@sessilefielder‘s awesome Chrome extension can be found here. See here for the original forum post.
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Folks, let’s not assume or speculate on someone’s motivations. While some people do seemingly want to be at the top of the leaderboard, singling out an individual and speculating on their motivation is not acceptable.
Also, let’s not use the word “cheating” for people who do get motivated by that. As long as they’re adding proper IDs they can independently verify, it’s not really a problem.
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I deleted the second half of my comment because it was making assumptions.
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I’m very happy with my 45% based on the averages 
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This extension only shows the breakdown for leading/supporting/improving IDs for that taxon specifically, not overall. It also shows your own observations as “Leading IDs” if not RG or “Improving IDs” if RG. I love the extension, but use it mainly for the color coded AI suggestions.
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My IDing habits have changed a lot. Back when I was doing broad IDs, I had very few “supporting” IDs and quite a few “leading”. When primarily identifying lady beetles, I’ve a very high number of supporting IDs and almost no leading ones (most observations in that taxon get IDed fairly quickly and the CV is good). My Platypezidae IDs are majority leading and improving because there’s very few identifiers and the CV isn’t great.
It’s a fun statistic, but it reflects more what you ID than how you ID…
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… and the fact that most of us on the forum don’t even know who this person is shows just how pointless “playing the leaderboards” really is. Honestly, if global leaderboards just disappeared tomorrow I don’t think I’d notice/care.
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Sounds like someone who hasn’t worked out their notifications. For a while, before I turned off most notifications, I was stuck at 9999+ notifications and couldn’t easily tell what new ID changes/comments had been added to observations I’d ID’d. I’m sure people were tagging me and commenting on things, but they were buried in 500+ “agreement” notifications per day. I certainly added plenty of IDs to RG stuff (searching through hard groups for errors, and tapping the “a” button if everything checked out, regardless of whether it was already RG or not). And I certainly inadvertently “ignored” lots of tags if I made a mistake. And I was quite active every day. Yet I couldn’t care less about leaderboards-I was just bad at notifications.
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This would be problematic because then we wouldn’t know who is a specialist/very knowledgeable in a certain taxon. For example, @nathantaylor for Euphorbia and @egordon88 for Penstemon.
Although there are some that shouldn’t be there, i.e. #2 on the Harris’s Hawk identifications is me who exclusively just identified every single RG observation back in 2020 when I didn’t know nearly as well as I do now.
Would be nice to show who has the highest improving/leading IDs on Inat.
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76% supporting - because I am a generalist - helping to sort out obs that are trapped. Not a taxon specialist. An occasional taxon sweep where I can. But it was a metric that iNat used for that previous experiment to validate the quality of iNat IDs. Leading and Improving is an effect of where you happen to slot in on the global 24 / 7 which is what it is.
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The most interesting metric on the year in review - to me - is
87% ‘dumped’ their obs, and added NO IDs. Gee. Thanks. Not much.
2% are taxon specialists ? And only ID. No wonder some shoulders are crushed under the burden.
The statistics in the year in review only indicate the number of users, not the total number of observations these users are responsible for. From what I see of observations in general, I assume that this number includes a fairly large percentage of users who join iNat and add a handful of observations as they try it out, but don’t stick around and continue to be active. It is to be expected that such users don’t participate in IDing (and quite likely it is preferable that they don’t, since users not familiar with iNat may not know enough to ID responsibly).
I’d love it if more users helped ID as well, particularly for taxa where we desperately need more support. But not IDing doesn’t automatically mean that users are freeloading.
Do you interpret that as ‘cheating’?
To me, it seems that that would be adding certainty to the identifications. I still don’t think cheating at iNat is a real thing.
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I agree 100%, especially not regarding IDs of all things
Exactly, I thought that is precisely how iNat is supposed to work, it’s also within the rules, so it can’t be cheating… It makes me wonder why somebody would have an issue with an identifier adding correct IDs?
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It used to make me cranky that someone would spend time adding IDs to RG observations instead of adding IDs to Needs ID observations. If a person knows how to ID something, why not ID the observations that need an ID? Adding IDs to RG observations strikes me as “easier” and “faster” than adding them to Needs ID observations. (I say that in quotes because I’m not sure that’s true.)
But now I try my best to embrace biodiversity of all sorts, including people who use iNat differently than I do. If it makes a person feel happy and productive, it’s all good. I’ll just go back what makes me feel happy and productive and continue to chip away at that enormous Needs ID pile (a little over 108 million at the moment; on a good day, I might move 250 observations from Needs ID to RG, so I might be here a while).
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I guess it could be called cheating (and would definitely be against iNat rules) if someone decided to add IDs to RG observations without actually knowing the species at all? It definitely wouldn’t add certainty and would just make someone look like an expert when they actually know nothing. However, while I’ve found plenty of wrong IDs, I’ve never seen any evidence of such a blanket attempt to game the system, so it doesn’t seem worth worrying about.
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The claim was “The top identifier on Inat almost exclusively IDs common bird species globally that are already at RG.”
So, what you are talking about is something completely different and even though I agree that what you are saying about adding IDs you don’t know is probably not the best practice, it certainly isn’t cheating either
Plenty of supporting IDs can be a real problem when they are incorrect. I sometimes come across observations with many supporting IDs that are incorrect. Getting those back on track can become an insurmountable task, especially when users drop out. This sometimes happens in college-type settings when students from the same class agree with each other’s IDs without actually knowing what they are identifying. The first ID is usually made by computer vision and then several users agree with it even though they are unfamiliar with the species. Typically, these users lose interest in iNaturalist after a short while. Good luck getting a misidentified RG observation with five supporting IDs back on track! I typically identify taxa that have few knowledgeable identifiers, which means there is no easy fix. My advice is: if you are adding lots of supporting IDs please do so only in taxa you are actually familiar with. If three people have agreed with the ID before you it does not necessarily mean the ID is correct. The bottom line is: let your IDs be well-informed IDs, whether they are in support or not. Become familiar with the diagnostic characters of the taxon you identify. Not everything that looks similar is the same species. Cheers!
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