The benefits and drawbacks of adding coarse identifications

General
6

In response to:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-same-individual-keeps-posting-cv-suggested-misidentifications-on-others-observations-what-do-i-do/54450/23

I agree with your analysis.

About educating the users, I am not sure that this recommendation, without circumstance (and considering the paragraph that comes next), is the right one:

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https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/community+guidelines

This “issue” has been discussed extensively, and for a long time.

In short:

  • Waste of time. As an identifier, I stopped adding a lot of coarse identifications (with the intention to reduce the number of observations without ID) (and doing that I learnt very few) until I figured out I could use my time more efficiently in other ways.
  • There do exist another (and better) way for experts to find new incoming observations that match their field of expertise, by using phylogenetic projects to sort observations without ID or with a coarse ID. It is a better way because there are 1,000 such projects, chosen for optimizing the sort, so that identifiers can reduce by a factor of 100 or more the number of “unknown” observations to review (as compared to reviewing all “plants” in search for a specific subfamily, for instance). It would be even better if someday iNaturalist integrates a similar feature.
  • Observers are encouraged to save their identification as a placeholder if their input does not match a taxon name. If someone else adds an ID, the placeholder is not displayed anymore in the observation page (I disagree with that, the placeholder should be treated like an ID and should remain visible). If the observer adds an ID, the placeholder is overwritten by the common name of the Community ID. If all IDs are then removed, the former CID becomes the new placeholder. The original placeholder is lost.

Encouraging “adding a lot of identifications” (indiscriminately and, in particular, coarse identifications) is a strong bias in our way to think about iNaturalist. We need to take a step back from this to allow us to consider other possibilities.

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