While this seems like a decent solution and not one I’d feel confused by, I admit that new users often have struggles that are hard for experienced users to fathom. But I do think some kind of UI flow should be implemented to address or mitigate the number of observations logged that have several photos of distinct subjects. The DQA lets us turn those into casual observations, but it would be nice if we had better chances of getting those actually fixed and turned into RG observations.
Part of the issue is also that a lot of new users either don’t respond or don’t notice at all when people request observation splits in the comments. I wonder how much of this would be fixed if the platform, especially the apps, communicated notifications in a way that was more salient and insistent. If a “Request Duplication” button that drafts a suggested duplication is considered too complicated for new users, perhaps a “Request Duplication” button that creates a special type of notification that is displayed with an urgent error/warning symbol and only clears when the request is viewed and then either denied or agreed to would be helpful?
Alternatively, I think this is another area where it feels like a problem that there are two Casual grades, “Casual = Captive/Wild” and “Casual = Data Quality Problem”. If we had a distinct Error grade that applied to observations with data quality problems and a flow around that grade which helped bring it to the original observer’s attention quickly, I think the DQA moving these observations into that “error grade” would probably go a long way to addressing the community’s desire to fix these obs. I suspect a lot of folks would want to fix data quality issues in their observations if they were aware of them.