Thanks everyone, for weighing in with thoughtful responses!
To be clear, I’m aware of the possibilities to filter for/out audio files. This is not so much a request for my personal convenience, but was meant to
I do believe a measure like this could make a real impact in terms of quality/access to experts. As I primarily identify plants, I usually don’t look at unknowns, and when I do there is little I can contribute to most audio-only observations, so getting them directly to animal-only identifiers who might never look at unknowns seems useful. Essentially, @sedgequeen captures my thinking quite succinctly:
However, I am swayed by @martyndrabik and @phma ‘s search and examples: there is legitimate use for audio-only plant and fungi observations and arguably we’re better off not defaulting to a wrong ID.
I suppose the question then becomes what tolerance do we have for this type of error (audio-only non-animal obs ID’d as animalia). We currently have 1,400,000+ animal audio recordings versus 1,300 non-animal audio observations, which would suggest this error rate might occur somewhere around 1 per 1000 defaulted IDs. That’s 10 wrong IDs to move ~10,000 audio observations currently in unknown (about 2% of all unknowns) to Kingdom-level.