Hello Everybody,
I want to start by thanking everybody who identifies observations of mine and of others. I appreciate the effort and thoroughness many people put into identifying very much.
Recently however, I have noticed one user who identified a lot of my observations–usually to species level–of basically everything, including very difficult to ID taxa. I then noticed that a few of them were misidentifications. Nothing wrong with that, of course, everyone makes mistakes, but upon further inspection, it looked like every single ID that person posted was the top CV suggestion.
At first, I decided to ask them what made them think it was their suggested species and gave them the arguments for my suggested ID. No response; no withdrawal of the ID.
When this happened again, I again gave my arguments against their suggested species, but again no response or withdrawal of ID.
Now it has happened a third time, and I feel it is unlikely the user will change their behaviour.
As iNat discourages blocking users for this and as that would not change the user’s behaviour either, what else do I do in this instance?
I don’t know if reporting is the right way as they do seem to use iNat legitimately apart from their identifying behaviour.
At the same time, I think it is not a good idea to simply do nothing about it, especially because a lot of users will agree with any ID they get.
What is your advice?
You could try contacting a top identifier for that taxon and ask what they think, in the hopes they’ll ID with the correct species.
You can also use the “No, the ID can still be improved” checkbox under the DQA options to keep the observation from reaching research grade while other identifiers have a chance to weigh in. If you do that, just remember to keep an eye on the observation and unclick that again when a consensus has been reached. Otherwise, it will never go to research grade.
You can always add your own (correct) ID, ask others to ID it (correctly), and the person’s ID will go maverick. Not the best option, but it’s better than nothing.
Perhaps an unexperienced new user who wants to gather a lot of identifications and doesn’t check notifications. Maybe send the person a polite private message pointing out the problems with blindly trusting the Computer Vision. And also how to turn off notifications for agreeing IDs to be able to focus on comments and disagreeing IDs to address the latter appropriately.
Not sure if this is what’s happening here, but there is a possibility the user might be using the iNaturalist (iOS) phone app (I don’t have access to the other apps, so I don’t know if they are the same) to identify. It’s a bit slower than the site, but possible.
One drawback of using the app is it is not possible to view messages or notifications in the app, so a person has to make sure that their account settings allow for emails to be sent to them with the notification and message content.
If this behavior is stressing you out, you’re never obligated to not block someone. (I am not a moderator or curator, but this is how I view the internet in general.)
I agree with the idea of sending a personal message if you would like, but with the caveat that if they don’t seem to see comments/responses on observations, they may miss that too.
Overall, this is iNaturalist’s problem to fix in regards to the UI. Right now, there’s so many… influences?.. in the way the site/app is built that encourage this behavior:
People are used to drop-down lists being complete, so of course they should pick from the CV suggestions.
There’s no instructions or tutorial necessary to begin identifying.
Identifiers are not required to list their reasoning or even check boxes or some kind of interface to “explain their reasoning”
Getting to Research Grade feels good and awesome with a green flag at the top. It seems like the type of achievement you should aim for!
Feedback on your IDs is not visible in the app as others have mentioned.
There are probably other aspects of the UI that encourage this that I didn’t list up there as well. And there are great reasons the UI is currently built how it is; every one of these aspects serves a good purpose for iNaturalist.
But yeah, this is something for developers and designers to think about, not something we can really solve as a community, I don’t think, due to the fact that the power the community has is really in the form of feedback (which in your initial post, you indicated the person was likely not seeing).
I have notifications and messages in the app, and have done for as long as I can remember. (But I’m on Android; I wonder if iOS doesn’t?? I know there are many differences between the two app versions.)
Sometimes I also have users who ID my observations when it’s quite apparent that they aren’t knowledgeable to tell the different species apart from others within the genus.
When this happens I might @ them to let them know their ID is incorrect, while also giving an explanation why. Sometimes the user will revert their ID, other times they will keep it there.
Sometimes you might also notice things about the user that makes you doubt their competence such as them gaining a reputation for misidentifications and/or them using the AI to ID difficult to identify taxa observations to species level. In that instance I would become sceptical of their ID’s.
In very extreme cases where it’s blatantly obvious my observation isn’t the species that someone else has identified it as I will @ people who are experts within that species / genus in my observations comment section. You can find these experts via the ID leader board. They will usually correct these false ID’s.
If you’ve given your observation a species level ID. Then this user with a reputation for just agreeing / using the AI to ID stuff also confirms your ID it will then become research grade. If you are unsatisfied by this and want to be certain you can withdraw your ID and wait for another user to either confirm / correct. Or you can tick “yes” on the data quality assessment where it says “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?”. This will mean more users will have to ID it to confirm the species. Just be aware you would have to untick it once you’ve got enough ID’s to satisfy though.
The usual process I’ve seen for a problematic IDer is an escalation of:
Comment at them (either asking them for an explanation or informing them that their IDs are incorrect, depending on your own level of knowledge of the accuracy of their IDs, and mention that CV suggestions shouldn’t be used as a primary identification method) and see if they respond
DM them if they don’t respond to comments.
If they don’t respond or do not change their behavior, send an email to help@inaturalist.org with your records of your attempts to correct them and tell staff what the problem is so they can try to address it.
But to be fair to the inat developers, it’s not their design that taught people to play that way, and there’s only so much they can do technically to limit it.
Everything is a game, the only distinction is who or what sets the rules, how they are taught to the players, and the consequences for cheating.
There are no good technical solutions to social problems.
I think it is reasonable to contact staff if a user is uncritically using the CV to make IDs and is not responsive to comments.
I don’t think there would be anything wrong with blocking the user, but this would only help with your observations; it would not change the user’s behavior.
It is quite possible that there is no ill intent. I don’t even think that they are necessarily trying to gather a lot of identifications to move up the leaderboards. I think sometimes users discover iNat and get excited by the cool things other people are observing and the ability of the CV to suggest an ID for any photo, and they may not fully realize what they are doing when they are entering IDs. Depending on how they interact with iNat, they may not be seeing notifications or realize that they should be paying attention to them.
(Since we are in the same region, I suspect I know the user you are talking about; I have been watching them with some concern as well. Part of the problem is that a lot of their IDs are for taxa where there is a scarcity of skilled IDers in the first place, so just waiting and letting the community ID sort itself out is not as feasible as it would be for more popular species. In the meantime, feel free to tag me if the affected observations are of bees/aculeata.)
I’ve been dealing with several identifiers who display this same kind of behavior lately. It can be incredibly frustrating. I often resort to opting out of community ID on the individual observations they have identified - at least until I can get some IDs from less problematic sources.
I had someone yesterday who agreed with my, tentative, broad plant ID. They are a birder so I had the conversation in the comments where we can reach more people than that one.
Why did you ID as Asparagales?
I was agreeing with you.
But - you should only ID if you can tell me WHY it is that.
The new Help has a link which words it more kindly, but with determination.
Thank you! This will be my next step then. I hope this will sort this out and the staff won’t have to get involved, as, like spiphany, I don’t think the user has any bad intentions. (Especially judging by their observations which all have good and clear photos showing multiple angles).
However, they might not see this as well if they use the iNat iOS app. Would it be okay to hijack one of their own observations for letting them know? AFAIK, that is the only type of notification on the iOS App.
That is a good suggestion as well and I will do itin the meantime! I always forget that feature is there as I never use it apart from setting it to “It’s as good as it can be” while identifying.
Yes, my observations all had my ID to begin with. I even re-IDed something just to disagree with them. (It feels like a rather passive-aggressive thing to do though. Haha)
This might be. I have just looked at their observations and saw that they used seek to upload, so it definitely isn’t unthinkable that they use the iNat app as well. (Btw, @DanielAustin the iOS app does have notifications, but they only show those concerning your own observations)
Yes. Additionally, the CV is also often not that reliable in these taxa.
I had the same issue, once. Some weeks or months later, the identifier’s account got deleted. (There was even a 2nd identifier, always the same, who agreed with the 1st one, but not on all observations).
My guess is that this will take you some time and efforts, before everything is OK with all your observations.
What I did at that time, I added a fake blank image as the cover image of all new observations I uploaded (so that there were no more cv suggestions). Of course I got ~10 messages asking me to remove these fake images. I removed all the fake images only when I was sure the “problem” was solved.
This gives me an idea for a new feature request: allow the observer to disable computer vision on all their observations.
This makes me wonder if just anyone should be able to id stuff anyway. I understand that this is supposed to be community driven, but if people don’t use it right then wouldn’t that make the results unusable? Would it be a good idea to have some sort of registration for the people that really know what they’re doing, so only they can add IDs that would contribute to makeing the observation research grade? It seems like average users, like myself, would be better off only using the CV suggestions for their own obs, just to get it where the right experts can see it.
Good idea! Although maybe the user should be able to selectively choose the observations on which the CV should be disabled, instead of just across the board?
Not all IDs require someone to be a taxon expert. Many users contribute by adding broad IDs (spider - bird - fungus - beetle) that help specialists to find the observation.
It’s also fairly difficult to create rules that would determine whether someone is qualified to add IDs to which observations. Expertise isn’t a linear thing where you can either ID everything in a particular taxon to species level or you can’t ID it at all. There are a lot of intermediate stages.
For many IDers, IDing is also a learning process. Some of us started out with a modest amount of knowledge and have acquired more in the course of our IDing activities. Maybe we started with broader IDs or IDing one or two species we were confident with, and then we picked up more knowledge as a result of looking at observations, having discussions with more experienced IDers, and doing research. But we wouldn’t have become involved if we were told that we had to prove we knew what we were doing before we were allowed to add IDs.
Consider also that just because someone is an expert in one taxon doesn’t mean they are qualified to ID anything. I have seen it happen that a specialist will happily ID observations outside their area of expertise and create the same sort of problem as an uninformed user uncritically using the CV to ID other people’s observations.
(BTW many IDers are not trained scientists – many of us are just “average users” who have realized that we know enough to help ID observations at some level. A good place to start is by not simply accepting the CV suggestions on your observations, but looking at what the CV is suggesting, comparing the suggestions to related taxa, and seeing if you can tell why some suggestions are a better fit than others. Or trying to narrow down what you saw – is it an insect? what kind? – before looking at what the CV suggests. Both of these processes are a first step towards understanding how to ID.)