Agreeing vs. Withdrawing an Identification – How to Strengthen the Quality of iNat Observations
A tip for our project members. As we are using the records of the 'EwA at the Fells' project for our own studies, we pay attention to the identification process to raise the quality and relevance of our data set to science. We also help our observers to strengthen the quality of their observations as much as we can :-)
One practice that leads to a decrease in the quality of the data is making a species ID suggestion when we don't know (for the sake of having a species identification or to push for verification) and to leave it at that. Then a community member comes into the picture, makes another identification. And then the original observer agrees to the identification to conform with the 2nd identification without really having the expertise or without having done research work to be confident that indeed it is what the other identifier said it was.
The result is that it pushed this observation to what iNat calls a 'research grade' which isn't true since one of the identifiers is not an expert (and only conformed to the other identification. This decreases the value of the observation and increases the cleanup workload to get to a quality dataset that can be used. It's a known issue, and if you ask many of us iNat should strengthen their RG criteria (but it's a whole different discussion).
Instead, what we should do when we're not sure is 'to agree' but to withdraw our own identification–not the observation! just the identification :-). Doing that is very simple: that go to your identification and click on the drop-down on the right, then you'll see at the top of the menu an option to withdraw. And you're done!
Don't hesitate to ask for clarification in this thread. We also run open office hours to help our EwA iNat project community members (check our https://www.earthwiseaware.org/events/ calendar).
Cheers! - Claire
