Why are Two agreeing IDs (and no disagreeing IDs) needed to achieve research grade?

This reminds me of one of my Proud Mavericks, though. I disagreed with the observer’s initial ID, and added an explanation. More came after me and agreed with the observer’s initial ID, but without explanation. I commented, “I explained why it isn’t – still waiting for one of these guys to explain why it is.” Over a year later, at least one more also agreed with the observer without any explanation. Still waiting…

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It sounds like a case to tag in a few other identifiers to take a look

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Is there a reason why Community Identified is now not the name of it? I agree it’s a much more fitting term.

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(It takes years for iNat to make changes.
But.
Changing to satellite view on the map - they activated literally overnight!!

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You are ignoring the fact that marking an observation as “ID can be improved” is not a good way to accomplish what you want – because there is no reason to think that it will be understood as “this needs another set of eyes because I think the ID is questionable but I can’t back it up and I don’t have any better suggestion”. It is a passive-aggressive way of preventing an observation from becoming RG without providing any justification and without informing the users affected that you have done so.

If you are sure enough that the ID is wrong that it absolutely should not be RG, why not disagree? If you aren’t sure but merely suspect someone was uncritically agreeing, how is it helpful to make an observation “needs ID” merely based on a suspicion that it could be wrong?

You have indicated in other threads that you dislike users pushing back an ID to genus when there is not enough evidence for a more specific ID and that you feel that they are single-handedly deciding something without citing their sources – how is your behavior here any different?

How is a tool that does not do the job you want a better solution than writing “Can you explain your ID” or “@ specialist, would you mind taking a look”? Even if you have not chosen their native language or not been diplomatic or nobody responds promptly, a comment leaves a clear record of your doubts that may be considered by others looking at the observation in the future. The DQA button will not do this, but only cause confusion and – since you see the advantage of this button as the fact that you can click it and subsequently “forget about it” – you will be creating hindrances in the workflow for future IDers, who will have to investigate why the observation is not behaving as expected.

Acting with basic consideration towards other users does not mean being “a social network user”. It means recognizing that we are humans, not machines.

(I am not claiming that there are no cases in which this DQA button is useful – for example, if you are sure that an ID is wrong, have disagreed but are outnumbered by careless IDs, your explanations and tagging of other users have gotten no response, etc. But it should be a last resort, not the first action as you have been advocating.)

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Already answered most if not all of your questions in previous posts.

(edit: Let’s format it to keep your objections eye-friendly)

'Why not disagree?'

because, I repeat, it’s often pointless - diplomacy/ignored/conflicts etc. -; and hitting the DQA already does a pretty decent job of ultimately fixing things by keeping these obs under extra eyeballs beyond mine

'based on a suspicion'

well, I know (beyond reasonable doubt) blind-agreers, don’t you?; and since blind-agreeing is tolerable and tolerated here, I usually don’t do a thing; otherwise I try and intervene in one of several ways, depending on circumstances (abstain from ID, or delete my ID, or summon extra eyeballs with a DQA, or soft-disagree, or this or that… then forget it)

'how is your behaviour here any different'

well does it have to be? ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do’, so why should I waste time/be better/guess stuff/play the diplomacy game I suck at, especially as it often leads nowhere? (but rest assured I still follow at least some principles and routines - some of them, to cope with other users’ subpar behaviour, or missing features).

'a tool that does not do the job'

in my experience it does the job quite well, and keeps me “doing the job” too - perhaps not the way you and others would like though

'hindrance' 'have to investigate' etc.

it just takes “future IDers” a scroll and a click (not more difficult than a ‘not wild’ vote for instance), all the while having spared others the infamous label of “maverick” (how rude! :D), and/or a waste of time and mind playing the diplomacy-explaining-guesswork game…

'Acting with basic consideration'

… It may not be your case, but I came to (and try hard to remain with) iNat in order to deal with observations of nature stuff; not much to take care of (more) online humans and their feelings (/brutally honest). This is especially true wherever there is zero interaction possible (hello, Seek app), or considering how the site tries very hard not to help to this avail (oh hello, human-interaction-friendly features lacking since forever - e.g. a sign-up form with a ‘language(s) of choice’ dropdown list in addition to username and email). Caring is a two-way avenue, why not assume all identifiers are humans and deserve a bit of consideration too?

So, yes, I’m advocating that the DQA-and-forget-and-waste-no-time-and-sanity is -at least to me in current conditions faced- a sensible action too, and that perhaps it should not be taken from anyone who relies on it to get things done. At least as long as there is no explicit rule broken or decision enforced against it. Again, one more time, bis repetita: if you think this is morally wrong or antisocial or inhumane or scientifically unsound or against rules: more power to you, report it and let the staff decide. With already tens of thousands of users willing to push IDs to RG a.s.a.p., and as many quick to demote anything to genus on the slightest doubt… they can certainly do with one problematic identifier less. :)
/EOT

You lost me at “and-forget”. If you use the DQA you have a responsibility to follow up to remove an erroneous vote if the community ID changes.

iNat is first and foremost a community platform. You are welcome to avoid interaction as much as possible, but then you need to limit your activities to the ones that do not require community interaction.

I sometimes use the DQA to bump something back into the “Needs ID” stream when I believe my ID is correct (but I’m not 100% confident) and a suspected serial agreer moves the ID to RG. However, I only do this with my own observations and I always remove my vote when another agreer adds an ID (unless I have reason to suspect them as a serial agreer too, which I don’t think I have ever had a case of two suspected serial agreers on the same observation).

If you are forgetting and not following up with observations you’ve voted on, I’m not sure how you can be so sure it’s doing the job well.

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Notice my use of the word “responsibility” and not “written requirement”. Your use of the DQA is already outside the description of the DQA. There are some generally agreed upon uses outside the DQA’s strict intention, but when employing such uses it is absolutely your responsibility to follow up. If you’re not going to follow up, don’t use the DQA except for its strict intention.

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It’s not though? Your point seems to be that because some other users misuse IDs to get observations to RG, the best solution is to misuse a DQA to get them back out of RG again.

I can’t say I agree with this. Adding a disagreeing ID if you think the ID is wrong is how the platform is supposed to work. It’s most certainly not “pointless”. Could you be outvoted by other people who vote for a species-level ID despite your disagreement? Sure. That’s how the platform is supposed to work- it’s a community ID. Resorting to the use of DQA votes to get something out of RG when you think the community ID is wrong is not the intended use case. I get that it can be frustrating when you’re so certain that something is wrong and can’t get any responses from anyone to change it, but in most cases of incorrect RG observations, there are only 2 IDs present, so just adding your disagreeing ID is all that’s needed to get it out of RG. In the remaining cases where there are more than 3 incorrect species IDs, no one is responsive, and no expert responds to tags, then nuking with a DQA vote may be appropriate, but these cases are rare in my experience, and 99% of the time just disagreeing is all that’s needed.

This has not been my experience at all. Over 300,000 IDs in, and I can think of only a few dozen times when I disagreed with a RG ID and had trouble getting enough fellow disagree-ers to join in and bring the observation out of RG. It happens, but it’s not widespread enough to warrant single-handedly removing observations from RG in a way that notifies no one and doesn’t provide any new ID suggestion.

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I hid two posts: one was sarcastic and one was a sarcastic response, just to keep those back-and-forths out of the conversation, which went deeply off-topic. I’m going to close the thread, the original question has been answered.

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