I have to confess, I don’t understand the arguments that this proposed change would make uploading observations more difficult or less efficient for many users. Learning to click slightly lower to enter a species ID doesn’t seem too difficult to me, and it doesn’t prevent users from focusing on a specific taxon. Users could still enter a species ID first for each observation if they wanted, and the species would still be easily visible on each card/tile. I’m not sure what I’m missing, so I’d be interested to hear any detailed explanations of how this change would be an impediment to use for others.
I don’t personally think the proposed change would have a strong affect on own my uploading process either way. I suppose I do tend to enter batches of observations that are all from one location, so setting the place at the beginning might be slightly more efficient for me.
The proposed benefit to the iNat community of nudging other users towards entry of place/location information does seem plausible to me for several reasons:
- Location and date are two fields that cannot be corrected by identifiers. Identifiers can, however, essentially correct an erroneous initial ID by an observer though. Editing location/place data after initial upload is more complex than changing an ID for observers, so in this sense, getting the location and date correctly entered is quite important.
- Location and date also provide key information to facilitate and improve identification, whether those are IDs from users or the CV. In the case of CV based IDs, I don’t find the arguments that entering location before using the CV will not improve accuracy to be compelling. This is based on the fact that adding location information to the CV model process was something that was widely requested by the community (see this feature request thread, though there are many others) and had broad-based support several years ago. There were many known cases where bad CV IDs were broadly suggested due to not taking location into account. Based on forum posts, the implementation of including location data in response to these requests has been quite successful and reduced the number of poor IDs. As such, I think it follows that encouraging a larger proportion of initial IDs to be made with location data could improve initial ID accuracy.
- There are a reasonable number of observations uploaded without any location information at all. We don’t see these very often because of the default filters, but they do exist. I think it’s reasonable to hypothesize that the placement of the location field first might reduce these, increasing the proportion of verifiable observations.