Year in Review: ID stats exclude those on Casual obs

Bug Reports
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Bug? Feature request? (tis the season for YIR thanks and complaints)

First, the new graphic that is generated for social media shares of the Year in Review is super cool. Thanks for that!!

A few days ago when I checked my YIR, I saw I was close to 8,000 IDs and thought it might be nice to set that as a year-end goal. But according to the API I already have over 10K for the year, so I tried to square why these stats don’t tally the same in different places.

It looks like the YIR only shows IDs made on Needs ID and Research Grade observations. I’m not sure whether or not this was intentional, but I think unintentional, because when you click the link, it brings you to a page not filtered to exclude Casual obs, and because the YIR does display and tally Casual observations that I made.

Comparison of stats in different places:

ID Category YIR /identifications API API, excluding Casual obs
Improving 1,862 2,505 2,505 1,862
Leading 1,983 2,650 2,650 1,983
Supporting 4,049 4,965 4,965 4,049
Maverick 1 2 2 1
Total 7,895 10,122 10,489 ?? 8,208 ??

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YIR, left and /identifications, right

Secondary issue: I’m not sure how the API totals (i.e. when not searching for a specific ID category) aren’t the same number as when you sum up all the categories. (Edit: moved that one to its own topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/many-ids-have-id-category-null/19061)

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i think this is because not every identification record is categorized as improving, leading, etc. some of the identifications show up with category=null. for example: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/identifications?id=84340111 (https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications/84340111).

i suspect category=null is a bug(?) / data issue in at least some of these situations. for example, here’s another identification that’s almost the same as the one above, but it’s categorized as supporting (as i would expect): https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/identifications?id=84340067 (https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications/84340067).

it looks like identification records with category=null tend to show up in clustered in time. so maybe there was something going on with the system at those times. for example, in your case, you have a lot of category=null identifications from 2020-01-17 21:26:22 (-06:00) to 2020-02-05 23:02:14 (-06:00), although not every identification during that period was uncategorized.

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Thanks for sleuthing! That seems like a more serious issue than the main one reported here, so I’ll move it to its own topic.

Edit: here https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/many-ids-have-id-category-null/19061