Platform(s): website
URLs: https://www.inaturalist.org/home
Description of need:
The desire for a more convenient for taxon curators to surface curation opportunities for taxa they’re comfortable curating has been voiced on numerous occasions. However, I couldn’t find any actual feature requests on the topic. I searched the forum for “taxon flag subscription”, “taxon flag notification”, and “taxon flag follow” and found nothing proposing the feature I detail here, or anything both like it and specific, other than one feature request which was actually multiple very general feature requests bundled into one forum post (and thus not votable/actionable) and was very non-specific (and thus not concrete).
Currently, taxon curation is an “active” activity. To elaborate upon what I mean by that, consider observations. When I want to see what identifications or comments have been made on my observations, what identifications or comments have been made on observations I’m following, what observations other people I follow have added, what observations have been added for taxa or regions I subscribe to, etc. – all of these are fed to me in a place where I can see them quickly and easily; in the main feed within my home page / dashboard; all with little active effort on my part. Staying on top of observation activity is a fairly “passive” effort. And for things I want to monitor outside of what current tooling provides, I have the observation and identification pages with their pretty flexible searching abilities, and URLs which I can bookmark.
In contrast, if as a curator I want to see what taxon flag-related activity is out there that might interest me (besides comments on followed, already-created flags), I have to take the time to manually and explicitly search for individual taxa to see if there are any new flags. This is especially cumbersome at the moment because of the ability to search on only one taxon at a time. But even that aside, I still have to make an active effort to seek out said information. There is the “Flags” section on the user Home / Dashboard page, but this simply shows all flags without any means of customizing what appears. I can click View All under this section to search more granularly, but again, we then get back into this being an active effort. The flags don’t just “come to me” the way that observations do.
Feature request details:
Allow curator users to set the Flags section of their Home / Dashboard to specific and persistent flag search criteria. I envision this being accomplished either by adding a “Save to Home / Dashboard” button or link on the Flags page (https://www.inaturalist.org/flags), or by adding a button (maybe a gear icon or a “Filter” or “Customize” button or something) to the Flags section of the Home/Dashboard page that allows you to enter a full flag search URL (e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/flags?utf8=✓&flagger_type=any&flagger_name=&flagger_user_id=&user_name=&user_id=&flaggable_type=Taxon&taxon_name=Asteraceae&taxon_id=47604&deleted=any&reason_query=&resolved=no&resolver_name=&resolver_user_id=&commit=Filter&utf8=✓&flagger_user_id=&commit=Filter, which is a search for unresolved flags on the taxon Asteraceae). However the Flags section’s filter gets modified, the settings provided by the user should persist. If I set my Flags section to only show me unresolved taxon flags for the taxon Asteraceae today, when I log in and see what’s new on my Home / Dashboard page tomorrow I should see only unresolved taxon flags for the taxon Asteraceae listed in the Flags section.
In the long-term, there really should be a separate Curator Dashboard where curators can effectively surface the various things of interest to curators – on the taxon side, taxon flags, other flags, taxon framework relationships, taxon changes, taxa without atlases, taxa with empty about pages, taxa in need of specific taxonomy / status page information, taxa without taxon photos, taxa with 0 observations, etc. are all of interest to me – and a lot of this information is currently difficult to surface.
In the meantime though, the proposal above seems like it would be an easy to implement yet meaningful step toward lowering the barrier to action for curator’s while they’re on the site. This should hopefully increase the amount of (taxon) curation that curators perform – and more active curators in turn means a more robust and up-to-date taxonomy for iNaturalist.
NOTE: As a taxon curator, my biggest gripe with the flags page is that you can only search on one taxa at a time. That limitation would certainly mitigate significantly the value of this feature request. However, I have submitted a separate feature request for the ability to search for more than one taxa at a time on the flags page. If that feature request is implemented, then this one here would have much more value than if that feature request were not implemented.