Identification Disagreements Are Now Explicit

We've made a slight change to how we handle conservative identification disagreements. Previously, if an observation was of a dog and you identified it as a mammal, iNat would assume that your ID was a disagreement, i.e. that you both thought the observation was a mammal and was not a dog. Personally, I've always thought this was a simple way to force disagreements to be constructive, but it's also caused a lot of confusion of the years. Now, if you add an ID of a taxon that contains the observation's community taxon, iNat will force you to choose whether you mean to disagree or not. It makes the identification process slightly more cumbersome, but hopefully less confusing, especially for new users.

Bonus: this also lets you add constructive identifications in situations where they would have previously been considered disagreements, e.g.

ID 1: Mammal (CID is Mammalia)
ID 2: Vulpes vulpes ssp. arabica (CID is Mammalia)
ID 3: Vulpes vulpes (CID is Vulpes vulpes)
ID 4: Vulpes vulpes ssp. arabica (CID is Vulpes vulpes ssp. arabica)

Before, that species-level ID would count as a disagreement with the subspecies ID before it, but now it can just be a "best guess" and the additional subspecies ID can shift the CID to subspecies.

Anyway, this is mostly just going to affect the hardcore identifiers out there. Hopefully it won't be too much of a problem for you folks. The apps do not yet support this behavior so IDs from there will continue to work like IDs before, i.e. IDs of taxa that contain the community taxon will count as implicit disagreements.

Posted on January 3, 2018 07:42 PM by kueda