That is not the claim made, the claim made was that this person adds IDs to common birds, and that the action is ‘cheating’. Nobody said anything about incorrect IDs being added and nobody said this user blindly agrees without checking?
I’m not sure why this is a reply to my comment? What you’re saying has nothing to do with what I said or asked
Spot the irony: Speed identifying, quality controls, 4th, 5th, 6th, IDs: community perspective?
The general consensus (with which I tend to agree) is that leaderboard climbing (and gamification in general) is mostly harmless. It’s just one of many legitimate ways to engage with the site. And the potential pros and cons of extra supporting IDs were quite nicely summed up by a post in the thread linked above, so there’s no point re-hashing it all again here.
The specific question about “a good percentage of supporting versus leading/improving IDs”, depends on how on “good” is interpreted. A good percentage for an individual wishing to climb the leaderboard as fast as possible might be 100%; whilst a good percentage for the community identification effort as a whole might be 60% (or less).
It was pointed out earlier that there are currently 108 million observations in the needs-id pool - to which I will add that 77 million are more than a year old. That’s roughly 38% and 27% of the total, respectively. Clearly, piling on umpteenth supporting IDs for observations that are in little danger of losing their RG status is not going to help reduce that enormous backlog.
When I started identifying, I chose to apply the golden rule. I would generally much rather have my oldest needs-id observations reviewed first, so that’s what I try to focus on myself when identifying: i.e. do as you would be done by. But even if I never uploaded any observations, I think I would still take this approach. I find individual targets somewhat motivating, but competitions quite boring - I would much prefer to gauge my contributions relative the collective effort as a whole. If the needs-id backlog was ever reduced to a few percent, I would of course change my approach accordingly - but I don’t expect that to ever happen in my lifetime. The vast majority of my supporting agreements took the observation to RG: about 57% out of 104k identifications (along with 52k annotations). That doesn’t even get me onto the bottom of the global leaderboard (which currently requires over 118k), so I suppose I’ll never be classed as a “power identifier”. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to cope without this particular tin badge, though 
The leaderboards and ID stats are currently a bit of a curate’s egg. It’s not easy to interpret them in a way that gives due recognition to all the differing contributions of our community, and this sometimes leads to speculation about the motives of those that happen to end up at the top. I don’t blame people for being curious about this: it’s just human nature to speculate when not in possession of all the facts. I have always felt that the site might benefit from giving less prominence to individual rankings, and emphasising our collective accomplishments (and failings) instead. The year in review statistics go some way towards that, but it seems like a bit of a sideshow, and it’s not clear how they should be interpreted in relation to one’s individual approach as a contributor to the site.
Yes, I joined in May 2020 and did that in June 2020 when I was 14. Luckily I learned from my mistakes and exaggerations and now am below 70% supporting for 2025(now down to 67.66%).
I’ll admit, I barely do IDing, which does make me feel like I’m part of the problem seeing how much complaint about there being more observers than IDers, but I just don’t have the expertise or patience for much. (I try to take good pictures, I always double–check CV suggestions to make sure they make sense before submitting, so I don’t suspect I’m too big an issue)
That said, from what I’ve seen and the tiny bit of IDing I did, I don’t think there’s really a ‘wrong’ way of IDing as long as you’re doing something. I agree that IDing something already very clearly settled might not be the best use of time, but I don’t think it matters much.
you have about 400 obs - presuming you usually start with your own ID, you need x 1.25 = about 500 IDs from other iNatters. If your ID is broad, that jumps to x 2.5 = 1K IDs. That allows for wrong IDs which need more to overturn, or interesting obs which provoke discussion. Identifiers also need … time, expertise and patience. Curious about the ID webinar tomorrow.
I’m looking forward to this web webinar, for sure!
It was just meant as a little tease - I hope you didn’t mind too much 
In your defence, I can’t resist mentioning that I came across one indentifier who accumulated almost 20,000 identifications in just one day - although I don’t know whether this is an all-time high. If we suppose an average of two seconds per ID, that equates to roughly 11 hours in total - which is almost two-thirds of most people’s waking hours. I do fewer IDs than that in most years, let alone months or days! Even so, I feel neither inspired nor intimidated such by feats.
Wow, that’s insane. Who would want to identify that many observations in a day? Unless someone is getting paid per identification or having an “organizational” account with many people IDing at once, but that’s a different story and I don’t want to speculate.
I work 12 hour shifts at my job, sometimes 18 or 20 hours, and I have been known to use iNat for the majority of the shift. (When there aren’t emergencies going on, and we are between calls.)
No iNatter should succumb to peer pressure to do more or something different than they are comfortable doing. If you are good at adding broad IDs for Needs ID records, have at it. If you enjoy spending most of the day adding confirming IDs to RG records, then do that. As long as what you are doing is not making the database less accurate.
After adding correct or at least informed identifications, any percentage is fine.
You do not have to do any particular number of identification. You can do no ID’s at all, if that’s what you prefer. Of course, we overwhelmed identifiers would welcome any ID’s you choose to do. (You might find identifying fun – not that I want to pressure you do identify )
Oh don’t get me wrong, I try to do a few things from time to time, at the very least I try to kick unknowns in my areas of interest down to a lower level since while I’m not an expert in any particular taxon I have good knowledge of basic taxonomy and broad knowledge of the common life of a few areas.
I just definitely consider myself to only be an occasional IDer but a dedicated observer.
but you can tweak that URL to another broad ID, or choose a (Southern hemisphere) location. Have got it under 1K in 4 days.
that’s fine - without you dedicated observers, we dedicated identifiers would have nothing to identify!
I think it depends on what you ID. Birds for example (at least in North America) are not too misidentified. Now that I’ve switched to mostly identifying Collembola though, the “agree” icon isn’t pressed as often…