Can someone tell me what a placehold backup is?
I have entered some species using the legitimate scientific name, but iNat doesn’t seem to have it as an option (not sure why, these are legitimate, accepted, published names, but perhaps I don’t understand how iNat works).
Then I get advice that someone has placed a ‘placeholder backup’ but no information on what that means or why I ‘ve got it.
Can someone enlighten me?
welcome to the forum
because iNat is an observational database, rather than a nomenclatural one, and the fact that it’s taxon agnostic and covers all taxa across the planet, not all names are currently in the database (being a comprehensive/exhaustive taxonomic reference is not iNat’s purpose). For some taxa that are more esoteric or unobserved for whatever reason, the name has to be manually added, which is easily done by a curator.
If you encounter a missing name, just go to the page for the parent, eg for a missing Astrebla species you would go to https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/577102-Astrebla, and click the ‘Curation’ button at bottom right of the seasonality chart, then click ‘Flag for Curation’ from the dropdown’. You can then request for the species to be added, and a curator will see the flag and add the species for you
In a number of situations, including if you type in a species name that isn’t in iNat (eg the species is missing), or you misspell the name, or you use an incorrect format for iNat (eg include the authority), or if you have no internet when uploading, your ID will be entered as a placeholder ID, which is denoted by greyed out text. This placeholder can be seen in place of the species name, but if another user comes along and adds an ID of any kind (eg IDing the record to the correct family or genus), that placeholder gets overridden and can be lost.
The ‘placeholder backup’ observation field you’re seeing on your record(s) is generated by a project created by @jeanphilippeb, and is simply intended to preserve the placeholder name in case it does get overridden, ensuring there’s a trace of it still
But I believe as long as you have not entered another ID of your own, you should be able to see the value you entered in the ID field when you click on “edit observation”, at least in the web view.
Blame me. JP made that project for me. When I ID for Africa, there are often
You are welcome to @mention me on your obs. If it is your obs, you can Remove from the project, or delete the obs field yourself. @astrebla I left comments on your obs.
I live in hope - since the new apps do NOT use a placeholder - that eventually the problem will be resolved for the website too. And we can abandon our workaround.
We made the project BECAUSE the observer’s text is destroyed with the first ID (under iNat’s misunderstanding that placeholders are junk info - like ‘something’). However wrong or unhelpful it may be, iNat overrides the observer’s intention. Which is ‘irritating’ if the scientist knows exactly what sp they saw, but it isn’t in iNat yet. Or for ‘beetle on daisy’ - where the observer had TOLD us which one they were looking at.
January 2020 decision
But as far as I understand it is not destroyed for the observer – it is still there, just hidden and only accessible from the edit screen.
JP is a computer engineer - he and I started our discussion with me asking him to retrieve the ‘hidden’ info. But it is intentionally destroyed by iNat - so he built the project and wrote the code for me, as a workaround - for which he has to use his quota of API calls (?) to scan all incoming obs. Not a happy solution, but it works. And I appreciate his support.
We also have the Pre-Maverick project. And he has the repertoire of yellow label Phylogenetic projects.
I didn’t check the edit screen. What I remember: it is hidden if someone else adds an ID, it is destroyed if the observer adds and ID.
And if the ID is removed, the common name (in whatever language) of the former ID is displayed as the new placeholder. (And that’s why it’s important to cach and back up the placeholder within a few minutes after observation upload, before someone else has time to add and remove an ID).
Observers in general are likely unaware of all the tricks. iNat proposes to save the missing name as a placeholder (and let the observer figure out that they should enter again the name in a note or comment, if they want this info be kept permanently - if they don’t know, it’s their fault).
The issue is that too much depends on what the observer does and identifiers are not helped once the placeholder is hidden.
For instance, this can happen:
I’m perfectly aware of that as well as the problems associated with placeholders.
But if the text entered by the observer is still stored in the system, it is inaccurate to suggest that the observer’s placeholder is “destroyed” when someone else adds an ID. It is hidden and many observers may not know how to access it, but this is not the same thing.
has this sort of case actually ever occurred? if an observer originally knew what an organism was at a low level, why would they agree to an identification at a higher level? and if they agree at a higher level, isn’t it accurate to set the species_guess to that higher level?
it seems to me that the case you’re actually solving for is the case where an identifier adds an identification without noting the placeholder and a subsequent identifier comes along and doesn’t realize there was placeholder there (or doesn’t know how to get it). there could have been other solutions to this problem, such as giving identifiers a browser extension to display the species_guess when the observer’s ID was missing (or asking for something like this as a feature request).
back in the day, my main ask was that if you were going to do this that you implement things in a way that would not annoy people.
I didn’t say that. I said it is destroyed if the observer adds an ID.
The issue is that identifiers cannot access an hidden placeholder.
In short :
Already discussed, and not the initial question.
This thread was started by an observer who wanted to know what the placeholder backup is.
It is relevant for the observer to know what happens to their ID if it is uploaded as a placeholder and where they can find it (and under what conditions).
In the discussion prior to my posts, it was strongly implied that the placeholder is gone forever as soon as any other ID is entered. This is not true. It matters that this is not true for the observer.
It does not seem to me that the disappearing placeholder greatly affects IDers, except in cases where the placeholder provides information about which organism in the observation the observer was interested in.
Observations with a placeholder will be sorted under “unknown” in iNat’s taxonomy. This means that specialist IDers will not see it under the placeholder name. It therefore needs someone to do the same sort of general sorting that will happen with any other “unknown”. If the observation gets an ID that allows it to be seen by a relevant specialist, the specialist should be able to ID the observation based on their knowledge, regardless of whether the placeholder is there or not.
If the observer is made aware of the issue with placeholders and replaces their placeholder with a taxon recognized by iNat’s system, this streamlines the process. But the disappearance of the placeholder is not the main problem for either observer or identifiers; the main problem is observers understandably not realizing what has happened when as far as they knew they entered an ID.
I am not attacking your project. I am merely trying to convey the information to the observer that if they enter an ID that ends up as a placeholder that gets overridden, it is possible to find this ID again provided they have not entered a new ID/agreed with subsequent IDs. In this context, the repeated comments focusing on why the disappearing placeholder is problematic – from an IDer perspective – seems to me to be highly misleading and not at all helpful, because the important message for the observer gets lost.
Many assumptions will not prevail over a simple fact: the placeholder backup is useful to those who use it. Of course, “others” can do later what we missed from the start. But, for people who want to help now not relying on “others” later, better be efficient today thanks to secured valuable information, than inefficient for years. Getting valuable info hidden/lost is inefficient.
Yes, observers could do it in another way, so that there would be no issue at all. But the web site works in such a way, that observers are misleaded. They are prompted to enter an ID, then it goes to a placehoder, then it is hidden/destroyed. I wouldn’t say observers should do better, I would say iNat should help them better. And a way to help them better is no placeholder at all. Nothing misleading.
So the placeholder is still there if more then one ID is added by other iNat users?
as long as the observer hasn’t made an actual ID, the placeholder is retained in the species_guess field, which is accessible via the API. see the link in my above post for screenshots of what that looks like.
alao:
At least one case where it seems helpful to have the placeholder observation field is it helps people add the taxon. If I see an observation with a placeholder taxon that looks valid and plausible for the obs I can flag the relevant genus and ask for it to be added, and then let the observer know when it is so they can update their ID to the actual taxon. This way even if no one is currently able to confirm their ID it is at least properly registered and stored. Yes, this info can be found by digging around intentionally, but I think it’s much easier to notice this way. I’m not going to check the api for species_guess on every single observation I click on, but I might notice the observation field.
And yeah all this could be accomplished via browser extension, but this way anyone can do this, not just those savvy enough to use the extension (and its also one less extension to install and hope no one updates to start mining bitcoin on my computer 
).
I’m a little confused, I get how getting notifications about your obs being added to projects can be annoying especially if it happens at once in large quantities, but are you actually using placeholders on your own observations? if not I don’t see why you’d be getting notifications or why these would be annoying
i did a little poking around just now, and this may not be entirely true anymore. it looks like the parts of the website that have been switched over to the v2 API – the Explore page and the Observation detail page – no longer display the placeholder at all (because they aren’t requesting the species_guess from the v2 API).
parts of the website that get data from other sources – the Identify page, the Edit Observations screen, and the individual observation Edit screen – still do display the placeholder (as long as no identification has been added).
i don’t have an iPhone to see how the new app operates, but i remember reading that folks noted that they were no longer able to enter placeholders there. so i wonder if placeholders don’t get displayed in that app either? it seemed like that was all part of an intentional push to get rid of placeholders altogether.
so then i wonder if the effective removal of placeholders from the web pages that were switched to v2 is also part of such a plan?
while i have been known to misspell taxa, i usually fix these fairly quickly. the situations where i’d be more likely to get notifications are cases where i’ve identified an observation that had a placeholder on it, and folks start talking about a placeholder backup, or where folks start talking about it in the forum, as we’re doing now.
in some ways, it’s a blessing that the process that runs to capture placeholders doesn’t capture every placeholder out there. otherwise, there would be tons more notifications and people wondering about what placeholder backups are. but then, the fact that it doesn’t capture these consistently makes it worse it some ways, too. people think that they can rely on it, but the reality is that the only way currently to see all placeholders out there is to make use of the API in some way or to use an extension or a similar tool to modify the behavior of the website. (even though you could export species_guess in the standard observation export, there’s not an easy way to tell from those results whether the observer has made an identification or not.)
@astrebla have we answered your question ?
It is misleading to tell the observer that your placeholder backup is an important way of “securing valuable information” because their placeholder is gone once another ID has been added, without mentioning that the placeholder is not in fact gone or how they can access it. Several posts here have indeed quite strongly suggested that once any ID has been added, the placeholder is destroyed/gone forever.
Again, I am not criticizing your project (though I think you overexaggerate its usefulness), and I completely agree with you that the placeholder is something that needs to be fixed on iNat’s end.
But I think having multiple options is good, and it empowers observers if we let them know how they can access this information themselves and how to fix the underlying issue – without having to rely on your project.
Surely the goal should be to have users who are more versed in using iNat so that there is no need for workarounds that may mitigate the effects but don’t address the underlying issue, yes? Providing them only a partial picture of how iNat handles placeholders does not accomplish that goal.