IDs made on Saturdays mistakenly uncounted
Hello all.
The take home message
Due to an unforeseen error in our methods, up to this point our counts accidentally cut out IDs made on the last day of the week (Saturday). We honestly had no idea this would happen--this is our first time doing an ID-a-thon so we are still working out the kinks. We apologize it took us until week 4 to notice the mistake. Remember this ID-a-thon is a bit of friendly fun with nonsense prizes, so inaccuracy in the rankings is not the end of the world! We have learned how to fix the count and from here on out it should include those lovely Saturday IDs.
The overly long explanation
If you're curious about the mechanics of the error, I'll explain. [Nitty-gritty detail warning!] On the typical user interface of the iNaturalist website, searching/filtering your observations is pretty easy, but there's no way to search or filter your identifications. You probably know there is a log of IDs you have made (https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications/yourusernamehere) however it's just a chronological list. The ID-a-thon requires us to track IDs for many people in very specific ways, and to do that we have to turn to the API.
What's the API (application programming interface)? Basically it's a tool we use to talk to the underlying programming of iNaturalist. When we have a question such as "how many IDs did these 80 people make last week?" we first translate that into a series of parameters, and then we run the query and see what the API returns. It's all very confusing and tricky; small mistakes can cause big problems. This document includes definitions of the parameters, and it was very helpful... until it wasn't.
Asking "How many IDs did these 80 people make last week?" involves specifying what we mean by "last week." d1=2021-01-24&d2=2021-01-30 seemed like the way to do this, because the documentation defined d1 as "ID created on or after this date" and d2 as "ID created on or before this date." Sounds simple, right? but the definition turns out to be omitting key details. d1=2021-01-24&d2=2021-01-30 is actually "ID created between Jan 24th at 12:00 AM UTC and Jan 30th at 12:00 AM UTC." Think about that for a second. Jan 30th at 12:00 AM is the very start of Saturday. It doesn't actually include any of the hours of Saturday! To fix this you have to explicitly say you want the cut off to be the end of the day, not the beginning. Which the documentation didn't mention at all. So from now on we will be specifying d2=2021-01-30T23:59:59, aka Jan 30th up to the very last second of the day.*
*In UTC. So the day ends at midnight UTC aka 4 pm PST/7 pm EST. If you ID after this cutoff it will count towards the next week instead.
We are still checking for other errors, and trying to make the process as efficient as possible while not cutting any corners. Please continue to bring issues / bugs to our attention, as it will help future events run more smoothly! :)
-- The IDathon team
