Yeah… I’ve changed my ID approach over this. As I go through a species that I know is almost always cultivated in a given location, marking every observation as such (with case-by-case exceptions if I see evidence), I sometimes come upon one that that is Research Grade because the observer specifically countered someone’s “not wild” vote. When I get through with it, the observer will discover thet they only have one vote.
The problem is that I also only have one vote. Therefore, there is a possibility that if I provide a second species-level ID after voting “not wild,” the observer could turn it to Research Grade by countering my vote, and there is noting I could do about it. So: I don’t provide a species-level ID, unless there are already two of them. That way, someone countering my vote will only send it to Needs ID, not to Research Grade.
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There are 5 IDs…2 at genus Bombus, 3 at subgenus Pyrombus (a subgenus of Bombus).
Observer has NOT opted out of community ID.
It’s had 2 agreeing IDs for genus for 8 months, before the subgenus IDs were added (which are not dissenting), so shouldn’t it be RG?
Seems like an oversight, no? Since they go to RG at genus without being voted “as good as can be”.
I thought things could be RG at genus w/o the DQA vote, but I can’t find any examples, so I mustr be remembering it incorrectly.
Whenever in doubt about why an observation is not RG, scroll down on the page and there is a handy box where it outlines which requirements are met, and which aren’t. And on the right hand side you can see the specific reason why it doesn’t meet the requirements for RG, in this case it reads:
The below items are needed to achieve Research Grade:
Thank you for the step-by-step instructions. There is one observation that somehow two people voted could still be improved even though the community ID is already at species. I put my one countervote, and @ commented the two.
Ok, I tried to skim and check if a similar question has been asked before. I didn’t see one, but it’s a long thread and hard to follow at times. Feel free to link to a specific post in the thread if my question has already been answered.
Please see this observation. I identified the caterpillar to genus. Once others confirmed the genus ID, I clicked “No, it’s as good as it can be” because it is my understanding that there are a number of Datana spp. caterpillars with orange “necks” that occur in GA that cannot be reliably separated. Of course, this vote moved the observation to RG, but when someone else added a species-specific ID, that became the observation ID (still at RG).
I could of course add a disagreeing ID back at the genus level to bump the observation ID back to genus. I’m bringing this up not because I disagree with the ID, but because this seems like a loophole where an observation can reach RG with a consensus of one.
A loophole if it’s misused. If the IDer thinks the community taxon can be improved, they should counter your vote. If you are pretty sure it can’t, you should bump it to genus. If you’re not sure, you can just remove your vote.
Agreed, but my reason for bringing this up is not because I cannot move it back to genus if I so desire. It’s really easy for me to miss notifications, so if I don’t notice (as I didn’t for this observations for several months after the species-level ID), it’s hard for me to take corrective action.
The observation should either stay RG with the genus-level ID displayed, forcing the species-level IDer to counter my DQA vote to get their ID displayed -or- a species level ID could possibly automatically add a DQA vote. However, the problem with the latter is a DQA vote stays even when the observation’s ID level has changed (though that of course is a problem even if the species-level IDer manually counters my vote).
I can’t offer much of a short-term solution, but I will note that eventually notifications will be revamped, which should make it easier for you to keep track of your notifications.
Thanks! No solution needed, especially since there are corrective actions that I can easily take for this observation. It was more of a “just so you’re aware”.
I did not realize that the observation taxon and the community taxon are separate (or at least not in the way explained by this post), so that is helpful information!
Has there ever been a feature request to have votes for “can Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” specific to a taxon level rather than the observation overall?
I think the closest to what you’re suggesting is this one. There are also (at least) two other requests related to votes for “can be improved”, here and here.
As a short term fix, what I would probably do on an observation if that happened is comment with your reasoning why it should stay at genus and @ the person. I feel like most active people would, hopefully, respond to the note.
I’m confused by some of the things I’ve been seeing with sound observations getting stuck as casual.
I noticed that one of my recent sound observations was marked as having no evidence of the organism’s presence. While I can hear the sound on my device, I could maybe understand someone being unable to hear it. Except I got curious, and looked up “casual” observations with sound. I’ve found at least a couple of observations that are clearly audible but were still marked as “no evidence of organism” for some reason. What’s going on with this?
Meanwhile, I also noticed some observations (not by me) that were marked as captive and it didn’t make sense to me. After asking a couple of people who had marked them as such, it seems like this was an accident, and I wonder how many other observations are stuck as casual because of this. This seems to happen mainly with sound observations and I wonder why! Is it some kind of glitch/bug?
