Yes! I was just coming here to share something I found on this forum. I wish I could credit the original poster, but I have this bookmarked. To find your maverick IDs you just paste this link into your browser, substituting your iNat username for mine:
Thank you for being an IDer! I see a relatively small number of people contributing an outsized number of IDs, and if you ID tens of thousands of observations, you’re going to make mistakes. After I’ve ID’d a bunch of observations, I try to check my dashboard to see if I’ve made mistakes. I also use this excellent link someone posted here to periodically find my maverick IDs, which I’m trying to move into the main thread because it’s such a good tool (you just substitute your iNat username for mine).
Thank you again for being an IDer. If you put yourself out there, you’ll make errors. It might help to focus on the number of observations you’ve correctly ID’d for a bit right now.
Just as a note to those who think their old mistakes might haunt them:
Sometimes I am going through reeeeaaaally old batches and ID “needs ID” that have not been touched in years. Some of the still very active IDers have been active those 4 or 5 years ago as well and yes of course there might be some mistakes there or rough IDs that are so easy to push further. But I personally have no problem at all accounting for all this time that has passed - It´s so nice to see how much more advanced those IDers are now.
And sometimes it is not even that much time ago. This winter a fellow european IDer and I “went” almost simultaniously to the US to cause mayhem there with the old data. We had a slightly different approach (I more species centric, the other more region centric), but eventually we did overlap quite a bit while diving deeper in IDing there and getting more knowledgeable. It was fun being able to pinpoint exactly the dates when we learned something new… saw a coarse or maybe even wrong ID by that IDer from 3 weeks back that he would now be able to push to species and I would not hesitate now to tag him for. Same the other way around. It is fun watching each others progress and it depends a lot on your IDing- and correcting-culture how the inevitable mistakes and hestitations are percieved. Normally I see it as something good and motivating.
I got an even better one: it isn’t maverick because all the numerous disagreeing IDs are to a broader level that includes mine that they disagree with. In order to make me maverick, they would have to suggest IDs that don’t include mine.
But sometimes, the pixels slip? We click species A and get species B.
I have learnt to wait … and make sure iNat gave me what I chose.
Not - but - I would never have chosen that, never heard of it, don’t even know what it is.
I often see - dunno how that happened! - mortified comments.
I just want to note that I love the dynamics, the teamwork, and the enthusiasm that the spider people have going. I’ve seen it at work a few times and it’s quite inspiring.
I’m sure a big part of this is the willingness to learn from each other and the recognition that mistakes (sometimes even stupid, “what was I thinking” ones) are a normal part of the IDing process.
Thanks! I guess that can’t be easily converted to the Identify interface. It’s not a part of the world I am familiar with, but hopefully others can help support some of the mavericks
Just to prove the point, here’s my most recent facepalm. Looking at this now, it’s so clearly wrong it almost seems like a joke but I’m sure I missed the mark here and there (and still do) when identifying. Maybe I should go through my older IDs and check for other mistakes I made.
I’ve finally cleaned up my mavericks and have moved on to observations within the Pre-Mavericks project I’d already marked as reviewed – sorted by last-recently updated (hasn’t been touched in a while).
I’m surprised and pleased that I can add, retract, or at least comment something useful in about 20% of cases.
meanwhile the average person goes “green plant yellow flower, all the same to me” … don’t be too dismayed. or worse: “green blur, plants? plants aren’t living things are they?”
I think I was ten or eleven before it truly dawned on me plants were alive, and sixteen when I realized they are capable of advanced and complex behaviours… and I’ve had a lifelong interest in biology!
And that “average person” apparently was me three years ago. It’s good to get a reminder every now and then that at some point we started out knowing nothing about the stuff we identify now. So when we come across a “stupid” mistake, just remember we’ve been there climbing Mount Stupid at some point, too.
(And it took me even longer to get around to plants. I skipped botany as a student because they were ‘boring’ and look at me now - teaching botany and trying to convince my students plants are the coolest thing on the planet. )