Description of need:
A recent experimental update to taxon changes involving plants requires 5 curators to approve changes to reduce issues with taxonomic changes that are controversial, not set up correctly, erroneous, or just need more feedback to determine the best route for iNat to take with particular taxa. Currently there is no quick and easy way to see which of the many identifiers and observers of the affected taxa are curators or not. You have to click on each one and look at each profile to see that.
Feature request details:
This issue could be easily solved by adding a curator identifier after usernames in observer and identifier lists for taxa. This could be the word “curator” or some sort of symbol for that. Below is an example showing the top 10 identifiers in Malvaceae with the curators noted.
I like the way in which staff, curators, and everyone else are portrayed the same way in leaderboards and elsewhere; it’s consistent with the implicit philosophy across the platform that all of our observations and identifications can theoretically be of equal value.
On the other hand I had the same thought reading through the discussion about the taxon change voting - it is indeed a bit of a challenge to find relevant curators. The best way currently would be to filter the flags page for the taxon and see who’s active on them, second best maybe looking through the leaderboard on the People page and check their taxa of interest.
I think the problem should be turned differently : curators should be able to receive notifications when their favorite taxas are being flaged or/and under a taxonomic change.
That is a reasonable way to look at it. I don’t think adding “curator” would indicate some IDs or observations are not of equal value but people interpret things however they want to. Another option would be the ability to filter observations and identifications by those that have been done by curators.
I’m a botanist that specializes in the vascular plants of California, which is about 10,000 species. Favorite taxa have nothing to do with what I may or may not be qualified to curate. I only see what people tag me on or when I stumble on a flag that is usually years old.
As far as I know, they don’t. I don’t subscribe to much though. The more you subscribe to, the more likely you will miss important things that get buried in all the observations in your feed. The only taxon changes I have seen in my feed are after they have happened, which makes it too late to weigh in on.
I agree with @upupa-epops here; I would not want curator status to show next to usernames or leaderboards on general pages. I’d really hate to introduce any more appeal-to-authority related bias in the system than already exists.
Some sort of system where curators could flag what taxa they are qualified to curate could be useful though, that way when someone needs to reference who curates certain taxa, there is an easy way to pull it up so they can be tagged.
That said, my assumption (which isn’t wholly accurate) is that most active curators of any given taxa, are also aware of the other curators that tend to work in that space. Of course that is not always the ideal system, and any system that relies on unrecorded knowledge and word of mouth can be lost if key people become inactive.
I like the idea behind this suggestion - there needs to be a better way to surface curators working in specific groups with the new 5 curator requirement for some changes.
But I also agree that
Maybe there’s a way to only show curators on leaderboards to other curators for this purpose? Or something different to make it easier to surface curators who are familiar with some groups?
Added my vote but I agree with cthawley’s sentiment that it should be narrowed down to the use case where, as a curator, you want to surface other curators for the purposes of curatorship.
I don’t think an everyday user simply wanting help with an ID generally needs to surface curators on a leaderboard. A curator showing up on a leaderboard may or may not actually be an expert on the taxon in question. For example, I show up in the top 5 ID’ers for Kingdom Fungi observations in my state, but 100% of those 500 IDs are of “Kingdom Fungi” or “Class Agaricomycetes” (or something in between) – I’m simply helping things along to those that can (hopefully) ID them.
