in the context of iNaturalist, i think evidence is anything that can be used to make an identification. what constitutes good evidence vs bad evidence is another thing, but i think in the context of iNaturalist, it may not matter.
this discussion reminds me a lot of debates over the merits of proof of work vs proof of stake systems in the blockchain world. in that world, you’re trying to take the need to trust a single central party that controls the system and shifting that trust to the system, and specifically to distribute it to as many stakeholders in the system as possible.
but how do you trust that all those anonymous actors out there have an incentive to act in the common interest? right now, the two main models for proving that you’re going to act in the common interest require you to either do some sort of measurable amount of work (why would you go through all the trouble if you’re just going to cause chaos?), or to put something at stake (why would you act badly if you’re going to lose what you’ve put at stake?).
iNaturalist does sort of seem to be trying to shift trust to the system as well, and their implementation of it to me looks a lot like a proof of work system, albeit with a very low work threshold (click a button to ID), though there are hints of a proof of stake system where just social approval is at stake (and that will probably exist in any social system).
the reputation system that some folks have advocated would push things toward more of a proof of stake system, where “reputation” is at stake. i won’t go into all the pros and cons of that approach or a hybrid approach, but i will say that my preference, and i think what is better in the context of iNaturalist is to stick with a proof of work system.
so then how to you improve things if you’re going to stick with a proof of work system? well, you increase the amount of work that needs to be done before an ID can be made. theoretically, that work can be arbitrary, like having to solve a random math problem. but you can also make it something that helps with that particular ID or that helps to improve some other aspect of the system. the tricky thing is that you don’t want to make the work so burdensome that it disincentivizes people to make IDs.
what does that mean? well, regarding the disincentive, i think maybe you could minimize that by requiring the extra work only in certain circumstances. for example, maybe there could be some algorithm that compares your maverick IDs vs your leading IDs that became RG or something like that and uses that to weight a random chance that you’ll be required to do the extra work before you’re allowed to ID. (you could implement a hybrid system here by exempting certain people from the extra work based on some sort of, say, curator or expert status or something like that.)
regarding extra work to help your IDs, i’ve talked about identification checklists that i think might help lay the foundation for that (see: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-often-confused-with-warnings/1269).
and regarding extra work to help the system in general, there have been different ideas for custom CAPTCHAs (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/limit-new-users-ability-to-send-messages/469) that could lay the foundation for that.
maybe you can even combine the concept of the checklist and the CAPTCHA to help the computer vision understand, say, which quadrant(s) of a photo contains a bird wing, or something like that.
sorry i didn’t go into a lot of detail here, but i wanted to put the concepts out there, in case that might open up a useful direction for the discussion. hopefully it’s not just a bad tangent.