Following up on discussion here, I think the “ident_taxon_id” URL feature, which is cumbersome and which most users are not aware of, should be added as a convenient toggle in the Identify mode Filter menu. My preference is that it should also be made the default mode of Identify, so users are presented with all potentially relevant observations unless they actively decide to narrow their search.
At the moment, a significant chunk of easily identifiable observations are not presented when users make relevant searches. For instance, if a user guessed that a plant gall was caused by wasps, and I correct the ID to mites, that observation is now moved up to Arthropods.
A user searching mite or wasp observations to identify would never see this observation, because the consensus ID is above both. Worse, these observations are scattered all over the taxonomic tree–many at State of Matter Life, some at Arthropods, Pterygota, etc. In order to find this observation again, I had to type ident_taxon_id into the URL and search the code for Aceria–something that is cumbersome and which most identifiers with relevant knowledge would never think to do. I’m sure there are thousands of observations that active identifiers would have long since taken care of if Identify mode just defaulted to ident_taxon_id for the taxon they searched.
At the moment, this problem adds to the already huge burden on the few users who do attempt to sort the high-level IDs at SOML, Arthropods, etc. Fixing it would shift some of that burden across the whole community, which seems both fair and preferable to losing so many observations, but for those users who might dislike the change, a toggle option could easily be added to let them go back to the way things are now.
