Ancestor disagreement shouldn't necessarily disagree with child taxon just because it contains descendant

Feature Requests
10

Some relevant background for this issue is the Clarifying Ancestor Disagreements blog post linked by @DianaStuder above (which describes the difference between ‘leading disagreement’ and ‘branch disagreement’) and perhaps the (long!) discussion in this feature request about changing the wording surrounding ancestor disagreements.

In the example cited in the original post, what I take to be the problem is that the initial (ancestor) disagreement of ‘Aves’ doesn’t only disagree with the inital ID of Turdoides hartlaubii (which it clearly was meant to do), but also disagrees with the three new “correct” IDs of Pycnonotus cafer (and in fact with any subsequent ID within ‘Passeriformes’, which I don’t think the IDer who put ‘Aves’ intended). Because of this, it will now take 5(!) IDs of Pycnonotus cafer to get this observation to RG (rather than the usual 3), if neither of the first two IDers change their initial IDs.

The reason for this is that the wording of the ‘orange option’ in the ‘Potential Disagreement’ popup that appears (“Is the evidence provided enough to confirm this is [X}?”… “No, but it is a member of [Y]”) makes it seem as if one is making a ‘leading disagreement’ (“I know it’s not X, but I can only say that it’s Y”) when one in fact is making a ‘branch disagreement’ (“I know it’s not X, and I know it’s not any taxa on the branch between X and Y”).

I don’t agree with this proposed feature request, but I would support one that either

  1. changes the current wording of the ‘orange option’ to make it clear that one is making a branch disagreement and not a leading disagreement

  2. adds a third option to the ‘Potential Disagreement’ popup, so that one can make either a leading or a branch disagreement (or no disagreement), or

  3. changes how the ‘orange option’ functions from branch to leading disagreement, without changing the wording.

I don’t really know which of those I prefer (I think it’s kind of a thorny problem, actually), but I do feel that the current wording of the ‘orange option’ is misleading in that it describes a leading disagreement while in fact producing a branch disagreement.

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