Over 12,000!
Wow, what a day! We passed 10,000 Unknowns and didn't even stop for breath before passing 12,000 as well! Good job everyone!
You have officially earned your prize and your first prize upgrade. The prize for 10,000 Unknowns is an exclusive photoshoot of Blue’s cat, Baklava. He is typically an indoor cat, but since you've now passed 12,000 Unknowns as well, some of the photos will feature Baklava checking out the world outdoors! Photos will be posted the week after the event. Keep going and maybe you'll earn the chance to see Baklava dressed in a costume!
Our next goal is 15,000 Unknowns, which adds Costa Rica and Czechia to the official URL.
(5760 observations are in this pool right now, including 1320 of those leftover from in the previous pool.)
Preliminary info on winners will be announced at the halfway point of the ID-a-thon - May 26! Congratulations to everyone identifying, even if you aren’t at the top of any categories. You are helping increase the scientific value of observations, teaching others how to identify their own, and learning in the process!
Comments
Wow, 12,000+ identifications of Unknowns! That's great! Is there any way to break to what level the IDs were made - kingdom? Family? Maybe even species? I'm just curious.
Unfortunately, Unknowns are slippery things--there is no way to track them at all, in any manner whatsoever. Everyone has wracked their brains trying to come up with a way and it seems it just can't be done. Even us saying 12,000 is an estimate based on the geographic areas used, but we can't tell you an exact number. If we made all our participants swear they would ID only Unknowns and nothing else during the event, then we could do stats on the IDs they made, but of course people are IDing all sorts of things right now, not just Unknowns.
Also notable is that participants have made over 30,000 IDs in total. You guys are great
Oh, that's interesting there's no good way to track Unknowns. Not surprising, I guess, but curious! And over 30,000 IDs is ASTOUNDING!!
I don't even want to think about what poor Baklava will have to go through if we make 20000!
we're running out of observations again...
Oh dear, let me check our progress.
2760 still in the pool, but I agree we will probably need to add more countries by tonight
If you use the most recent link, there are 2732 left. Which means we passed 15k, doesn't it... Guess I'll have to make a new post later today.
Jinx! Hiya Amy!
I must have been working from an old link. I was down below 600.
You were doing the difficult stuff then--things other people had skipped. Good for you.
I was going to say! more experienced identifiers should try to work from oldest first. It's something you can do most newer identifiers don't have the experience to work with.
@arboretum_amy -- it should be possible to get an exact count of IDs that were done on unknowns, though it would involve a few steps. if you get individual identification records from the API, one of the fields that is included is previous observation taxon. so if the previous taxon is not indicated, then that particular identification would be one of an observation with previously unknown taxon. since you all have more than 10,000 identifications, not only do you have to get the records in sets of 200 per page x 50 pages, you'd also have to use id_above / id_below parameters to repeat the process for each greater set of 10,000 records. but once you have all the data, then you could crunch it as you like.
I could see how that's possible, but it certainly sounds time consuming. We are now up to 23,000+ estimated completed unknowns, and it's also probable at least some people have made other, not-unknown IDs in the designated countries over the course of the event, so I bet the total number of IDs is quite large.
i guess how time consuming it would be would be dependent on whether you've done that sort of thing before. i wouldn't recommend doing this sort of data extraction regularly, but you indicated earlier that you all hadn't come up with a way to get such information. so i just wanted to let you know how to do it, if you really wanted to do it.
@radak can take a look at this...
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