Did iNat remove locked taxa? Prior to me noticing this, certain branches of life, primarily vertebraes, could only have its taxonomic status curated by “taxon curators”. And I’m sure that’s something we’re all familiar with.
Well today, I noticed that a hybrid taxon was created for a duck hybrid by someone who is not the bird curator. I couldn’t find an explanation, the user is not listed under the framework details, yet was able to make this hybrid.
After I exhausted my searches, I decided to do the last thing I expected to be doing today; I went into the flags and found the first one requesting a hybrid taxon. And I created the taxon without being told only a taxon curator can do that. Note, the hybrid taxon I made is a well-documented combo of a vagrant bird that paired with a local (see second link).
Anyway, what’s going on here? Are we now allowed to curate anything? I cannot find any news regarding this change, assuming it’s intentional, unless it was eliminated when we introduced Taxon History last month.
It’s still a thing in some taxa. But in general, many common taxa are not locked anymore.
Anyway, i agree with @brian_d. Locked taxa are making curators less flexible when curating taxa. I know that letting other curators could really mess the taxa if the curators don’t know much about the taxa (i was one of them, sorry). But every now and then, the Taxon Curators could get really busy with their RL and can’t curate those taxa. That can result the taxa being left behind on many new changes (ex. Spider). By letting other curators do the job could solve those problems.
I usually avoided curating vertebrate taxa, and prefer to curate Odonata.
Infact in these past months, i’m the one that actively update the taxa so it’s not left behind, despite not being the Taxon Curators. It was locked, but for some reason it was unlocked on one point.
That is actually my major concern. As I presented here, the bird curator tried to find a way for the everyday curator to aid in the 2021 taxonomy updates, all we had to do was do the grunt work and once done, he’d start committing the changes. We finished about two months ago, but I haven’t heard word yet that these changes are actually being committed. I know he has a lot to curate but with birds no longer being locked and if others get word of it, I see downhill chaos happening really quickly as we start committing things all willy nilly.
I currently disagree, although I’m sure I could change my mind at some point. Out of date-taxonomy, duplicate taxa, unwarranted taxon swaps, etc. happen all the time in the small group that I curate by curators unfamiliar with the standards we use for the group—having changes like that happening in bigger more common groups seems like it could be a major problem.
Yes, that was from my earlier days becoming a curator. Maybe instead of locking taxa, maybe we could restrict what curators can do based on how long have they been a curator or are they experts or not. Senior curators and/or experts can do much anything, but junior curators need some training or guide first.
Great idea?
I was thinking among the lines of eliminating or limiting the ability to commit your own taxon changes. If we’re not having locked taxa now, no one person is responsible for curating the entire family. So we encourage curators to check out the taxon changes and review the propose changes.
Just to check, am I right to think you are suggesting this only for certain taxa (i.e. the ‘locked’ ones). I think implementing this more generally would certainly just result in taxonomic gridlock.
Yes only for originally locked, aka vertebrae, taxa. I think an agreement system before commitment can help safeguard against erroneous taxon changes. Obviously this wouldn’t work in frameworks over insects because those taxon changes could sit for years before being committed. But maybe it’s a mute point since taxon history is now a thing. It also seems like with our new found abilities, there’s still a limit. It appears that any taxon change that has or will have over 200,000 observations can only be made or committed by the taxon curator. That might be our “safeguard”.
Existing Taxon Curators were removed by accident. But we thought we’d wait and see how they went since taxon curators have exposed both benefits (less changes to branches that have to be reverted and more stability) but also cons (large backlog of changes that don’t get made because too few taxon curators).
Watching how things are going, I do think we need to add them back for some clades like amphibians and reptiles (I’ve re-added myself as the taxon curator for these branches for now) where there’s been persistent problems with curators deviating from the references by adding taxa that should be split or internodes such as subgenera without first discussing these changes, without documenting these as deviations, and without doing all the steps needed to keep the tree well maintained (e.g. adding a taxon but not splitting its sibling).
Maybe taxon curators are just a band-aid while we sort out the deeper problem of better policies/resources/training/tools for all curators to do their work. Or maybe taxon curators have a long term place as teams of several curators (e.g. 10 or more) per framework.