Hi all together.
What is iNats recommendation how to handle the following situation:
I often have users changing their pictures in the observation to a completeley different species after I have made a first ID from unknowns to a species.
Its annoying, if it looks like I’m not able to recognize this species correctly.
Yes I can withdraw it later, but it’s a stupid waste of my time leading to not identify anymore.
Thanks for sharing your ideas.
Is this happening with users , plural, how many? i would just ignore it but this sounds super annoying.
have you tried reaching out or commenting ?
If you recognise the iNatter (often) you could try a polite explanation. Would this be someone who seldom, or never, IDs ? Does not realise that identifiers are human, not bots. Volunteers are not paid staff.
Then pass it on to help at iNat for ‘repeat offenses’. Wasting the time, effort and goodwill of burnt out identifiers.
An easier option is to mute them - and ID for someone … else.
I’ve had it happen a couple of times, and it drives me mad! For one the observation was research grade before the user changed the photos. When I asked why they did it, they said that they had uploaded the wrong photos. I tried to be polite in suggesting it would have been better to just delete the observation.
I guess the people who do it are those who don’t understand how the site works, or that the people adding IDs are real people who don’t enjoy being messed around.
If I mess up an upload , i will usually delete the entire observation. this seldom happens, but i do remember some cases where personal photos accidently being selected and uploaded, so i delete the whole thing and re upload
I can’t tell, if it’s allways the same user. I don’t remember all the names while IDing.
It’s often enough to be annoying in the last few days. It’s not only once. On each batch I’m doing (not so big at the moment because we have outdoor season now), it’s one ID.
But it’s not necessary to waste the time with those observations, while I could do some more appreciated ones.
Fair enough, that someone don’t know the system how iNat is working. Or just want to check their pictures with the CV model and uploaded it unintentionally to the website.
I will try doing some commenting. Muting is a very good point too.
I don’t know if there are technical possibilities too, to prevent from deleting all pictures of an observation after uploading it. Me too, I have to change one picture of the batch later, if something went wrong, that’s not the problem. But if an Picea is replaced by a Fabaceae, that’s not helpfull at all.
Thanks a lot for all the suggestions!
Well, I had a case: [link removed by moderator]. I muted the author of the observation. And despite the subsequent comments, I still think that was the right decision. I’m sorry. It was really rude. For a while, I truly doubted my sanity. And whether I really could have made such a mistake. The only benefit identifiers get is their reputation. I wouldn’t want to interact with users who don’t understand that. Sorry, maybe I’m still angry. Although this was my only such case over the years.
Hi, I’m sorry to hear about the experience you had with the changed photos. It looks like they did explain and apologized for what happened unintentionally.
However I did remove the link in your post since we don’t point out specific behavior perceived as wrong on the forum.
OK, please excuse me.
Huh! It would never have occurred to me that someone might do that. Perhaps this explains some of what appear to be my very oddest mistaken ID’s. I’ll have to consider this and communicate with the observer. (The ignorance hypothesis seems likely correct to me.)
It still appears so after you withdraw your ID. You have the option of adding a comment to your ID before withdrawing or just delete the ID.
Most of the time these sorts of issues come from timing or honest mistakes. Still annoying.
Could we have a line added to iNat etiquette asking for a comment about any photo changes?
On a flip side, observers complained about identifications on observations they haven’t finished yet.
I think that conversation ended up with asking for a draft mode upload before fully committing.
In addition to a draft mode, I think situations like this are also an argument for why it would be desirable for iNat to record changes history on observations. It can be very difficult to reconstruct what happened when there is no way to tell whether something changed between the time the original ID was made and a subsequent visit to the observation.
Sometimes I or someone else will ask a user to edit photos (because there was a photo didn’t belong) or they add photos because of a comment about needing to see particular features, and a lot of the time they don’t comment when they have done so, with the result that anyone visiting the observation later doesn’t know what changed and may be puzzled because the photos look fine to them.
I don’t necessarily think iNat needs to save previous versions, but a note that indicates “photos edited on yymmdd” or “observation note edited on yymmdd” would at least give other people a way to tell whether something changed and when.
This brings up the point that if something is changed with the observation (photos removed, location changed, etc), that should be included in the notifications for those who have ID’d, added comments, etc. I often downvote observations as having more than one species or inaccurate location but then never get notified if the person fixes it so I can remove my downvote.
Meanwhile, I leave a comment, then I get notified when anyone engages with that obs. And take the opportunity to check my DQA.
It depends on what you mean by engage. Because as has been said, it’s not uncommon for people to make a change as requested but not leave a comment (sometimes they will even put something in the notes…) - and there is no notification of such changes, so the first thing you know might be a year or two down the track when someone finally looks at the observation again and realises it’s been fixed.
That - a new ID or comment in the discussion. I will take what I can get. If not a formal notification.
I also think that would be great indeed! I often add several photos to an observations and it happens on occasion to add a wrong one by mistake. It would be great to have an option to only submit the observation when we consider it’s ready for reviewing. If I am not fast enough in detecting the mistake, sometimes flags it as being related to multiple subjects and then I have to chase them to remove the flag… which does not always happen easily as people will be busy with other things. In some cases I end up deleting the observation and creating a new one, so having a draft mode would surely help… this could be a configurable option in the account preferences, if some people feel they don’t really need it the could turn draft mode off…
There could be an extra notification being sent to followers when photos are getting added/changed/removed from an observation. It has happened to me before and in some (rare) cases my IDs were wrong after the photo change… On other sites, IDs are getting automatically withdrawn from an observation when photos are getting modified in any way… that may be a bit extreme because it could generate lots of extra work for the identifiers, but it’s the only way to ensure accuracy.
No - that is not a viable solution. But draft mode - definitely - people are in the field, and need to get back to good internet. Or to have time to to research their ID.
And a notification of changes.