On my profile page it says that I have made 4858 IDs, but when I go to the ‘Your Identifications’ page, it says that I have made 5155 IDs. I’m wondering which page shows the right number of IDs made and why they are showing different amounts.
Has anyone else ever seen this?
Apologies if something like this has been discussed elsewhere.
It is the same for me. It is likely due to taxon updates from previous IDs, adding additional numbers to your identification count but not showing up next to your profile, or at least that is my working theory. If you take a look at this image you can see the “added as part of a taxon swap”. The correct ID count is most likely the one displayed on your profile as automatic taxon changes aren’t identifications made by you.
I quickly looked at the underlying code and found that the profile number is the number of other peoples Observations you’ve added an identification on.
The identification page shows the number of Identifications you’ve added on other people’s observations.
I haven’t drilled down enough to find the cause of the discrepancy - but it’s likely to do with taxon swaps (like @cacklingkingfisher says) or perhaps something else like counting withdrawn ids on the identifications page?
EDIT:
Previous discussions:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identifications-count-is-different-from-my-profile-and-when-you-click-identifications/23000
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-counts-towards-a-persons-identification-counts/4165
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/profile-identification-counts/36749
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/3-different-stats-for-identifications-which-is-correct/47574
same with me. I recall this was addressed, but forgot the real reason.
I think it’s because the larger count includes the IDs you’ve given to yourself, and not only to others.
I do not believe this to be the case as the ID count would be far higher than that if it were true considering I have almost 2000 observations but only an additional 200~, unless you mean IDs added later, but I still feel as though the count would be a bit different considering additional taxon swaps counting as IDs are very possible
I think it comes down to one counting withdrawn IDs and the other not. So if you add an ID of “plant” and then later refine it to “dicot” and then to “maple tree”, you’ve added three IDs, but only the most recent one is still “active”. So that counts as one ID (as in one observation ID’d) for your profile, but 3 IDs (2 of which were later withdrawn and replaced) for the full ID list you posted.
Actually, I do not get the ID counts most of the time… I observe since a while that ID counts are also very different and sometimes waaay off for certain taxa when you e.g. compare the leaderboard displayed at a certain observation, with who is displayed as top observer with what number at the taxon page, with numbers and orders at the identifier page for a taxon… I only started to wonder because I wanted to tag someone for a certain taxa and wondered why the top IDer following the leaderboard on an observation had so little IDs when I felt I had already run into much more
Just as an example… at least this one seems to show the right people in the leaderboard… I ran into some examples with cery different leaderboards, depending on where you look
I’ve also seen things like that as well.
4000 is with a location filter ?
It is on a certain observation, not in explore or an ID setting… can there be a filter active? If so - how and where?
yes, as noted in the last previous discussion link you included.
compare:
they are both correct, depending on how you count your identifications. if you’re counting only the current identifications for others (not withdrawn), the count on your profile is correct (or at least should be very close). if you’re counting all identifications you’ve made for others (including withdrawn), then the count on the identifications page is correct.
I believe the leaderboard on this page shows the number of IDs for RG observations only, whereas the leaderboards on the taxon pages show the number of IDs for observation with any status. The numbers on the observation pages are also global results, not filtered by region.
it’s a little more complicated than that. compare:
Remember also that we lose the identifications on observations of people who delete their accounts (or just some observations) - those lost ID’s should be remembered in our profiles.
The numbers in the links you give show:
IDs for verifiable observations → default Explore setting
IDs for RG observations → this is the number shown on observations
IDs for observations of any status (including not verifiable) → this is the number shown on the taxon pages
How is this different than what I wrote?
it’s a little more nuanced.
not really IDs. it’s verifiable observations of the target taxon not by the target user where the target user has identified any taxon. if you try to get a similar count on IDs, you’ll get a slightly different number (probably because of orphaned IDs on deleted observations).
current (not withdrawn) IDs by the target user for the target taxon on research grade observations of any taxon by any user.
current (not withdrawn) IDs by the target user for the target taxon for observations of any taxon by users other than the target user.
So does this mean that if someone consistently misidentifies species A as species B and is corrected by three others each time, they could still end up high on the leaderboard for species A? Ouch.
you would hope that if someone is intentionally misidentifying stuff, that that would be noticed at some point, and folks would try to correct that behavior before it gets too bad.
usually, any disconnect between appearing on the leaderboard in the first screen above and having a lot of specific expertise on any given taxon tends to be related to folks who make higher-level identifications. but i think the reason they’ve chosen to count that way on that screen is that it identifies folks were involved in the entire journey to the right identification.
theoretically, the second leaderboard usually should be best at identifying expertise at low ranks like species. the third screen should function similarly to the second leaderboard at species level, but at a higher level both those screens could highlight folks who specialize only in a single species, who have broader expertise across many species in a higher-level taxon, or who can identify at a higher level but not at a lower level.
as i noted, the way those leaderboards actually function is complicated.
