Beetledude wants to make his resources and notes available to all

 
I have a large and growing collection of invert ID tips, self-made identification keys and invert taxon diagnoses, and hopefully-helpful notes. On iSpot I must have added over 1,000 such contributions already. Many of these were popular on that soon-to-vanish platform. Before iSpot banished Google indexing, I was also pleased to see my taxonomic resources being used by people that had nothing to do with iSpot, but who could locate my stuff by googling.
 

Is it feasible if I would (gradually) make a collection of my resources and notes here in my 'journal'? They would then all be in one place, instead of being scattered as comments among numerous observations ... and lost.

 
This will not be for my benefit, but for that of the iNat community, and I do hope for that of the normal googling person also. My satisfaction lies therein that this will be part of my contribution to the common good and to increased public understanding of science.
 

    Will it work out to consolidate my notes & keys here, as 'journal entries'?

    ◘ Is it easy enough to refer from an observation to a specific journal entry with a hyperlink? This is essential.
    ◘ Are the journal entries retrospectively editable into the future? This is essential.
    ◘ It is possible for other people to comment on journal entries. To whom are those comments visible? Ideally it should be everybody.
    ◘ Is it possible to 'follow' journal entries? I haven't found a way {yet}. This is desirable.
    ◘ Is it possible to subscribe to somebody's journal to receive notifications of new entries? This would be useful.
    ◘ Are the Google bots allowed to crawl the journals on iNat? That would be ideal for my stated purpose.

 
Another question:
Can one ping somebody from inside a journal entry? Did the system beckon you here, to answer my questions and give me advice, @tonyrebelo and @bouteloua and @loarie and @jakob?
 
This is my first journal post. I shall probably become able to answer some of my own questions just by posting this.
 

Comments from anybody will be welcome!

 
 

Publicado el jueves, 15 de febrero de 2018 a las 06:51 PM por beetledude beetledude

Comentarios

Hi Riaan, you have just asked the same question as I have, just better written. Currently we have keys to ~ 4/5 th's of the bisid fauna of southern Africa, but see no reason to place it disjunct all over the place on this platform where nobody can find it. Thus hope you get a meaningful answer (personally still waiting and hoping)
Will follow, in hoping for guidance
Regards, Mike & Riana

Anotado por fubr hace cerca de 6 años

Hi Riaan.

You are such a generous soul, and we really, really, really appreciate all the comments, references, keys, criticisms, praise, humour, behind-the-scenes work, literature reviews, help, advice and friendship in your mission to empower us and make us all better at identification of insects, grammar, critical thinking and life itself.

Journal posts seem to be the way to go. Perhaps journal posts in projects may be a better way of keeping stuff together? For example, if you have a Cerambycid project, then all your keys, references and suchlike pertaining to them can go into journal posts on that project. Then on your About section, you can have links to each journal post within that project. Perhaps something like:

Family characteristics of cerambycids and how to tell them apart from similar species in xxx family [link to journal post][link to journal article on external site]

Key to the subfamilies of Cerambycidae - [link to journal post]

Key to the genera of Cerambycinae [link to journal post]

What photos to take for ID [link to comment on a particular ob]

Latest descriptions of longhorn larvae [link to external site]

Good photos of longhorn species characters [link to filtered observation page]

etc.

Then, when you need to point someone in the direction of a link, you can direct them to a single page (e.g. Cerambycidae project), and all the info that you or others are looking for in that group will be in one place. And your About page can be edited. Not sure if journal posts can be edited?

Just a suggestion. I'm sure others will have good ideas too :-)

Anotado por karoopixie hace cerca de 6 años

I think, but not really sure, that anyone who places a comment will be notified of further activity in the journal

Anotado por tuli hace cerca de 6 años

How it should work!

◘ Is it easy enough to refer from an observation to a specific journal entry with a hyperlink?
Yes: this is https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/beetledude/14239-beetledude-wants-to-make-his-resources-and-notes-available-to-all#comments
but this works just as well: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/beetledude/14239

◘ Are the journal entries retrospectively editable into the future?
Yes. but I am not sure about whom. The author of course, but it might be possible that for projects managers may be able to edit other managers journal entries for the project, but somehow I doubt it. There is no closure on editing a Journal.
And one can edit the comments too

◘ It is possible for other people to comment on journal entries. To whom are those comments visible?

Yes: I think there is a word limit though: one cannot go overboard (break it up into several comments).
Anyone can see comments and the journal

◘ Is it possible to 'follow' journal entries? I haven't found a way {yet}.
It should show up if you are following the person (I missed this, but certainly the Outramps journal entries appear on my dashboard). One does not appear to be able to follow or subscribe to a journal like one can a taxon, place or person: but if one is following a person at least their journal and comments should show.

◘ Is it possible to subscribe to somebody's journal to receive notifications of new entries?
(same as previous question: can be requested ....)

◘ Are the Google bots allowed to crawl the journals on iNat?
I cannot find this entry, but some of my journals appear if I google on some keywords.

Anotado por tonyrebelo hace cerca de 6 años

@karoopixie - your suggestions are cool, but some of them are not journal items. Some belong for instance in "Guides"
see for example:
https://www.inaturalist.org/guides/6978 (made by importing a place - took 10 mns to create place and add a species list, and 2 minutes to create the guide)
https://www.inaturalist.org/guides/6975 (made by dropping in a species list, took 5 mins to create)
in both cases see the "cards" view.
maps! descriptions! keys! (not dicotomous, but multicharacter states) :: all can be done here (but not necessarily all times and not necessarily the best place)

Anotado por tonyrebelo hace cerca de 6 años

Subscribing.

Anotado por vynbos hace cerca de 6 años

additional inputs are coming up on my comments list.

once you've sorted out the bugs from the beetles perhaps we can canvas @wynand_uys to do something similar with his spider notes

Anotado por tuli hace cerca de 6 años

Thanks @beetledude your work on inaturalist is so appreciated by novice entoologists like me.

Anotado por botswanabugs hace casi 6 años

Great ideas, all round.
Note: I did not receive a "ping" from the mention two posts up. Unless.... unless I was absent long enough for it to have sunk too far down the list for me to notice.

Anotado por wynand_uys hace casi 6 años

Note that @tonyrebelo opened a project Keys (s Afr) would this suit your needs?

Anotado por fubr hace casi 6 años

Dude!!

This is superb - thank you!

Anotado por leejones hace casi 6 años

I got pinged.

Keys is here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/keys-s-afr Note on the project.

Anotado por tonyrebelo hace casi 6 años

Añade un comentario

Entra o Regístrate para añadir comentarios