Top Identifiers is very useful for finding people with expertise.
Problem: At the moment, when you look at genus-level top identifiers for an area to determine who has expertise, for plants, the top identifiers to species level can be flooded out by names of people who identify to genus level. The idea here is to fix this.
Solution: The top identifier count should - at least for plants - be for species-level identification or similar (such as hybrid genus or complex/agg). Specifically, the intent is that genus level or less shouldnât be counted (maybe there should be calculable exceptions but I think it should be the default).
This may need to be applicable only for specific branches of life form, plants being one, as I wouldnât want it to apply to branches where itâs difficult to identify to genus level.
It could be that iNat could automatically calculate which branches fall into which category by how readily observations are reaching RG species level. Curators could have a setting to adjust the automatic calculation.
I agree that this might be useful. For example, someone might assume Iâm more of an expert at identifying Euphorbia of all sorts in my area, but really, I can just confidently identify whether something is a sandmat or poinsettia (both are sections within the subgenus Chamaesyce of genus Euphorbia, which has a massive number of species).
In addition, I imagine basic implementation could be relatively trivial if the relevant branches (like Plants) are hard coded in, then curator control could be implemented at leisure.
I donât think the leaderboards for IDs should be calculated differently for different taxa - this will be very confusing for most users. It might be possible to design a tool/option that allows users to select a taxonomic level that they want to see a leader for, but I suspect that this would mainly be used by a small subset of âpower usersâ given my experience with being mentioned based on my leaderboard position.
those identifiers search can rank results automatically from this filter in-turn instead of manual profiles changes.
I also think if such a tool/filter is developed it is essential to take temporal factor into account - an Expert IDer for that taxon who never IDed that taxon in last one year (or inactive) is less likely to be interested in that taxon over another budding IDer who is actively IDing it in last months. so such component should goto scoring. Ultimately it is point of finding right user for person depending on that search without changing leaderboards per se as they are now.
Definitely agree with this. I often go through âUnknownâ observations with No IDs. I have identified many as âPlantsâ within my State, but I know so little about Plants that I donât deserve to be on any plant leaderboard! I would hate for people to waste their time tagging me on Plant observations because they see my name on the leaderboard.
Iding as Plant would be okay - within plants in my experience it would be specifically people ID-ing to genus, because when you look for an expert you tend to look at the genus level to see who the identifiers are, and in places where identification to species is tricky within a genus the species-identifiers get swamped out by the genus-identifiers.
Why not just see which species are documented from nearby (either using the CV or a resource like BONAP), and check to see who the top-identifiers are for those species? As others have noted, finding species-level identifiers is complicated- not just temporally but also spatially. For example, I often identify Dichanthelium species in the northeastern United States, but there are many Dichanthelium in the southeastern US Iâm too unfamiliar with to identify- and I donât bother with the species west of the Rockies at all.
The difficulty is that the leaderboards as accessed from taxon pages do not actually show top identifiers for the species â they show people who have contributed to IDs to observations with a community ID of that species. In other words, it includes people who provided higher-level IDs that were later refined by someone else.
I think changing this to actually display top identifiers would go a long way to make it resolving some of the issues with leaderboards. I do not know how easy it would be to fix, given the way the leaderboards are integrated into Explore (which is based on search results for observations not individual IDs)
I believe what the OP is asking for is that if one is looking at the genus, the list of top identifiers be based on people who have provided the most species-level IDs for that genus (i.e., those who are skilled enough to not only recognize the genus but refine it further it to species). I think this is an interesting idea, though it could create some issues with genera that really shouldnât be refined to species most of the time but people keep trying to do so.
This is not the same thing as the issue with the leaderboards that I mentioned above (showing IDers of observations of a species rather than IDers of that species)
Yes as spiphany says, focussing on species level (or hybrid or complex) rather than genus level.
I think the question of âsome life forms are difficult to get even to genus levelâ could be resolved by providing both identifier calculations (i.e. with and without genus-only contributions) so that the user can choose which one they want. Obviously there are several permutations for how to do the calcuation (such as whether the observerâs view should be included - never, always, or intelligently) and perhaps providing links to the different methods would allow users to choose. The reality is when you try to improve these things youâre going to end up coding for all the options to try them out and compare so they might as well be retained - the choice of âwhich method is bestâ would then refer to which one to offer automatically, and the remaining ones rather than removing the code could just be linked to.