escol
July 23, 2025, 7:19pm
38
Please see this feature request about “editable identification guide”
A lot of folks expressed interest in using iNat, but a short-coming that was highlighted (and a reason many folks still preferred using BugGuide) was the lack of information about identification. As one participant explained “All the identification tips are scattered across comments in individual observations.”
It would be awesome if we could expand the existing Similar Species tab into a more comprehensive resource for taxon identification (and maybe rename it “Identification”). Even if it was only editable by curators initially, it could become a really useful resource and help to cut down on misidentifications and redundant comments explaining how to ID various species. I know we already have the Wikipedia articles under the About tab, but those are typically limited to general descriptions rather than specific tips for identification.
The idea is to have that identification guide / wiki in the ‘About’ page (or maybe in ‘Similar species’ as suggested).
Now it’s only the matter on how they want it implemented, from what we see they decided to try out aggregating information from comments and train a (demo) generative model on it, so it can explain a choice of certain species (along CV but different approach?).
Other requests, similar posts listed here:https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/expand-the-similar-species-tab-into-an-editable-identification-guide/13890/52?u=escol
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