You don’t describe duplicates, those are observations from different users, duplicates are not that.
@teellbee very well could be, but still bothers me as people upload the same picture twice too, it’s not hard to understand you don’t need to do that.
2 Likes
It may be useful to describe types of duplicates. What about submitting 50 photos of a single plant, from different angels as 50 observations. These type of duplicates can often be identified by a portion of an identical branch or leaf. Thankfully this has been removed but once there were 50+ observation of a seed. That means at least 100 ID’s, an effort in terms of personal computer time and iNaturalist resources, be used better utilized elsewhere.
4 Likes
It is annoying if someone who is told about a duplicate observation doesn’t respond. Because it is rudely impolite. Anything following is just the consequence of this impoliteness.
And please bear in mind that (as established elsewhere) there are probably a lot of neuroatypical persons on iNat. They make good identifyers, but they tend to have issues that other people don’t.
So be a nice fella an’ delete your doublettes because they make me cringe. ;)
5 Likes
I ID Unknowns, and that workflow shows up … the duplicates. I pick the best photo to ID (sometimes needing to use info from the And Also Here)
Duplicates IDed as Life with a polite copypasta.
If they bob up again in my notifications because another identifier has spent more time there, then I tip to DQA Good as it can be at Life.
I prefer to ID something fresh, instead of autopilot same old. For plants, if the flower, leaf, habitat, that vital distinguishing feature … are each scattered across separate posts - identifiers add polite comments - nice flower but what did the leaves look like for species? More work to no point and purpose. Rant over. That is why.
3 Likes
How would you react to frequent duplicate records in your day job?
2 Likes
Me? I was a librarian - if we fined overdue books … and you could go to the shelf, bring me the book - I apologise, but you are the one who is painfully bent-out-of-shape. Eina! We had chaos when the University of Cape Town libraries first went from paper to computer. But we got there eventually.
Then I did a rinse and repeat in Zurich and everything went smoothly like clockwork. Not a digital native and I remember BC.
3 Likes
The decline of duplicates will make iNat look more ‘clean’. But if situation is not too severe, I don’t think it needed to be care.
Different people upload photos for the same organism is understandable——after all, everyone want observation for their own.
And some might don’t know how to combine multy photos into one observation, or just make a mistake to upload same photos for several time. that’s also reasonable. I think there is no need to blame. I will ID several of them, and suggest uploader to improve their observations, that’s good for both uploader and IDer. And need to be alaerted in case that some one upload duplicates to boost in ranking.
One thought arise in my mind. I have several experiences that meet many indiciduals at a time and I photograph them all. I don’t know if it’s better to combine all of them to one observation or seperate them——as I always did.
That depends. I will split groups of similar species that tend to grow together, highly variable species or poorly observed species into single individuals/ observations. I think this makes sense. However, I got annoyed in the past by an (otherwise great) observer who split schools of fish into separate specimen. I was annoyed by scrolling through hundreds of nearly identical looking fish, even told him off for that. He told me he is interested in individual patterns of this species, which makes his modus operandi understandable. Still, somewhat annoying …
That is my day job, and night one too.
Again, it’s not a duplicate.
4 Likes
I think that most “unorthodox” behaviours could be traced back to how seriously each of us take what we do in iNat.
There are users, for example, who revise all the observations of a given taxonomical group or others who care for the observations made in a certain area and, again, others who make research with iNat or simply post observations following the site instructions.
On the opposite, there are users who use iNat as a game photographing everything in every way without caring for the reliability of their observations, duplicates included, or others who organize events involving crowds of people who are completely unaware of what iNat is, of how to use it and of which are its potentialities.
I do not want to say that the first are in the right but the second approach is certainly detrimental for many reasons.
4 Likes
I know it’s not duplicate, but the outcome looks similar, that a certain organism at certain place and in certain time was uploaded for several times.
The flags page is clogged with people flagging duplicate observations to try to prevent them from becoming RG.
1 Like
Librarians are meticulous. You’ve cautioned me about IDing duplicates. I get it now! :D
3 Likes
ok, but it is not fault of those who flag duplicates. Adding, if possible, a filter to exclude such flags would allow to see only the desired kind of flags.
2 Likes
I suspect at least some of the aversion against duplicates is coming from a mindset of wanting “clean” data for e.g. abundance of a species in a particular location. However, that’s not what iNat is intended to be used for and its data is not suitable for that kind of analysis. But I understand that some people wish to use it that way and therefore push for making duplicates at least casual, if they can’t be deleted. The problem with that is that iNat has no ‘proper’ mechanism to make duplicates casual (because based on iNat rules they are not a problem), so a lot of DQA stuff seems to get misused as a result.
One alternative strategy I’ve seen ID’ers use with duplicates is to look for a second organism in the picture and then ID one copy for one and the second copy for the other. It doesn’t work for everything but sometimes it does. It helps to put a comment in along with the IDs to let others know what’s going on.
I try to point out straight up duplicates with a comment and link to the second copy when I see them. Very occasionally, the observer will react with a “gosh, thank you for pointing that out, I didn’t realize I uploaded this twice” and fix it. Often, there will be no response at all, but at least now there is a link between the two copies to alert other ID’ers so they can skip/mark as reviewed if they don’t want to spend time on it.
Only once have I run into duplication on a large scale where a small set of observations appeared to be re-uploaded over and over until there were dozens of each. The user had been suspended (not sure if related to the duplicates or something else - it almost looked like a technical glitch like automatically re-uploading everything whenever they turned on their phone). In those cases, contacting help to let them take a look at what’s going on is probably the best course of action.
For the ones with multiple pictures of the same organism being uploaded as separate observations, I sometimes add the question “is this the same as this?” with a link, again trying to tie them together for fellow ID’ers. It can be helpful to explain how to combine images since most of these are due to people not knowing how to do that. Pointing out that it is much easier to ID when all the pictures of the same individual are together usually is good motivation, but there is a learning curve. If it is someone I know (e.g. student), I may talk to them in person and do a little demo for them how to combine images. That usually fixes it at least for that person.
6 Likes
I don’t think there is a way to mark a duplicate as a duplicate. I think the issue is people are marking “captivate/cultivated” or no “evidence of organism” to prevent duplicates from reaching Research Grade.
1 Like
Clean data doesn’t mean people most want to use it to count specimens, iNat is not designed to be used to do that, but iNat also shouldn’t be used to observe specimens that weren’t there! If it was one it’s one, not 3 or 20. It’s a cheating, it’s a lie, regular users do fix if they find out, but most won’t. Iding something else doesn’t work, next iders don’t care, don’t read comments or whatever, but they ignore that and just id the same thing observer did.
1 Like
This would be me… Sometimes, especially if my uploading was done over several days or I skipped around to get the higher priority ones in first, I have inadvertently uploaded an obs twice. I don’t think I do it that often, but it has happened. My intentions were good 
5 Likes
In the context of a BioBlitz, definitely. I will be involved as a project admin in an upcoming BioBlitz at our university and I can guarantee you I will be watching out for this and advocate for disqualifying observers who do this from winning any prices.
That is another issue and one I see often on observations where the observer duplicated with intent (e.g. bee on flower, one observation for the bee, the other for the flower) and subsequent ID’ers ignore the observers initial intent and ID both for the bee, for example. I really wished people would take the time and look at notes and comments before adding another ID to something.
8 Likes
I meant a filter in the flags page
https://www.inaturalist.org/flags
1 Like