In the first linked observation, the DQA was indeed ticked by the observer themselves who also made the initial ID. They were a new user (first and only observation), so I think it’s likely that they just didn’t understand the DQA and made a mistake. I don’t think it’s someone acting in bad faith/misuse.
I occasionally see these mistakes in DQA by new users, but they are pretty rare in my experience (I don’t think most new users scroll down that far!).
However, at this point, this thread has strayed pretty far from OPs original purpose/question which was
If folks want a separate thread about DQA options including best ways to use them with unknowns, we can make a separate one and move some of that discussion from this thread there.
Yes, I was wrong, I clicked on it from my phone, but it opened the link that was before that. There I’m pretty sure it’s a regular ider who knows how to mark such observations, but doesn’t know ids are needed for that.
I politely ask to not use phrases like “don’t want to see it” when describing other people’s actions, it implies they do the wrong thing and just don’t want to see something, in reality they do the right action, just not always fully go through with it.
Very often observers click on “yes, can be”, because they think that is what makes the observation appear to iders, those are new users and they learn fast unless they leave the site. Like you I wonder why observers click on “No” unless it’s not a missclick.
From what I’ve seen while identifying, usually if the “as good as can be” box is misused, it is the observer that checked it, either because they don’t understand what it does, and/or because they are a student observing for a class assignment and trying anything that might make the observation go to research grade.
Sorry for perpetuating the tangent. Another thread would be okay.
I was picking up a phrase used earlier to make a connection to a previous post but I see your point. We don’t know what people’s intentions are, and we should assume people mean well. I don’t see anything wrong with not wanting to see something though. I have marked plenty of things that I didn’t want to see again myself - I just use a different method (marking as “reviewed”) instead. I would have never even thought of using “as good as it gets” for that.
I’ve read at least one comment that suggested the observer was using this as a method to make their observation “casual” as they didn’t want IDs from the community. It strikes me as odd and probably something better addressed with opting out of community ID, but it’s another reasoning I’ve come across. Maybe they’re using a placeholder ID and trying to preserve that. This observer is probably not going to be overly happy with anyone trying to “fix” their observation by doing something that puts it into the Needs ID pool.
I noticed a few other curiosities while checking the “as good as it can be” project. Less than 10% of the total observations appear to be in North America and almost all that I’ve checked were marked so by the observer. Given that NA accounts for well over half of all iNat observations, that struck me as odd. Most are in Europe (~59% of the observations in the project vs. less than 20% of the total; the map view suggests a “hotspot” in Denmark), followed by New Zealand (~17% if the observations in the project vs. ~1.5% of total).
Is that an artifact of the project being incomplete? It makes me wonder if there are regional differences in how people interpret the buttons on iNat, maybe even due to different language versions in Europe.
All my projects are biased with regard to places, because I started downloading observations 2 years ago, country by country and state by state, and recently I added all observations I add in cache into projects. Moreover, I have focused recently on Southern Africa.
The yellow projects are phylogenetic projects (about 1,000 projects) and a few non-phylogenetic projects (Trees of Southern Africa 1 and 2, Pre-Maverick).
This journal post provides the list of all phylogenetic projects.
I know it wasn’t you who started it, but we shouldn’t continue, it was used in context where it can be easily interpreted not the way you described.
I doubt users really want to make things casual and to it this way unless observation really can’t be ided further from e.g. family level.
That’s why I was surprised to read that comment thread. It was on an observation showing plants that I’m sure could at least be ID’d to dicots or something and left “unknown” while marked “as good as it gets” by the observer. There were a few comments (I’m paraphrasing from memory) along the lines of:
Potential ID’er: “Do you want this identified or left casual?”
Observer: “casual”
Potential ID’er: “ok”
Sounded like they had interacted before and the potential identifier clearly knew more about this observer’s habit of marking things “as good as it gets” than I did and the intended purpose.
Thanks jeanphilippeb for the details and links to all these projects! And thanks also for all your hard work putting them together!
For what it’s worth, that is not my interpretation. There are observations on iNaturalist I want to see, and there are observations on iNaturalist I don’t want to see. I use the tools available through the iNaturalist user interface to try to see the ones I want to and not the ones I don’t. I assume everyone else does the same. I don’t believe this is inappropriate.
Personally, I haven’t found a consistent meaning communicated by “it’s as good as it can be”, so it isn’t useful to me. I believe some people are using it as an expedient—if there are some observations you don’t want to see and the other options aren’t working for you, sometimes this is a tool that does the job. That isn’t nefarious, it’s normal human behavior. You encounter a problem, you use the tools at hand to find a solution. In this particular context, it creates some information that I find difficult to interpret. To the extent we’re striving for clear communication, it might be worthwhile for us to address this, but it isn’t a moral failing.
I see a combination of “misused flag” with that question to point on seeing the will of hiding something from yourself aa bad.
I agree with you that it’s fine to be willing to not see something, I asked to not reproduce the same phrase as it already had the meaning added by the first use.
I noticed that I had used the word “misused” as well, and that in retrospect I’d rather I hadn’t.
It would be nice if language provided more opportunities for expressing that one is irritated, but not irritated at someone. Or maybe the opportunities are there and I miss them.
The Community Taxon is “as good as it can be” does not make sense about an observation that has no identifications at all (hence no Community Taxon).
Something (the Community Taxon) that does not exist cannot be… anything.
As the question itself does not make sense (in the absence of an identification), it should not be answered (neither yes or no). If it is answered, then the flag is misused. (That’s why I also suggested to disable flags when not relevant).
You may have a different logic. This is simply what I meant.
Maybe its my autistic literalness, but I find that I don’t have this problem. I take it to mean literally what it says. The literal meaning of those words in that order is unambiguous. The inconsistencies you find are, presumably, people using it for other purposes than it was intended for.
[Edit: Well, now that @aspidoscelis has quoted and replied to it, it seems strange to edit that portion. On some platforms, editing what someone has replied to is considered very bad manners, because it makes them look foolish.]
Normal human behavior to twist the meaning of a statement to fit what you want. Normal human behavior can be nefarious.
You see, this use of DQA doesn’t just keep “you” from seeing it. It keeps everyone from seeing it unless they specifically look for casual observations. In other words, it is imposing your will on the community.
[Now for the edit.]
It just doesn’t make sense to me that people are rationalizing this. I honestly do not see the difference between this use if “it’s as good as it can be” and, say, marking something as “date inaccurate,” “location inaccurate,” “captive/cultivated,” or “no evidence of organism,” not because there are true, but because it is a way of getting it to casual so that you don’t see it. When and how did we tacitly agree that “it’s as good as it can be” is (alone among DQA variables) permitted to mean something different from what it says?
I agree that there can be broader negative effects. I differentiate between harm as an unintentional byproduct (normal human behavior) and harm as the intended effect (nefarious).
This is one of the reasons I’m in favor of more options for getting to the sets of observations different groups of people want to see. Design processes to do it right, and make that the easy option.
It seems to me that “reviewed” is the “I don’t want to see it again” button. It just effects my interaction with the observation.
“It’s as good as it can be” affects everyone, not just me. It means what it says, as @jasonhernandez74 says. In other words, we can’t get a more precise ID for it. Why? Maybe the photo is too poor, maybe the photo is great but the needed details just don’t show.
One time I find “It’s as good as it can be” useful is for those few observations that are stuck at “Needs ID” but have plenty of ID’s. Nobody’s opted out; the observation is just stuck. Clicking “It’s as good as it can be” sometimes unsticks it.
True, also in those cases you can then leave it unticked afterward and the observation stays fixed. :) (toggle “x” works for unsticking things too, as long as you don’t click too fast)
You’ve summarized it perfectly for me. Thank you for doing the work and saving my time and effort by voicing my thoughts so eloquently! The only need for a comment is to emphasize just how well you’ve captured my feelings.
I skimmed the thread and didn’t read everything, so I apologize if a similar point was made, but I always take that check box to mean ‘this cannot be IDed more finely without evidence that isn’t included in the observation.’
For example (and I’m going to use mushrooms here because… I’m a broken record) the genus Russula in a mess and the red ones basically can’t be IDed to species without microscopy and a lot of prayer. So if I take a picture of one, I know genus is the farthest its going to get and mark the box. Another example would be the Cantherellus genus eastern north america; the common ‘golden’ chanterelles were formerly recognized as C. cibarius, but that’s been discovered to be a purely European genus, so a lot of eastern US Chantarelles are in a limbo state until some more papers are published.
or I dunno, certain Asteraceae species that are hard to get right without specific photos that people might think to take.