True!
In multiple discussions here, it’s become clear that people often treat it as ± equivalent to the “reviewed” button—to them it means “I prefer not to see this observation again”. At this point, I don’t think it provides any information about an observation.
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I’m not sure where you took it from, please link where people used it that way because it’s wrong and personally I never read on this forum about such usage, going to that DQA takes time, if you need to use reviewed you use reviewed and not “can’t be improven”, it’s a button for thousands of genus and complex observations where id can’t go further, or family observations, like Poaceae with leaves only, do people sometimes click on it when they don’t know something? Yes. But it’s an honest mistake from them.
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The recent example is this thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/opting-out-of-community-taxon/38062/175
For instance, using “can the ID be improved?” as a way of removing observations from range maps is recommended there. “Reviewed” is a good way of marking observations you don’t want to see in “Needs ID”, but it’s not as effective in other contexts.
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I also run into observations where someone’s clicked that button and I just can’t tell why or what information they might have intended to convey. If I encounter an observation with multiple correct IDs that’s still in “Needs ID?” this seems to be the most frequent cause. Those also push me towards viewing “can the ID be improved?” as uninformative.
Ah, it’s a case of opted out observation, there you can’t do anything else and mark is correct, because it’s added when there’re many correct ids, it’s an equalent of regular RG observation having this mark. I think it’s different from “I don’t want to see a particular obs on a map”, but “it shows on a range map of a different species”.
If there’re some mistakes it’s still needed, there’re thousands of unmarked captive plants, but data we have on both sides is still useful, as in statistics there’re errors. We all should do the best to avoid them, just today my obs was ided to species while somebody marked it as good as can be, but I’m not angry at them, they must’ve thought it’s unidable. I marked hundreds of polygonum-complex observations, so those observations that have seeds would be more visible for researchers.
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Well, it’s “I don’t want to see this observation on a map because I don’t think it’s the taxon I want to see”. :-) Either way, it makes it harder to infer a consistent meaning for “Can the ID be improved?”
Although I don’t know how representative my experience is relative to the total set of observations where “Can the ID be improved?” is used, that particular category of mistake is the majority of the cases where “Can the ID be improved?” comes to my attention. So my experience is that it’s usually uninformative to me.
(For what it’s worth, this is another reason why we could use better ways of interacting with identifications on iNaturalist.)
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That’s one of iNat core problems, if there was a normal way to get those observations out of the map, people would use it, the same wy how for years there’s a whole “to do” list for duplicates and yet nothing is done.
Mistakes are visible because they’re left in “needs of id”, rarely mistakes are the opposite, but check how much observations are RG at genus level and compare their number to mistakes. If experts did it more (correctly), ration would be even more on the correct side.
Here is a recent admin comment re duplicates:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/an-abundance-of-duplicate-observation-flags/32582/15?u=lotteryd
Re multiple organisms, id’ing to common denominator and marking “good as can be” (the obs matches the id as far as it can go) certainly should be the appropriate DQA setting, don’t you think?
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Presently, yes, but this feature request would provide something much better (because more specific and allowing a future review/treatment of all of them):
Easy way to mark multiple-species observations
As already explained by someone else, creating a new DQA entry is likely easy to do (because the framework for managing DQA already exists). This is like adding a new entry in an existing list of entries, this is not really a new “feature” (not a new concept).
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In such a case, it is accurate: the ID cannot be further improved.
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I should’ve been more explicit—I was referring to observations that are in Needs ID because, although they have multiple correct IDs, someone clicked “it can be further improved”.
If it were the other way around, and someone had clicked “it can’t be further improved”, it might be accurate but it still wouldn’t convey any information to me—you could, for instance, just go through the piles of research grade observations and click “can’t be improved” on all of them, but I have no idea why someone would do that or in what case it might be useful…
If I find things marked as “can be improved” in Needs ID with multiple agreeing species IDs, I usually add a comment pointing it out and asking if the community ID needs further discussion or has been resolved. If there is no reply after a while, I go ahead and counterbalance by marking it “can’t be improved” so it can become research grade.
I sometimes also see this marked on captive/cultivated things, presumably a result of the observer hoping for IDs. It won’t bump casual observations into Needs ID though so it seems pretty useless there.
I’ve also found things in casual because they were marked “can’t be improved” at a higher level, e.g. kingdom, that could very well be further narrowed down. So there seems to be some misuse of this feature as a tool to get things out of Needs ID when the identifier probably should just have marked it “reviewed” and left it in there for others to take a look at. In some cases, it appears it is being used to bump duplicates into casual, which I’m pretty sure is not what that checkbox is meant for.
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People find all kinds of ways to enforce their own ideas of how it ought to be.
One thing I learned from this thread (rather than from IDing Unknowns, which was the original question) is that forum users never miss an opportunity to make a thread be about complaining about users who do things differently than they would like.
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Many observations without identification, with a misuse of DQA:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?captive=any&identified=false&project_id=154271&verifiable=any
10% of these observations are verifiable:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?captive=any&identified=false&project_id=154271&verifiable=true
DQA flags in these observations:
- The Community Taxon is “as good as it can be”.
- “No evidence for an organism”.
No comment, no identification, no obvious issue, but flagged “No, it’s as good as it can be”:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/139867562
Multiple-species observation, without comment, but with misused DQA flag (“I don’t want to see it”?):
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/133936990
Feature request: restrict/disable the usage of DQA depending on the content of the observation. For instance, if there is no identification at all, the DQA “as good as it can be” should be disabled.
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What are you talking about, that is not a misuse, that is a standart way of dealing with multiple-species observations! And in this case observer chose it, so no “I don’t want to see it”.
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If there is not identification, how could the non-existing Community Taxon be said to be “as good as it can be”, or be said anything else than non-existing.
…what Community Taxon are you talking about?
It’s clear observer clicked on it. You can’t call it “I don’t want to see it”.
That is not misuse even if somebody else clicked it, not all users know how DQA works and that id is needed to make it casual.
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The multi-species example linked above was a different user marking “good as it can be” so that seems to be a “don’t want to see it” thing, but I agree it seems most of the others appear to be the observers themselves using this. Most of them only have one or very few observations, so I assume it’s more a lack of understanding how to use iNat and its DQA flags. Maybe they want to say “I don’t have any better pictures, this is as good as it gets for this upload.”
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