I tried a Felidae quiz from any location, and 9 of fifteen where domestic cat. The others where lynx and two lions. Is there a way to make it do species that are less observed? The quiz would have more interesting and informative if there was a Flat-headed Cat or Fishing Cat thrown in there.
1 Like
Same with mosses in the Netherlands, a lot of common species were presented, all more then once. But it is nice to have more then one photo of an observation…
@reclassifier @wildonion yep, this is so far a common suggestion, and I was considering this problem when developing this. In the current state it fetches observations in a randomized order (with the specified filters), so species that are observed more frequently will appear more often. So I will likely add a second quiz mode where all species are grouped and randomly selected from, to make it independent of observation frequency
1 Like
If you mean to add an extra “example quiz” for this purpose, then yep, I can add that. If you want to do this test in the current state, you can actually just press New Test, search for California in the search bar, and use the Native filter
awesome
1 Like
Ok I found out how to use the filters, put California & Plantae
this is exactly what I was looking for! thank you
2 Likes
As well as numerous other languages, e.g., Jabiru (Tupi-Guaraní).
3 Likes
This is awesome! I managed to get 0.830 on jumping spiders (but I would probably bomb spiders in general). This seems like a great way to practice!
1 Like
I found it annoying that you had to get to right species to get a point. To be useful and fun you should get some credit for genus, family, order et cetera.
3 Likes
You could consider a filter for ‘dead’ animals for those who don’t want to see roadkill…
1 Like
One suggestion I have would be an ‘are you sure’ warning when pressing the skip button. I had the correct name for one of the monitor lizards I was ID’ing but I accidentally pressed ‘skip’ instead of ‘submit’.
Great! It’s a lot of fun! I filtered it for Accipitriformes of Pune district in Maharashtra, India (birds are the only things I can identify correctly).
And guess what! I got my own White-rumped Vulture observation!
Its observation is here.
5 Likes
Was pretty fun, I tested with Papilionoidea in Hong Kong.
I think it would be a good idea to link the original observation. That way if the player realizes a potential misID, they can go over to correct it.
I also notice that if I get the genus correct without writing a species or getting the wrong species, I get it completely incorrect. There are no partially correct. The scoring system could change for eg. for fully correct being 1 point, if i get the genus correct, I get -0.1 points, if i get the genus wrong but the family is still correct, i get -0.2 points etc.
Another option could be to allow the player to select the taxonomic level, eg. if they want to test themselves up to family level.
Can that logo be a button to return to the homepage? Or could there be a button that takes you back to the homepage?
1 Like
This is a neat idea and a fun challenge for practicing ID skills! I tried it with a mammal quiz (at which I failed miserably) and a quiz on U.S. Clerids (at which I did quite well), and I agree with the earlier comments about making common names and genus-level IDs count for credit.
It would also be nice to be able to click through to the original iNat observation used for the quiz. (Maybe that’s available somewhere, but I didn’t see it.) I could swear that one of the examples in my clerid quiz was incorrectly identified, but couldn’t find the original to verify that.
I’ve released some small changes about an hour ago that should address some suggestions so far:
- The test results page includes a hyperlink to the observation now, next to the taxon name. Picture below. I might rethink how it should look down the line to be more clear. cc @robotpie @WeeCorbie
- I added a button on the test results page to restart a test (which really just refreshes the browser)
- I disabled the skip button when there’s a guess filled out, so there can’t be any accidental misclicks. cc @varanus_enthusiast
- I added a toggle to exclude dead results. I’d like to make it more general (for example, to have filters for any annotation), but this should do for now @langzi
6 Likes
Levenshtein distance is fine, but I think it should only be used to make true/false evaluations of your answer - making the distance itself part of the score makes it a spelling test, not an identification test. I would also make it case-insensitive and aware of all the possible names of a species - not just it’s most recent scientific name, but previous scientific names and common names, as well. If the goal of this is to test people’s identification skills, I don’t think being pedantic about capitalization, spelling, or scientific names is very helpful.
2 Likes
Yes, I did the same thing a couple of times and almost did it several more times (over several games). Giving “submit” a coloured background might help too.
1 Like
This photograph has Ruddy Shelduck (the correct answer), Grey Heron (Ardea cinerea, which is the tall, long-necked one) and most probably Eurasian Spoonbill. I entered the name Ardea cinerea (Grey Heron, because it was closest) but the correct answer was Tadorna ferruginea (Ruddy Shelduck). What can be done in such a case, where there are more than one species in the same photograph?
1 Like
Great fun! A bit complicated when it comes to dealing with the problems though, from the sound of it.
Some things I noticed:
-
it isn’t always possible to identify to species with just the one photo shown - some of the observations must have had more photos originally
-
it would be useful to be able to exclude some things. I did an insects quiz and 7 of the 15 photos were brown moths. There are thousands of species of brown moths and even if I could recognize different species I wouldn’t remember their names.
-
one of the photos I got on a plants quiz really threw me; there were 3 different types of plants visible and I didn’t recognize any of them. They turned out to be green algae and it had never occurred to me that it was an underwater photo until I looked up the name of the plant afterwards.
1 Like
It would be nice if we could sacrifice points to get clues. Sometimes I know the name but can’t drag it out of the dusty recesses of my brain without a bit of help. I do much better with multiple choice questions.
Or a hangman style game where each subsequent wrong letter loses more points. Sometimes I can remember the first letter or a part of the name but struggle to remember the rest.
1 Like