Changes to Quality Grade 2015-08-14

We recently changed the way our quality grades work: instead of just "casual" and "Research" grades, we now have "Research," "Needs ID," and "Casual." Here's what they mean:

Research:
Just like before an observation must have media, coordinates, a date, and pass quality metrics, but now the community ID must be finer than family.
Needs ID:
Any observation that could become "Research" grade but needs more identifications.
Casual:
Any observation that cannot become "Research" grade.

The only exception is that observations stay in "Needs ID" until they get a community ID at species or lower unless they get voted out of "Needs ID" using the Data Quality Assessment. Here’s a flowchart that... might not help:

Here's a more narrative example: if you add a blank observation it will be considered "Casual." If you add a photo, coordinates, and a date, it will become "Needs ID." If two people identify it as "Order Lepidoptera" it will still be "Needs ID" because the community ID is at the order level. If ten people identify it as a Monarch Butterfly, it will become "Research" grade because the community ID has shifted to the species level.

And another example: you add an observation of a bird. It has coordinates, a date, an identification, and a photo, but the photo is really blurry. The observation is at "Needs ID" because it could become "Research" grade if the community IDs it to species. However, someone comes in and votes "No" on "Still Needs ID?" because they think the photo is too blurry for anyone to be able to go further than Class Aves, which shifts the quality grade to "Casual."

The most significant changes here are the narrower definition of "Research" grade that excludes coarsely identified observations, and the shift away from requesting ID help to assuming that every observation that could become "Research" grade needs ID help. We're leaving in the "ID Please!" checkboxes for now, though their only effect is to vote "yes" on "Still needs ID?" when a user is updating their own observation.

We've also added the ability to mark observations as reviewed. This is really a feature for hardcore identifiers who want to be able to filter out observations they've looked at but could not identify:

Observations that you’ve identified or created yourself are automatically marked as reviewed.

The upshot of all this is that you can now browse observations that need IDs and you haven’t already checked out like this: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?reviewed=false&quality_grade=needs_id. We’ve also updated http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/id_please with these changes, though we’ll probably be replacing that with something better soon.

Why We're Doing This

These changes stem from some extensive discussions in our Google Group and within the iNat team:

Basically, we're trying to accommodate the opinions of many dedicated members of the community that observations with coarse IDs should not be shared with our data partners, and that the community should decide what does and doesn't need to be identified rather than the observers. We're also trying to make it a bit more clear that one of the goals of the site is moving observations toward "Research" grade status, i.e. creating accurate and precisely-identified biodiversity observations.

There was a lot of discussion<

Publicado el julio 14, 2020 04:29 TARDE por

hannahsun99

Changes to Quality Grade 2015-08-14

Why We're Doing This

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