Depends on your definition of ‘recent’: annotations were introduced in the summer of 2017 so we are coming up on two years. I wouldn’t say that is recent. My point about the old observations is that the unannotated list is large, but if 75% of all new observations are also unannotated, and the number of observations is growing, then you will have a growing backlog. I bet if you could rewind to 2017, the list of unnatotated leps was 500,000 or something, and a million last summer (I’m making up the figures, but the growth curve is the point). So even with annotations around, the number keeps multiplying.
Chris - if we wait, I fear that nothing will get done and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more observations will be entered without the benefit of useful data supplements in the form of annotations. So if the male/female thing for birds is an issue, maybe that is a second phase rollout. But hopefully we can work on the unambiguous issues first, possibly to get a process sorted out.
As mentioned in the Lets talk annotations and Data uses cases threads, the ability to download annotations is also a requested feature. Speaking from a data user’s perspective, iNat’s insect observations are problematic because of the inconsistent application of life stage categorization, so a development like this could really address what some believe is big problem.
No doubt it’s a huge job, but isn’t a technology and workflow solution better than any other option? And if I recall correctly, the CV is retrained on a full dataset, implying each new dataset is much larger than any earlier version.