If identifying made you end up in a Leaderboard (or a ‘Top Identifier/Observer’ shortlist) against your will, a temporary workaround is to remove your obs and/or IDs, then wait a couple of months for the site mechanisms to expunge your name. Disabling notifications in the meantime, eventually.
Yes, because removing IDs that improve the quality of iNat’s data is a great solution that suggests my IDs have no value and I wasted my time adding them in the first place.
That ex-user has deleted their contribution.
This is something what I can appreciate too
Notify me of mentions (e.g. @username) ←—- can we have whitelist?
Just because I’m top identifier doesn’t mean I want to be pinged by random folks. You don’t need to ping me, I will see your worm, sooner or later. But I’d like to see pings by specific folks, like my ‘higher ups’ - people who doing my taxon longer than me or trusted users who just asking for cooperation.
I think the only proactive thing you can do is to write something in your profile about what kind of pings you do or do not want. Of course, not everyone will read your profile, so then you have the choice: Just completely ignore the request or reply saying something polite like, “I am sorry, but I do not feel comfortable identifying (whatever taxon) outside of (your usual region for identifying).”
Not in the least, just that I find it surprising sometimes to see my name up there!
I have a somewhat different view on this, but am interested to hear why others think differently. I often review research grade observations in taxa I know well to try to challenge any that may be erroneous and improve the overall accuracy. I abstain from adding confirming IDs to those I agree with even when I have very high confidence in my ID ability. My thought is that I am providing no real benefit by providing additional confirming IDs, but I may be making it more difficult to change/correct the ID in the event that new information draws it into question. Of course I can withdraw/change my ID as necessary, but I do IDing both for fun and to be helpful, and there is no guarantee that I will still be IDing 10+ years from now if my interests shift.
I ID a handful of fungi (mostly morels), and have seen even in my very brief time IDing how ID guidelines can rapidly evolve in response to new information. A species only described in Newfoundland or Turkey may be found in Oregon, far outside of its previously known range; it might not have been considered in the initial ID, and it might not be uncommon (these are both real examples that affect the way I ID observations of similar species). An ID that is adequately supported given all available evidence and guidelines today may not be in the future. The way I see it is that it’s totally appropriate to ID things to research grade based on the best available knowledge, but the only effect of any supporting ID beyond that is to make it harder to change. If you add a third ID to something, it will remain at research grade even if someone challenges it in the future. I don’t want to vote against that future objection if I don’t even know what it is. It seems quite common for people to agree with IDs when they may not have the knowledge/experience to do so, but relatively rare for them to challenge IDs without a decent reason. If another IDer wants the observation to receive additional review at some point in the future, I don’t want to block that from happening preemptively.
I have encountered this from the other end, when a research grade observation may have a train of IDs I know to be incorrect, many made by accounts that are no longer active or that for some other reason do not review/correct their IDs when new information is presented. I leave my maverick ID and maybe mark it as “can be improved” to draw additional review, along with an explanation of the correction, but it then needs several more IDs if it is ever to reach research grade again with a correct ID. Sometimes, this can happen even when the earlier IDs were reasonable at the time. That’s by no means catastrophic and it doesn’t bother me all that much, but I fail to see the benefit that offsets the potential cost of adding additional supporting IDs most of the time.
All that said, my views on that matter are probably shaped by the current instability of fungal taxonomy, and I’m sure there are other species where future unknowns aren’t as large a consideration. And as an observer, I do appreciate getting an additional ID by an expert even if one of my observations is already at Research Grade, so I suppose there is that. Finally, looping back to the original question, supporting ID percentage can vary for a number of different reasons, so if I were honestly assessing myself, it wouldn’t be the primary tool I would use to do so (it makes no distinction between the 1st and 5th supporting ID on an observation). 68.5% seems like a very normal percentage of supporting IDs. If someone is at the top of the leaderboard with 95%+ supporting IDs, I may raise an eyebrow. Yet someone else may have a large percentage of leading IDs that is driven by unscrupulous over-identification, and I see it as a far larger red flag when someone is rapidly jumping between an implausibly large number of difficult taxa across kingdoms (fungi, insects, tricky plants) with no apparent pattern and always IDing to species.
Here is a workaround for now:
https://www.inaturalist.org/comments?q=@sumie-dh
I agree with you entirely, but I’ll point out that I have a high percentage of supporting IDs (maybe 80%? I can’t translate the end-of-year pie chart to numbers), yet almost all the IDs I make are of Needs ID observations. In other words, I am not adding a third (or fourth, etc.) ID to Research Grade observations; I rarely look at those at all. And I’m at the top of the leaderboard for several common plants. I’ve never quite understood iNat’s definition of Supporting, but perhaps there’s some confusion over that?
Was just giving basic info on how to alleviate a shortcoming of the iNat platform. Believe it or not, I’m not the one who decided to make the inclusion in leaderboards mandatory.
You’re ignoring the fact that if iNaturalist identifiers remove their account, all their identifications disappear. Zap! Back to Needs ID, if there were only two ID’s. Therefore, it is very useful to add a third, even a fourth ID to an observation. Adding an eighth or ninth, not so much. I’d say, add third ID’s whenever you can.
But as long as they’re not marked as reviewed, they’ll still show up in a check of Needs ID in future, at which point an ID can be added. Speaking as someone who’s maverick on a number of observations where I’ve disagreed with three previous IDs but need additional help to even remove the wrong ID, never mind correcting it, I’m not a fan of additional extra IDs once something is RG. And that’s ignoring the point about potential future taxonomic changes.
I have likewise looked through lots of RG observations checking for errors, but I’d rather add IDs if/when they return to Needs ID due to a deleted account than preemptively add a third ID, with the potential future issues that can create if I’m wrong.
Basically, it’s any ID that matches or leads up to the Community ID that is not the first ID at that level. That status is dynamic and can change (but is less likely to do so than Leading and Improving), if the CID changes.
Since we need at least two IDs to reach RG, if all identifiers shared a hesitation to make supporting IDs, out of the sense that one of those is not “worthy enough”, then observations would never reach RG.
Yeah that’s a good point. I wish it weren’t possible for people to do that, but whether that’s appropriate is an entirely different subject I suppose, and we just need to figure out how to deal with the potential fallout so long as it’s allowed. I guess one way to think about it is in terms of likelihood/frequency and how hard it is to fix. I’ve heard about a few high profile cases of account deletion, but I wonder how common it actually is. I know you have a lot more ID experience than I do, so you’d be better able to compare the two issues in terms of the number of affected IDs/observations. In terms of consequences, each missing ID from a deleted account would take only one ID from a single IDer to fix. The affected observations should still show up under the same taxon that was previously supported as the community ID, making it much easier for later IDers to find them and quicker to check/make the IDs, and they will also show up in the Needs ID pile (I think, not sure how that works if I have previously marked it as “reviewed” though). I’m not trying to minimize the amount of disruption this may cause, just framing it for comparison.
In contrast, if something has 3+ IDs for the wrong taxon, it will first require one IDer to have the confidence to make a maverick ID. If the maverick IDer doesn’t check the “can be improved” box and other IDs are not corrected/withdrawn, the observation will remain incorrect at research grade and not show up in the “needs ID” pile. I typically don’t check that box at first because I like to give people a chance to change their IDs and don’t want to come off as overconfident or aggressive. That means I then have to come back to it later to check the box if they don’t respond (and if I remember to and am sufficiently motivated), and possibly a third time to uncheck it if/when the ID is corrected.
Each ID beyond the second requires two different IDers to correct it (vs one for the case of a deleted ID), meaning they can’t be fixed by a single person like deleted IDs can. That 2-to-1 discrepancy also means deleted IDs would need to be twice as common as incorrect third IDs to cause an equal ID burden. And the observations are often stuck at a higher taxonomic level, making them harder for subsequent IDers to find, even when they do end up in the “Needs ID” pile. I’d also rather err on the side of something receiving unnecessary later review (even if it takes a while) than having it stuck with the wrong ID.
If someone wanted to proactively reduce the impact of account deletion by top IDers in their taxa, they could in theory download all of the IDs from each of the top IDers through the API every few months or so, which would be fairly easy. Then if one of them did delete their account, you’d have a list of affected observations and the now missing IDs, making it fairly quick to add them back for the taxa that you ID (perhaps this should be done any time someone threatens to delete their account). I’m still not strongly disapproving of third/fourth IDs by others, and can see some value in having them by specialist/expert IDers in particular, and they can sometimes have a certain social/fun value as well. This is just the reasoning I’ve used to guide my own practices for the time being, particularly given the lingering uncertainty on the horizon for the taxa I ID (additional cryptic/semi-cryptic/pseudo-cryptic taxa may be discovered).
Personally, I’d estimate that maybe 1 in 20 “Tags” that I get asking for ID help based on the leaderboards is something at all relevant to what I identify.
For example, I’m at the top of this leaderboard because I identify one Nearctic genus within this superfamily, so I get tagged in tropical bagworms (not a family I know at all) all the time:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_id=61414&view=identifiers
I’m on the leaderboard for a bunch of Coleophora species, despite the fact that I don’t ID them to species, and I’m very vocal that they should never be taken to species based on photos of adult moths, for example:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_id=217329&view=identifiers
But the leaderboard includes anyone who contributed a higher-level ID to something later identified as that species, so my genus-level IDs get me on the species leaderboards and create the false impression that I’m identifying these to species.
I’m at the top of the Notodontid leaderboard because I ID the adult moths, so I’m constantly being tagged in observations of larvae, which for Notodontids are often more showy that the adults, but I don’t know the first thing about how to ID them:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_id=47718&view=identifiers
Maybe the leaderboards work better for finding experts in other places on iNat, but at least for moths, they clearly mislead more often than they lead. I know the actual specialists for a lot of moth groups irl, and they simply aren’t active enough on iNat to make it to the top of the leaderboards, despite the fact that they do have iNat accounts. I figure if someone is active enough to be at the top of a leaderboard for a taxon I post, they’ll see it anyway if it’s something they can help with, so I don’t do the “tag someone based on the leaderboard” thing.