I have been following this discussion with interest. When I created this feature request, I was mostly spending my time IDing “unknowns.” I was concerned that the number of “unknowns” were increasing but I was really interested in increasing the efficiency of putting the correct label on the observation.
I think both of those premises are somewhat faulty:
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It turns out that the number of unknown observations is not increasing. Bouteloua posted a nice graph that shows that the number of unknowns spike in April in the Northern Hemisphere but then it gets worked off during the winter months. It has been roughly stable for several years.
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Choess pointed out that the “unknown” observations are not the “rate-limiting step,” in IDing observations, which I think is a good way of putting it. There are way more observations stuck at higher-level taxonomic classifications (Kingdom, phylum, subphylum, etc.) in plants, for example, than unknowns.
So from an efficiency standpoint, the proposed feature request might not really help that much, especially if it is just used to get an unknown to a kingdom or phylum-level classification.
From the above, I’m less convinced now that this feature should be implemented.
If we could somehow just get the observations that are suitable for CV to be the ones that CV is applied to, and these observations could be IDed to genus, family or order with an acceptable error rate, I would be all for that. But there are a bunch of unknowns that have blurry images, or the focus of the observation is unclear, or have any number of other issues that can confuse the CV; if these kinds of observations can’t be screened out somehow, I imagine that the error rate would be unacceptable.
If I were proposing a new feature request, I think I’d suggest that it be a sort of experiment to be tested on a limited geographic region/or maybe even taxonomic group (or maybe on a “low risk” group like observations marked “captive/cultivated”) to see how well it works. Obviously it will only work well in areas that have lots of observations already, and I can imagine it working better on some taxa than others. I wouldn’t limit it to unknowns, either, maybe go down to phylum and see if it could help address some of the backlog at higher classifications.
That’s my 2 cents, thanks for all the thoughtful comments.