Pretty much what the title says. I came across an observation that the poster identified as Genus A, but the organism in the photo is definitely Genus B. Three other users identified it as Genus B, but the title ID still says Genus A. Out of curiosity, I went to look at the user’s last login date, but it says the user’s account has been suspended.
Unless some suspensions are temporary, this user won’t be able to correct their initial ID or opt in to the community ID.
Shouldn’t suspended accounts automatically undo the “opt out of community ID”, especially if suspensions are permanent?
It’s an interesting question, but I don’t think I agree that a user’s wishes regarding the data they contribute to iNat, and whether they wish to opt out of community ID, should necessarily be negated by a suspension.
I think that might be only once they’re a maverick? Realistically, there are enough incorrect disagreements that I don’t think it would be reasonable to have a single disagreement send an observation to casual (though it’s a waste of identifiers’ time if the best that can be done is to remove it from Needs ID, not actually correct it).
You can mark “no” for the “can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” DQA to move the observation to casual and out of the “Needs ID” pile.
This is usually only applicable once the poster’s ID has become maverick, at which point it is automatically casual. Otherwise you’re marking an observation as “CID cannot be improved” when technically you think it can.
The observer ID need not be maverick. If the user has given a higher taxon ID and 2+ people have given species-level IDs, the CID cannot be improved because the observer has opted out. These should be removed from the “Needs ID” pool because they essentially create an identifier trap (along with a lot of unnecessary confusion for those that aren’t familiar with all the subtleties of the DQA).
Yes in that case it would be appropriate. And that doesn’t automatically mark it as casual because the observation ID is different from the community ID? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an unresponsive user who opted out and provided a higher level ID. People who opt out and then never come back almost always seem to provide precise IDs.
I’ve seen this quite a bit, when a user does a global opt-out but doesn’t always provide precise IDs, and then goes inactive for whatever reason. I’m sure it’s not their original intention to block refinement of their initial ID, just to have more control over any refinement.
There are situations where is is impossible to disagree, like if the observer posted a species level ID but it is only IDable to genus, then once one person disagrees to genus others who post a genus level ID are not given any option to disagree, in this case the only way to correct the error is to mark cannot be improved
I’d be comfortable marking “no” for “can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved” for observations where the poster identified it as a higher, but still correct taxon (e.g., posting a clear, identifiable photo of a gray wolf and identifying it as “Canid”). I would add a comment explaining why I marked that it can’t be improved, but I’d still mark it.
I don’t think I’d want to do it when the user identified it incorrectly (e.g., posting a clear photo of a gray wolf and identifying it as “Felids” or “Felis catus” or something).
I know there are legitimate reasons for opting out of community ID, but I’ve seen a lot of joke ID’s as well (and the ID that prompted my question looked like it might’ve been a joke ID).
I think what bothers me is that the title ID could just stay incorrect indefinitely. This could lead to confusion for users who are trying to learn what a certain species looks like. They’d come across photos that aren’t representative of whatever species they’re trying to learn, and they won’t know that the title ID is incorrect if they’re just scrolling through a list of observations.
I’m assuming the incorrect title ID could mess up data quality a bit too, even if the observation reverts to “casual” if the poster’s ID becomes a maverick.
Maybe there is a better solution than just undoing the “opt out of community ID”. For example, better labeling for all “opted out of community ID” observations that become mavericks. That way anyone who is just scrolling through a list of observations could see that the title ID is a maverick. And maybe adding a search option so that users can choose not to include observations where the title ID is a maverick.
I’ve seen at least one case (I think more) where someone left an ID of Plants, opted out and never came back. Quite a number of people had tried to move it down over the years…
Annoyingly there is a species with only 3 RG observations that also has an opt out observation that is incorrectly IDed. It also has 3 casual obs (planted). Out of only 24 photos of this species, 2 of them are wrong. Myself and another user have been trying to talk them into changing their ID or removing the opt out. For now we can only add more casual observations as we are both cultivating this species, but have never seen it in the wild.