URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem: I believe an RG-level identification gets stuck in case it is the only RG-identification of the taxon and the default photo of the taxon is attached to this identification. The reason my belief is the following.
I identified a photo to a rarely observed species (Bellucia strigosa) and while doing so, I noticed that in INat, there was only one RG-level identification of B. strigosa. The example photo of the species was linked to this RG-level observation. This observation, however, presented in my opinion another frequently observed species (Miconia nervosa). In the observation page of this wrongly identified M. nervosa, I found that there was actually just one identification (the first one) as B. strigosa and three as M. nervosa, including the id by the person who had originally agreed that the photo was of B. strigosa.
I started to wonder why iNat had not automatically changed the id even though it had a 3 to 1 vote for M. nervosa. I added my vote for M. nervosa but the iNat identification did not change from B. strigosa. Next I changed the default photo of B. strigosa to the photo of the observation I first had identified as B. strigosa. Nothing happened to the wrong id of the M. nervosa observation. But when I added a confirmation id to one of the two existing suggested B. strigosa ids (both without any agreement), the wrong B. strigosa identification disappeared. (I can’t actually remember if this disappearance happened before or after I had changed the default photo of B. strigosa to this observation.)
So, my conclusion is that if a species has just one RG identification and the photo of the species is attached to this identification, iNat doesn’t change the RG status, neither the original identification even if later identifications should dictate a change in the identification. If there is at least one other RG identification of the species, iNat works as it should.
Unfortunately I didn’t copy the page of the wrongly identified M. nervosa but it should be easy enough to find as it is apparently the only observation of M. nervosa that also has an identification as B. strigosa.
These two observations you linked are showing the same plant individual (using the same foto). The locations given are about 100km apart. At least one of these two observations has wrong location data.
That’s a complicated situation! Let me see if I understand what you found by restating it:
IF an observation is misidentified but also has a concurring (misidentified) ID, and subsequently an image from that observation is used as the default image on the misidentified taxon page, THEN no amount of correcting IDs on the original observation will remove it from RG and gain RG for the correct ID UNLESS the misidentified photo is removed from the taxon page?
I wouldn’t think there should be any linkage between RG status and whatever images are on a taxon page since the latter are under the independent control of the wider community, but maybe you’ve found a hidden glitch!
I think this is true. In fact, the images used on the taxon page don’t even need to be from iNaturalist, let alone from a RG observation.
This sounds like an indexing issue. The other IDs all look to have been from over 5 years ago, so there could have been additional IDs from users who left the platform, and the ID hadn’t been updated when their accounts went away. Sometimes adding and deleting an ID a couple times forces it to re-index and update. That’s my guess anyway.
Many thanks for all the answers/comments. I’m very impressed of both the number fastness of reactions. However, I also noticed that I apparently didn’t explain the case quite as well as I should have been able to. I’ll try to clarify the situation. I’ll go through the responses in their chronological order.
mreith:
I’m sorry but I don’t understand what you mean of the links two observations have to the same photo. I’ve at least tried to speak about four observations. Three that have only Bellucia strigosa as ID ( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=706961 ) and one that has additionally four IDs, all claiming it to be Miconia ( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19102383 ). As far as I understand, there are no double links here. Please explain what you mean.
gcwarbler:
Yes, I thought that there was possibly a connection to the example photo in the way as you describe, but only if there are no other RG-level identifications of the species. I suspected, though, that the example photo is not necessarily relevant here and that seems to be the general understanding also here. So, the issue boils down to my observation that a RG status of an observation was not changed to the species name (Bellucia strigosa) that had 3 votes against another that had only one vote (Miconia nervosa). This imbalance had persisted for about 5 years. My adding of the fourth vote for M. nervosa did not change the identification that iNat offered as the RG-level ID. It only changed when I verified one of the existing IDs of B. strigosa so that it got lifted to RG level. Immediately after this uplift, the problematic B. strigosa observation got changed automatically to M. nervosa.
paul_dennehy:
marytndrabik apparently solved the question about ID. As far as I understand, your second comment relates uniquely to the example photos and they are now all in order. The real question is in the failure of iNat to change automatically the identification (in this case at RG level) to follow the voting rule that the name with >2/3 of the votes should be the RG name for the observation.
DianaStuder:
Sorry, I don’t understand what is CID so I can’t comment on this.
To clarify what I mean be indexing, I think the issue may be related to additional IDs that were present before but are not there any more. If a user deletes their account, their IDs all vanish without a trace. Sometimes though, the identity of the observation does not change when the IDs vanish. So it could well be that 5+ years ago, there were other IDs present that caused the observation to show up as it did. Once those vanished, the observation did not update its community ID. When you added and then deleted an ID, it caused the community ID to be “re-calculated”. That way, when you re-added the ID, the system worked as expected. There’s no way to know for sure that this is what happened, but this sort of thing has been documented before, and I think it’s more likely than some sort of issue tied to the use of the photo on the taxon page.
Thanks again for your attention. So the re-indexing was initiated when I went to the wrongly RG-identified page and added my identification. The indexing process just took some time (perhaps less than a minute) so I could observe its result only when I just had added my ID to the B. strigosa observation that elevated it to RG. Then I simply draw an erroneous conclusion of causality from a haphazard chronological sequence of independent actions. Sounds reasonable. The issue that may need fixing is the lack of automatic indexing in some but apparently very rare occasions.
