I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say this yet here, but it’s a good idea not to tag people as soon as you upload an observation. Give it some time, and only if it doesn’t get identified after some reasonable period, say a few weeks, tag in a relevant identifier.
The top 130 users have put in a number of identifications that equals ~25% of the total number of observations. There are more identifications than observations, each RG has at least two. Pedantic nit-picking aside, yes, we need more active identifiers!
I get tagged a lot, and personally I don’t mind if folks just use my userlogin without “context”. I can read between the lines, and I generally don’t have time for foreplay.
I do disagree with the scenario mentioned above. An urgent need on the part of the observer does not constitute an emergency on my part. Usually, the “urgency” involves someone participating in something like an insect count or bioblitz, which is not a matter of any urgency as far as I’m concerned. If it’s work-related, then it is definitely not a matter of urgency for me. As it is, it’s bad enough that I’m being exploited by folks who are being paid for my ID work - they can wait in line like everybody else.
I review several hundred observations per day - 7 days a week for much of the year, and I’m sure the observers all think their observations are in urgent need of attention. If everyone tagged me, I’d be buried in notifications and I would have to ignore ALL notifications, including the ones which I regard as genuinely urgent.
I feel folks should be patient - give it a few days to see if someone provides an ID “organically”. And folks should definitely tag someone “local”. I regularly get tagged for observations from the far side of the planet, and I have no clue what the correct ID might be.
I’m very grateful to all the identifiers who help me by providing IDs, allowing me to complete and submit my datasheets. I appreciate the time others take to assist me, and in return, I’m glad to offer that same help for taxa I know well.
I only tag others very occasionally, and I always respect boundaries. If someone indicates they don’t wish to be tagged, I stop tagging them without question. And I make far more IDs that I receive.
While I don’t want to be tagged frivolously (and I recognize that definitions of “frivolous” vary widely among iNat users), I also believe that if I ever start to feel exploited, that is a sign it may be time to step back from identifying altogether and to stop expecting others to ID for me as well. iNat is, at its core, a community. That means extending grace when others’ priorities differ from my own, as long as those differences are expressed respectfully and within reason.
OP here. I deeply appreciate everyone’s perspectives on this!
I was under the misimpression that tagging someone meant “Hey - check out this cool thing I found! You might find this interesting!” and not “Please identify this ASAP.”
(Remember I’ve only been using iNat regularly for about six months.)
A few other things I’m just now learning about tagging:
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Naked tags often come across as rude.
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Don’t tag immediately. Folks who are actively studying it will find you soon enough.
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Try to learn. Don’t repeatedly tag regarding the same species.
…How am I doing so far?
I was under the misimpression that tagging someone meant “Hey - check out this cool thing I found! You might find this interesting!” and not “Please identify this ASAP.”
It’s not that tagging someone can’t mean that, it’s just that those usually come with comments about why they’re interesting (“found another one!”, “this one is weird”, etc.) and are often from people who know us well enough (at least in the iNat sense) to have a good idea what we find interesting. Those are always fun to get, but I think most mentions, especially from people we don’t know, are for “please ID this”
One of the questions you might ask yourself is why you’re tagging IDers. At some point, I finally realized that IDers couldn’t ID my observations unless I photographed the characters they needed to make a firm ID. So, for example, a couple of years ago I became fascinated with genus Solidago (goldenrods). After making too many observations that remained stuck at genus, I decided to learn about Solidago — I studied a couple of field guides, worked through the dichotomous key on the New England Native Plant Trust web site, and took a half-day workshop — all of which helped me to learn what I needed to photograph in order to get a firm ID. (By the way, in the course of learning what I needed to photograph, I also began learning how to ID Solidago.)
I was an art student for a while, a long time ago, and I actually think about this kind of thing a lot. Great photographs are beautiful in part because they are rooted in deep knowledge of their subject matter. Ansel Adams’s photographs of Yosemite are so powerful in part because he knew the landscape so intimately. Or think of Karl Blossfeldt, or Anna Atkins — part of the beauty of their photos lies in their knowledge of the organisms that were their subjects. It has definitely deepened my photographic praxis to pick a taxon — a genus or family that I find myself photographing a lot — and going beyond iNat IDs to learn more. As a part of this, I rarely tag IDers any more — and maybe one of these days, I’ll be brave enough to start making IDs in taxa that I’ve studied.
As the saying goes — your mileage may vary. But thought I’d mention it.
I thought: “Thats so german.” And you followed up by saying: “Maybe that’s the german…”
Nailed it.
I 2nd this tho. I am aware that people tag me to get an ID. A nice little sentence to it is prefered though… Obviously.
I get annoyed when I am being tagged for IDs that are not hard to get to by using google or by just clicking on the taxon page. (If they select a Species that could be visually excluded by just looking at the taxon pictures - again and again)
Not sure how to explain this better … When people make no effort whatsoever to get a broad ID on their own and blindly agree on whatever I say.
There are also some people that have 100+ Observations of a Genus I am IDing with very few (3) possible species in it that don’t really look alike. After IDing over 70 of them, they have learned nothing, even though I gave explenations on the first few IDs. I get that nobody can learn and know everything, but if you have observed something over 100 times, you should be able to get further than Genus + IDer-Tag…
Okay, so. Conclusion.
I appreciate some nice words, but tagging me is enough to make me understand what you want. :D
But: Don’t write “thank you” comments, pleaase. (unless you have some cool new info to share with it) Those spam my notifications…
I’ll add “be respectful of the IDers time”.
My area of focus is Afrotropical butterflies, particularly Central African butterflies. Sometimes, there are apparent tourists who fly in for a great two week trip and once back home they’re itching to know what species of butterflies they saw and they’ll tag me on 20+ observations all at once.
If those are all fairly common species, I can probably ID them all in ~15-20 minutes. But, if they’re common, they’d likely be ID’d anyways within a couple of weeks (a good timeline for insect IDs in the region).
If they’re all proper forest species, then I’ll likely need to spend 5 - 10 minutes (sometimes more) on each species observed. For many genera, it’s just a lot of work, consulting several different sources, narrowing down the list of possibilities to one specific ID.
So, in summary, tagging me in 20+ observations is equivalent to asking me to do hours of IDing, just for you, and if you’ve just “@” me in each of those, it’s evident you’ve not considered the person who you’re tagging. Usually, I just ignore those tagging sprees.
Some folks will tag me in 3 or 4 observations at a time, including a even just a short message on each. I’ll often find that they those observations have been sitting there unID’d for a couple of months and that there’s several more from that trip. Often it’ll peak my interest, and I’ll end up working through all the observation over the next few days.
Today is that day. You clearly have knowledge to share. Start with the Solidago?
Write a little note or just tag me? I don’t care. Do write if there’s something extra you want to say. (I explain if I’m asking about an observation in that experiment in on-boarding new users, for example.)
The only thing that really bothered me about being tagged was one guy who must have tagged me on every single grass he photo’d all summer and never seemed to learn them. If you’re tagging people a lot, please spread the “joy” around.
Most identification on iNaturalist is pattern matching rather than taxonomy itself. With your background in the visual arts, you’d probably be good at it. You are under absolutely no obligation to do ID’s . . . but we need more identifiers, so I ask that you try it. You might like it. I used to play solitaire on the internet. Now I do identifications. It can be that relaxing! Will you make mistakes? Duh. We all do. Just withdraw or change your ID if you find out you were wrong.
Sorting the Unknowns was a very satisfying exercise for me last night! Mostly very high level (flowering plants, butterflies and moths, etc) with occasional deeper levels if I was quite confident, and suddenly things that had been sitting there for months were getting IDs. And that’s one little thing I can do to make it easier for the pros to step in.
But you could use that knowledge to identify other people’s observations of it.
I am also an amateur/hobbyist at this whole iNat thing. I don’t even consider myself a photographer. I’m just curious about nature and love getting out and about. That said I do my best to get an initial id and then I wait and hope someone comes along and gets my observations to research grade or points me in another direction. I do not @ folks on the leader board unless an observations has been up at least several weeks without attention one way or the other. Then I always ask for a confirmation or suggested alternative. I try to remember to say thank you and or please and sometimes both. A little good old fashion good manners can’t hurt. I have had pretty good luck with people responding and being very helpful. A big thank you to all those who have helped me out. I do actually keep records of my own and I like to have confirmed species level ids.
I wanted to say thanks for this thread. Like the OP, I post rather than helping to identify other people’s observations because I am a newbie and not confident I will get IDs correct. BUT. People made very good points here about participating more broadly and I realized there is one species I do feel confident about getting right. So yesterday, after reading this, I sorted things to identify by my state and that species, and then outside my state as well. Without even trying, I knocked off 38 identifications! So thanks. It’s a lot easier to contribute to others than I had realized.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily have to ID something to species, or even to genus, to be helpful. Narrowing down the ID somewhat can help people who are good with that particular group find the observation to put a more specific ID on it. Say, finding an observation that’s just IDed as “birds” and narrowing it down to “hummingbirds”.
As so often on the forum we have two conversations which answer each other’s questions. Over a hundred comments there.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identifications-taking-longer/69155
I’ve been back to my high-level IDing the past couple days and am getting better at figuring things out–like not jumping on the newest ones. One thing that was puzzling me is why someone with thousands of observations would have things sitting in Unknown. Fortunately, I finally noticed this thread about why that is! https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-do-some-serious-power-users-add-so-many-unknown-observations/282/55
Even before seeing that, I was starting to always check how long the user has been on the platform. Even if someone’s account is a few years old, as long as they have not made many observations I might still add one of the suggested blurbs from this doc: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#addid
Sometimes people will surprise you. Recently, I came across someone who had joined several years ago, but all of their observations were just a couple of days old.
I usually only really dislike being tagged when the user tags 5,6,7 or more people on an observation that really doesnt need so many eyes. Even more so when the people tagged likely can’t help because they are not very familiar with the taxon. It just comes off as rude to me, especially when a number of identifiers are already overburdened with notifications.
But i don’t mind getting tagged much since i do not get many tags to begin with.