To Annotate, or Not To Annotate...
Speaking as an amateur... Part of the problem getting people to enter "observation field" annotations might be self-awareness among iNat users about their own limitations. It might be humility driving their apprehension. I know this is true for me.
When I see an insect on a plant, I wonder... is the insect just resting there? Is it nectaring? If it's nectaring, shouldn't I use the "nectaring" field rather than the "host plant" field? Or maybe I should use the "Host" field? Or "Host Id"? If it's nectaring, shouldn't there be a proboscis involved? Where is the proboscis? Am I even sure what a proboscis is for? Maybe the insect is just resting there. If the plant is a host, shouldn't the insect be laying eggs or maybe eating? My only hope in answering all the questions I have is to take various classes on various subjects because I have general interest in the natural world. This means that even if I fill out the questions correctly for the botanists, the marine biologists get mad at me whenever I observe an echinoderm. Have you ever been trapped in line at the BMV next to an angry echinoderm expert?
Luckily, we can all agree that our problems would be solved if the computer scientists would come up with a static list of relationships between every organism across the entire natural world and then require each to be filled out for every observation. I once told this to a computer scientist while standing in line at the BMV. A short time later most scientists began advocating for public transportation. Coincidence?
The computer scientists at iNaturalist seem to have thought carefully about the humility of the casual and completely untrained user coupled with the presence of highly trained subject matter experts. Highly trained subject matter experts are allowed to assign new observation fields to existing observations made by other users. This allows the angry echinoderm expert to assign whatever appropriate observation annotations he would like to my starfish observation. This is important because that starfish was really cute. In the event that the enraged echinoderm expert can't locate an appropriate observation field for a relationship he knows to exist... the computer scientists at iNat have allowed for that too. The expert can just create a new observation field. I'd never do this. I don't have the time. I'm too busy looking at the pretty starfish.
What I should probably do in the future is use the "Plant that the organism was found on" annotation. I'm passionate enough about wooded areas to know the plants that are growing there. But my knowledge of plants hasn't blossomed into knowledge about insects. I'm never sure what the insect's intentions are with the plants even when it might be obvious to an entomologist. Thankfully, I haven't run into one at the BMV. She takes the bus.
Somewhere out there, among the army of children with phones, is a single instance of the species. An individual instance of "child with phone". This particular "child with phone" can be observed taking a blurry picture of a natural organism. The child has no idea what the organism is, and has no annotations to offer. This child has a depth of knowledge about phones, not organisms. So they upload the image to iNaturalist. What should happen?
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