College student from Texas who is a novice naturalist. My mission is to get as many observations out of the unknown section as possible, and hopefully learn some botany and zoology along the way.

Sections of the Identification Etiquette Guide on the forums That I try to follow the most:
Give it your best shot first. Even if you can get it into a broad “bin” like birds, plants, butterflies, etc., that will make it much easier for knowledgeable identifiers to find. Even if you are not sure, this is better than leaving it as “Unknown.” If you put it in the wrong “bin”, someone should at least be able to put it in the right one for you.

You don’t have to know which species. If you can help get the ID to a finer level, please do. For example, if the current ID is “plant,” and you are sure it is a conifer tree, but don’t know which one, just ID it as a conifer. iNaturalist lets you ID at any level.

Adding coarser IDs - if finer-level IDs already exist on an observation, adding a coarser ID in the same lineage will give you the option (when you save it) to explicitly disagree with the finer ID(s), or to simply be uncertain about the finer ID(s). If you intend to disagree, again you should say why in the comments. (Keep in mind that sometimes an observer will have recorded notes about features that are not visible in the photographs, which may be important to the identification.)
Special case - as discussed in this topic 7, be aware that iNaturalist currently treats disagreements with subspecies somewhat differently than with other subordinate ranks.