Yes. The issue is I had no idea there were people going through pages and pages of unknowns until posting this question. If you’re unaware of what these people are doing and why then getting IDs of “dicots” doesn’t make much sense. I did not realize this was a triage process. Nor did I even realize you could search by something like “dicots” and just see all the dicots with no ID. This is why I asked.
And from the point of view of someone who is just using this app to get an ID and who doesn’t understand the broader mission of this project, it is indeed annoying to get a notification about an ID on your mysterious plant and see that it’s just “dicots”.
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but that ID is not an automated service. Identifiers don’t know that you don’t want a broad ID. (Plants are a special case, and there are other earlier requests to at least go to family, and then pushback) I am assured that identifiers do search for dicots, and YMMD but for my obs across Africa - I don’t see much ID progress until plants at least start at family.
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Well, there’s the problem. People use iNat for reasons other than just to get an ID.
People chiming in on unknown observations with whatever ID they’re sure of is encouraged. You can see that in some posts around the forum. (One piece of advice I’ve seen to prevent this scenario is to look only at older observations that still need IDs, though.) Even general IDs are supposed to be helpful because they can get the observations seen by people who know a lot about, say, plants or mammals.
If this bothers you that much, upload your observations when you can sit down and ID them or enter your ID right away.
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No. Man I feel like nothing I can say won’t get misunderstood. I thought I was being clear that now that I know what is happening it doesn’t bother me. It’s only bothersome before you have any idea what is going on. I completely support any and all volunteer efforts being made to help get an ID or to help the community in anyway. The last thing I would request is that my observations get ignored. for a period of time.
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Apologies if you caught this mistake, but rabbits are not rodents. They are in the order Lagomorpha.
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[edit: original comment removed] I had commented on this here, but am afraid that I totally misunderstood—so I removed my comment. Sorry!
Martin is saying the opposite :)
‘The last thing…’ in the sense of the least likely
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Is he? “for a period of time.” makes it seem the opposite, and the whole problem started with people iding observations and not ignoring them, so I agree with @pfau_tarleton here.
Maybe identifiers should not try to ID if they are not sure what something is. I usually do not attempt an identification because I am not familiar with a particular taxa. To me, an observation map filled with high level IDs (a red blob) is not always helpful.
People from all over the world are going through “unknowns”. I have to admit, I do not always check the precise location when IDing unknowns. I would recognize a rabbit, but without checking the location I cannot tell which species it is. And even if I look at the location, I would not ID for example rabbits in Northern America to a species as I’m simply lacking the knowledge of rabbit species in a certain area. In order to get that rabbit out of the “unknown limbo” I would add a coarser ID. In my opinion a coarser ID is still better than “unknown” as there are people/expert that search and ID specific groups of organisms.
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Many experts do not look at observations in the Unknown category. So, sorting Unknowns into high level categories (plant, insect, fish) is an often appreciated way to help move the record towards a research grade ID.
That said, I’ve learned that some experienced observers prefer to upload all their observations at once and then add ID to them later. To avoid getting in their way, I would usually filter for Unknowns that are more than a month old.
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I’ve learnt to recognise the - wait, I was getting to that! and skip their obs. We need the draft mode they asked for.
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Would an unknown observation be ignored if you were filtering by location, i.e., state, province or physiographic area?
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No. I only ID in my area and I get unknowns all the time.
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That said, I’ve learned that some experienced observers prefer to upload all their observations at once and then add ID to them later. To avoid getting in their way, I would usually filter for Unknowns that are more than a month old.
Why is IDing these observations a problem?
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Maybe not by a generalist who also includes unknowns or doesn’t filter for life-type, but probably would be ignored by specialists who would be able to narrow the observation to something more specific.
I’m not certain that the overlap between folks who look at everything vs. those who look at specific branches has a huge number of people.
I look at plants and unknowns since my range of identification is pretty small and have seen observations I identify outside my comfort zone (insects, spiders, animals, etc.) get narrowed by multiple identifiers. It’s nice to see the process working as designed.
Even the iNat help which @fffffffff pointed to mentions the fact that Unknowns can stall out in getting identified.
Lastly, even if the ID is wrong, as mine often are, there’s an option to withdraw the ID. If it’s very wrong, maybe even Cunningham’s Law comes into play?
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Well, I cannot say for sure; but, apparently, it’s annoying as it does not account for their preferred workflow.
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I also look at Keckiella!
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