No offense but, how boring is the repetition of this mantra.
I am not referring to you in particular. Here is full of users who anytime remind us what iNat should be meant for. Of course, it’s just my debatable point of view.
As far as I am concerned, I would not take for granted that asking users for a more proper use of iNat would necessarily mean that it would be less beneficial for them.
But it worked so well when it was possible to flags duplicates…
It kind of is - IMO people should just deal with duplicates the same way they do other observations. They really aren’t a big deal and flagging them just increases the amount of headaches duplicates create.
Or just add a vote in DQA as was proposed multiple times throughout years.
Which is why you and I clashed when we first met on iNat. I was tidying up a distribution map, and you had to convince me that our daisy was invasive on your Mediterranean coast.
Nice pun
I have seen this and believe it is a person new to iNat not knowing how to combine photos into a single observation. Maybe a few words telling the person how to do this will help educate the person.
Keep reading the thread.
I agree, most of these issues are just growing pains as a new user learns the site. My go-to copy & paste messages are as follows:
For observations with multiple species uploaded as a single observation:
Each species should be its own separate observation for ID to continue. There are some tips for splitting the observation up here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-fix-your-observation-with-photos-of-multiple-species/15096
For multiple observations of something that appears to be the same individual (but not duplicate photos):
Is this the same individual as you subsequent observation: insert link here? If so, please combine all photos into a single observation. There are tips for combing your observations here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-turn-multiple-observations-into-a-single-observation/9838. If this is a different individual, then separate observations as you have them is fine.
For duplicate observations where the exact same photos are used:
Hi, looks like you accidently uploaded a duplicate: insert link here. Would you mind deleting the second observation? Thanks!
This should put things in perspective. No one anywhere, especially admins or experienced users, likes to deal with duplicates.
Global Big Day (October 7, 8, 9) is just concluded and I have to enter bird observations from multiple sources (in my bird club) to ebird.org.
Can you imagine how challenging, if not frustrating it is to resolve duplicates (and other inconsistencies) for data entry, in a list long as this…?
Inasmuch as mistakes would be made during data entry, it behoves contributors/sources to clean/revise data before, and after submission.
Something I’ve wondered about but never bothered to solve: how many of the annoying duplicate submitters are Seek users? I’ve never used Seek, but from what I understand of it I could imagine somebody seeing a cool fly, running the Seek algorithm and submitting it to iNat, then doing it all over again and again to see if it keeps giving them the same answer. Now, I know there are many duplicate farmers who don’t fit this profile, but I wonder if Seek might be a structural conflict that promotes some duplicator behavior, and if we could head off some of this by fixing that input stream.
That makes sense really. The few times I’ve tried Seek, I got quite inconsistent IDs of the organism depending on when I pushed the button. My patience gave out waiting for the ID to settle. But, I can totally see someone experimenting with that, if such happens broadly.
I prefer not to be upset by minor things like duplicate observations. I just pass them by. I like to save my annoyance for serious issues, like the people who think one space (not two) is appropriate between sentences. Or who think “may have” rather than “might have” is the past tense conditional. Or those totally annoying people who think “very unique” makes any sense at all!
No, nothing is ever the fault of those who do it. The congestion on the roads is not the fault of those who drive cars, either.
Eh eh… I do not remember, it must have been long time ago. Could you remind the post via pm here or in iNat?
I think the problem (and why this keeps popping up over and over again) is that there is no dedicated DQA vote for “duplicate” yet. Therefore, people use inconsistent workarounds that work for them personally but make no sense to others or even interfere with what they’re trying to do on iNat. So just as some people get annoyed by duplicates, others get annoyed by what those people are doing to push the duplicates into casual. A duplicated observation is neither captive/cultivated nor is it lack of evidence or wrong location/time as some people are marking.
These problems would go away if there was a DQA item for “duplicate” that people could use to make them casual. However, then the question becomes: Which of two duplicates should become casual and which should remain needs ID/RG? This gets tricky if the two observations have different IDs. Do they have different IDs because of two organisms being observed in the same photo? Or just a misidentification for one? I can see how trying to implement such a duplicate filter raises a bunch of questions.
It’s all good. I still wonder why your celery, is blue?
Now you are on my list as Phelipanche person, nana or ramosa - thank you.
It’s pretty easy, choose one with the best photo and mark the rest, if there’s only one photo in those duplicates then of course save the first one, user can and if they wish will remark what they want and save the observation they wish, but they always can reoder photos too. If you see the observation you’re likely iding the group it’s in, so you can see where id is wrong.
I figure it is problematic when multiple users upload observations using the same photo, not a similar photo or a photo of the same individual from a different angle, but the exact same photo (5-10 times). It seems to be an issue with school groups. I suspect that people are sharing the same photos to boost their observation counts without having to bother taking a photo of anything.
It is admittedly a little irritating to come across the the exact same photo multiple times. I might see them days apart and get this odd sense of deja-vu and then spend more time than I should reviewing dozens or hundreds of my past IDs to confirm that I had seen it before in order to avoid needlessly IDing the same picture over and over. It’s worse when they all have different initial IDs because I would almost never see them all at the same time/day which would make it easier to spot the duplicates.
It can be annoying, but via iNat rules it’s ok and it’s very normal, e.g. rare bird can be photographed by thousands, if at least some of them are on iNat, that’s a lot of photos, but every person has the right to upload what they saw, sometimes only one gets to photograph it, but yes, with school groops it’s shady and I can’t get why people/teachers who opened iNat for the first time yesterday think it’s the time to force groups of uncontrollable children to post whatever they see, but that’s a separate topic.
I stopped worrying about duplicates at some point (actually, after reading a similar thread here on the forums and some comments of people that did not really care and explained why) and just ID them or leave it be if I don´t feel like IDing them. I don´t think it is a big difference for the dataset or for the IDer, whether one person uploads some duplicates (generally frowned upon) or whether a class of students each uploads the same individual (seems to be fine). So these points don´t seem valid reasons for me.
I feel a lot of the preferences IDers show really seem to come down to personal aspects and personal idae of how iNat should be used… this is getting more clear especially when I compare opinions stated on this thread to other recent threads concerning blocking or opting out of comunity ID and their effects to the IDer or dataset that seem to contradict each other sometimes (I include myself here). It´s rather intresting.