Add links to the taxon changes and flags pages

Feature Requests
1

Platform(s): Website (could also be apps, but mainly the website)

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes
https://www.inaturalist.org/flags

Description of need:
Both flags and taxon changes are a critical part of how iNaturalist functions “behind the scenes”, but both are pretty opaque to the average user, and even people who use the site and know it well seem to find them rather obscure and difficult to find.

In addition, there are endless discussions in the forums about taxon changes and the need for more transparency around them.

Perhaps new tools need to be created, but in the meantime, there are some pretty decent tools that already exist, namely the flags (inaturalist.org/flags) and taxon change (inaturalist.org/taxon_changes) pages. These pages already have filters that with a bit of practice make it much easier to find things you are interested in. This is great!

However, currently even curators don’t have easy access to these pages (edit: the taxon changes page, at least) except by saving them as bookmarks or following some convoluted route through the interface (e.g. look up a taxon that you know has been changed or flagged and then backtrack from there). (Edit: Finding flags is apparently a bit easier than that, but only for curators.)

I propose that just adding plain basic links to these pages would be helpful enough to be worth the pretty trivial effort involved. Probably most users would never notice the difference, but for the relatively few who deeply care about these things, it would increase transparency both in how taxon changes are handled and how moderation is done.

There could be some small risk that slightly more people finding these pages would allow more people to use them to pester curators, but I think on average, it would more likely result in active users having a bit more appreciation for the work that curators are doing.

Feature request details:
This is really, really simple. Just stick links to the two pages (inaturalist.org/flags) and (inaturalist.org/taxon_changes) somewhere in the interface.

For example, I imagined sticking them under “more” (but for the purposes of illustration, they could be down at the bottom under “Curator Guide” or under “Community” instead).

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I think it’s worthwhile to add both, but if I had to choose one or the other, I would pick taxon changes, because the function of that page is more immediately obvious, and because taxon changes tend to generate more controversy.

2

I agree that it would be good to provide easier access to these, especially taxon changes. However, I don’t think this part of the request

is accurate. On the homepage of curators, on the right hand side there is a “Curation” section of which “Flags” is the first part, showing the five most recent flags and with a quick link to those flags and the general flags page referenced in the request. I use this feature almost everyday and find it gives easy access to flags.

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3

Oh that’s perfectly fair, I can go back and edit that part. I only had it described to me, as I am not a curator. I was under the impression it just gave you the most recent five flags, and that to get to the main flags page you had to backtrack from one of those.

4

It’s been noted before in other discussions that there are two basic types of flags on iNat – for taxonomy issues (including not just taxonomy changes but also e.g. questions connected with common names) and for issues related to community guidelines/user behavior – and that there are arguments for more clearly separating the two.

I think that taxonomy flags should be easily accessible to all users; this is relevant information and not all users who may be affected or have insights into the taxon in question are curators.

However, I don’t know if it would be desirable to include moderation-type flags in such a link. Issues related to user behavior may be heated and efforts to resolve conflicts or sort out different points of view require good judgement and diplomacy. I am all for transparency, but there is a reason why such activities are generally carried out behind the scenes on most websites. I would be concerned that making these flags easy to access by anyone casually browsing iNat would be more detrimental than useful: “voyeurs” who are attracted to drama and might be tempted to stir things up could further escalate sensitive situations.

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5

Taxon changes and taxon flags (if they can be separated from ‘bad’ behaviour)

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6

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/curation is on curators’ homepages as well. If moderation and taxon curation are ever separated, this page could be revamped and a link to add a new taxon change plopped somewhere here. Personally I don’t think a link to Flags needs to be added to all users’ homepages.

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7

I went into this a little already, but if I had to pick one of the existing pages to make more accessible, it would be the taxon changes pages. Taxon changes are of greater concern to the average user, in my opinion (whether they realize it or not), and they are an area where opinions from expert users are likely to be more needed. I don’t want concerns about increasing the visibility of flags to distract too much from this.

I do think it would be useful to separate the moderation-related flags from the ones that deal with, for example, names and conservation status. You can separate them on the flags page with filters, but you have to know to do that.

It is pretty baffling to me, as a relative newcomer and as someone who has experience moderating web platforms, that moderation and curation are treated as basically the same thing. Dealing with reports of harassment is not at all the same skillset as deciding if that common name is legitimate or not!

To me, it would make more sense to have moderation-related stuff one one page and taxon-related stuff on another page. (It is really not intuitive that taxonomy changes should be on a totally separate page from, say, requests to change names.) This would make the stuff that does sometimes need more informed input more accessible without making the moderation stuff any more of a target for trolls than it already is.

So, it would be even better to have a new page which includes both taxon changes and taxon-related flags (and not moderation-related flags), and then add an easy-to-access link to that. But it would take a bit longer to put that in place, and in the meantime, I think just a link to the taxon changes page (and optionally the flags page*) would still be beneficial.

*I don’t think that attracting more people to the flags page is very much of a risk because I don’t think the average person even looks that deeply into the menus. :sweat_smile:

1 Like