoying, but I still don’t get why this is a “you” problem when IDers use the site as intended and observers have different workflows. There are too many observations already drowning under new observations coming in, if they have not been seen and IDed directly, I don’t think discouraging IDers to do what they do is helpful at all (says I, who usually digs around in very old observations myself, but I do appreciate the quick IDs on my own observations)

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Request for Draft Mode has 89 votes. Unless I get an irate PM - it is hard to remember - that observer says don’t

You can’t delete others’ annotations, can you? I’m not sure I’ve ever tried it on my observations, though, so maybe I’m wrong. Certainly with others’ observations, you can only downvote. And adding correct annotations doesn’t work if an existing annotation excludes other options - for example, I’ve tried downvoting ‘no flowers or fruits’ before, and it still doesn’t allow you to add ‘yes, there are fruits’ or whatever. I’ve probably never tried it with multiple negative votes, though, so maybe you can ‘maverick’ them?

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you can, if it’s your own observation

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Good to know, thanks - I’ve never had occasion to try.

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https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/apply-community-consensus-logic-to-annotations-in-the-same-way-as-for-ids/12075

Another open feature request with 101 votes from May 2020

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I’ve experienced this too, throughout my use of iNat (2021 onward). When uploading a new observation on the app (Android phone in my case), you can’t access the annotation section until after your new observation has uploaded (synced). While your observation is “syncing”, you can’t click on that observation to open it and annotate, but others can. Sure it’s wonderful to have others willing to help where you need it, but it is frustrating to be locked out of your observation when you still have more to add, and while you’re locked out, others can go in and do the things you were in the midst of doing - or would be if you could get in. For whatever it’s worth @Thunderhead, I’ve found that when your new observation is syncing, if you open the previous observation, then swipe right, you can open the syncing observation and annotate it before someone else gets to it. I hope this helps. (-:

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I fully understand your problem Thunderhead! i usually go on my fieldtrips (offline of cause), and collect hundred or so observations with INat classic. Then after the trip i do the upload, often without any IDs, as adding IDs increases memory required by the app (which is one of the limiting factors for the number of observations i can make per trip). I mainly observe plants, but whenever the “crowd of fast identifiers of iNat” see an irrelevant bug in my pictures, they ID for insects … (which i hate cause it disturbs my upload routine)
It would really be helpful, if i could delay website publication of my uploads for a day or so. So i can do my upload, and add my IDs peacefully. … eventually even duplicating my plant observations that have bugs, so these tiny critters get their proper ID too. (To explain my upload routine: I usually add a link leading to the host plant observation, to the critter observations. Therefore the host plant observation have to exist first, before any critter gets its own observation.)

It is obviously not an app problem though, but a problem of the standard sorting on the “identify” tap. With old observations being largely forgotten, while new uploads are swarmed like a honeypot.

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No, and annotations aren’t available at all yet in the new app. Annotations are a bit tricky in that they are taxon-dependent. So if we want to allow annotations pre-upload, we’d have to contact the server once the unsynced observation has been IDed and display the proper annotations. Doable, I’m sure, but also not simple.

Personally I agree with @ajott here in that if someone accurately annotates my observation before I can get to it, that’s great.

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Some of us are still ploughing thru the CNC residue. You are welcome to help.

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Well, this certainly gives me a damned if you do, damned if you don’t feeling! We’re asked to annotate because so many people don’t do that. We’re asked not to annotate so the observer has time to do it himself. On other threads we’ve heard people upset because their plant observation hasn’t been ID’d in the first 24 hours – and others complain that people are putting ID’s (especially, broad ID’s) on their observations when they’re planning to apply the optimum ID soon. Frustrating.

Sigh. I certainly don’t understand caring who annotates one’s observations but I can just add that to the list of things I don’t understand but will cooperate with if I can because accommodating other people’s wishes is polite. One of my personal rules is “Don’t ID recently posted observations by people with thousands of observations.” (Those seem to be the people who object and I can’t simply remember which individual people want what.) However, I often don’t notice how many observations a person has posted until I’ve ID’d at least 8 or 10 observations. Also, I become complacent because some people I follow have very high observation counts and are happy to have them ID’d, and then I ID for the wrong person.

Please do create a “draft mode” for uploading so these conflicts among well-intentioned people can be avoided.

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I really don’t understand the value of having an observation on iNat when you don’t want people to engage with it. Surely, if the observer wants to ID it first, but can’t get to it right away, they can wait that little bit longer before uploading, (unless they are really tight on storage and need to free up space ASAP, I guess)

I can understand annoyance when it’s immediate and you were just in the middle of doing it yourself (perhaps it’s like someone visiting you when your home’s a mess and you were just tidying up), but people have gotten mad at me for broadly IDing their hours-to-days-old observations they still wanted to ID to species themselves, apparently.

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I don’t know whether it would be feasible to implement, but it sounds like what some people would desire here is not so much a draft mode, but a setting that would allow them to upload their observations and have them available on all interfaces where they are logged in (website, app), but not have the observations displayed to any users other than themselves until a certain amount of time has passed (an hour or a day or whatever).

By the way, for those of you who place importance on annotating your observations yourself, you can sort of do this for many annotations during upload by using observation fields (at least on the website – I don’t think the app currently supports observation fields?). I can’t find the forum post discussing it right now, but some observation field values have been linked to annotations. For example, if you add one of the observation fields for “sex of organism”, it will convert the value you enter there into the corresponding annotation.

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I similar cases I duplicated the observation and identified the intended species in the duplicate.

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I guess I’m very confused about what the negative impact of someone else adding an annotation is. If it’s your own observation, you can just delete it if it’s wrong, but presumably the majority of annotations added are correct. Am I missing something? I also upload mostly using iNat Classic and go onto the browser later… if someone else has done my work for me in the intervening time, then great, less for me to have to do. I must be missing something; why is someone else rapidly annotating my observations a problem for me?

Personally I’d block someone if they responded to my IDs like this. Plenty of people appreciate a very quick ID- most, in fact. If someone is posting to iNat and then getting upset that they’re getting an ID too fast, my time IDing is better spent elsewhere.

I admit I don’t even look at whose observations I’m IDing most of the time. When I’m in ID mode, I add as many correct IDs as I can as quickly as possible. If someone doesn’t want me adding IDs, they can feel free to block me. It just slows down the process for the majority of folks who want quick IDs if identifiers are having to analyze each observation to figure out if the observer actually wants an ID or not.

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Agreed. I know I appreciate IDs ASAP, and I’m sure that’s true of the majority of iNat users. Those with special needs will have to figure out how to modify their own process to achieve their goals. Asking IDer’s to wait a day on all ID’s is perverse and letting the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

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If only the ‘draft mode’ feature request was given more votes and some consideration… No need for “perverse” uploaders to “block” people.

In terms of practical impact, I don’t believe it has one. In terms of emotional impact and flow, which was the initial problem, that is obviously person-dependent; it is your observation, for which you have plans and intentions, and someone else has wandered by and made it what they believe it is with the best of intentions. Even if they are correct, it can cause one to feel miffed and off-balance - your plans are askew, your rhythm disrupted. Rational? No, but certainly relatable; I don’t always handle transitions well even if they’re objectively an improvement. My brain just kind of fries on me until I can get it in order. This isn’t to say it is a problem that other people should have to manage or work around; perhaps for people who find this upsetting observations should have notes appended saying ‘DO NOT ID’… of course, various people do not read the notes, but being upset that people did not check your observation notes while identifying is very reasonable. If anyone had identified the unknown observations i very specifically annotated as “I’m messing around with duplication on the browser and the phone app, please leave this alone I’ll identify it when I’m done” I would certainly have been miffed.

One way that the app might impact this is that it does not show placeholders. I’ve noticed that I can check what projects an observation is in, and if it is in placeholder backup then it has a placeholder and I should open it in the web browser, but that’s certainly an awkwardness and not intuitive.

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I think it depends on what you are posting. I know birds, in general, and (my) dragonflies get identified before I can add anything to them. That’s fine with me. The bluets (damselflies) sometimes sit for awhile until the people in Ohio (where I live and take photos) who really know the native odes look at them. Other things sit: A lot of plants especially if they don’t have flowers, small caterpillars, various insects. Bees get identified fairly quickly - which I like because I often just use “Bees” or “Bumblebees”. I am trying to learn them. Butterflies get identified quickly, too.

I have started to identify bird songs/audio recordings using the Ascending sort. So, I get the oldest observations first. Some have been sitting for a number of years. I just learned that I can right-click and download them. I then use Audacity to try to enhance them

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