Draft and commit a needed taxon swap, merge, or split
Remove a misidentified photo from the taxon page
Mark a taxon as native or introduced in a certain place
Assign a common name to be the default for a certain place
Graft taxa that are floating out in space, not attached to the tree
Fix the link to Wikipedia which is displayed on the About tab, via Wikidata
If you’re unsure how to resolve a flag, you can always just skip it, or try reading through the Curator Guide, or ask your question(s) on the forum here in the Curators category.
*If you’re not a curator but interested in getting the tools to help with some of the tasks above, read through the Curator Guide and fill out the Curator Application.
Ouch, worrisome trend for sure. Though I am impressed with the sheer number that have been resolved during those three months. A wonderfully relentless field season has kept me from pulling much of the weight recently, but fall and winter are coming… Thanks for the topic and heads-up for us all!
One thing I sometimes wonder is how many of these might be in locked taxa with only one or two overwhelmed curators, and whether another curator or two for those groups might be a good idea?
I think one area where we could make a dent, if we could get consensus or a defined policy on how to deal with the situations is all the flags related to plant subspecies that POWO does not recognize.
There are a significant number of these (and many more which are not, but could be flagged) in the database, but there seems to be no guidance on how to deal with them.
One clear issue, and I write this as a taxon curator, is you get no notification when something in a group that you curate is flagged. So unless you are actively monitoring it, it can be very easy for them to slip under the radar.
Something as simple as ‘if there are no observations and no ID’s, and POWO lists it as a synonym, then align it to POWO’ would help give some guidance.
POWO says that name is not valid, it specifically assigns it as a synonym of in this case the parent species. But someone, in this case apparently EOL where it has been imported from says no, that is a valid name.
To me that is a candidate to just get merged into alignment with POWO, especially as there are no id’s or observations. But I at least am unaware of any guidance that says that is acceptable to do.
My impression is that it has been the unwritten practice to do this, but yeah, maybe having it specifically stated somewhere would be good. In general, non-conforming names (in any group with an accepted framework) with no obs and IDs should be…?
swapped/merged into their accepted taxon, or
deactivated, and the inactivated name added to the accepted taxon as a non-accepted scientific name.
I’ve seen it done/recommended both ways, and it’s not clear to me if one has any particular advantage, other than the first option maybe being more automated for accomplishing the same tasks (and capturing any common names too on the inactivated taxon).
…and, of course, always checking to make sure the Taxon Framework Relationship is up to date for the accepted taxon.
Also, should we trust the taxon ID leaderboard to determine that no IDs exist, or would a specific search of identifications be more reliable?
It’s listed as a synonym on POWO, there are no controversial comments/IDs, no one has flagged it to request a deviation. External sources like EOL and COL don’t picture into the taxonomic authorities that iNat references for taxon changes/curating. So unless you have reason to consider a deviation from POWO, I would just go ahead with aligning with POWO. I inactivated it.
Re taxon swaps vs. inactivating taxa with zero IDs:
Yeah, for these taxa with no IDs or other associated info, I tend to just inactivate them. Aside from any common names being transferred during a taxon swap, it also
takes longer,
transfers conservation statuses (which might do more harm than good),
adds a usually pretty useless dashboard notification to anyone who’s made IDs of the output taxon or is subscribed to the taxon for another reason (e.g. it is on one of their personal lists), and
the curator guide also says atlases and range maps get transferred, but I honestly haven’t delved into the particulars of that. That seems like asking for problems in any but the simplest of cases.
A taxon swap should probably specifically ask “Do you want to transfer the following items to the output taxon? Vernacular names Range map Atlas Conservation Statuses” etc
Thanks, those are all things I hadn’t considered, and will be good to keep in mind. The likelihood of any of those things existing for a taxon with no IDs seems pretty small, but definitely worth checking first.
Just updated the stats above. It’s nice to see that there are more taxon flags being resolved and fewer being added to the backlog, but the backlog still grows.
More and more flags on taxa are being resolved per day - almost twice as many as a year ago (awesome), though the total backlog of unresolved taxon flags has more than doubled since the initial post. Oof.
there needs to be a better solution for species folks want to identify as computer vision error prone, even if it is a separate category of flag. Like spam and copyright flags, these are not meant to be resolved, but they keep building up
the relevant taxa curators (and I am guilty of this and will look at mine) need to go through their areas of responsibility and either implement the requested changes or indicate why they are not going to do so and close the flags out
it would be nice to have some discussion / consensus about what number of impacted observations requires a review, and what number is acceptable to initiate if it is bringing something in line with our references. I’ve started doing a few draft changes to close out some things, but where is the cutoff for needing more feedback. Is it OK to unilaterally do if it changes 10 records? 25? 100? etc
at some point a more formal consensus on how to deal with the ‘this common name is not valid’ flags needs to be reached. Same hold true for the ‘this doesn’t need to be obscured’ ones. One person requesting it should not be enough to impact a change (with the caveat it is likely OK for those cases of globally obscured species that are introduced somewhere)
fyi @sjl197 (re this topic): see updated table at the top - looks like it’s the first time since I started periodically tracking this that the number of unresolved taxon flags is going down rather than up
Oh interesting, that’s awesome! Thanks for the updates. Here then i think it’s also impressive the expansion in flags which have been resolved, and for sure you should be proud of the especially large part you’ve played in that. It’s easy to loose sight of what’s been done and how far travelled with the continual stream of "needs’ or ‘wants’ with new flags every day.
The global overview is most welcome, and hope you and others can forgive my posts then which are focused to arthropods. Given that they’re easily 3/4 of all animals, i hope can see value of giving the subset some attention of the state of play.
With the global view, i’m mindful of the current policies towards plants in particular. I see there’s differential efforts and stability depending on plant lineages. I fear there’s far to much curatorial stagnation there. Those involved in plant curations have given many suggestions and feedback in multiple places, but here might be a good place to hear again how that’s viewed in terms of backload or overload they face in terms of ‘the backlog of flags’. I suspect the fraction unresolved flags for plants is growing due to those policies, despite a wider global reduction. Hopefully soon we’ll see some review updates from staff end of the ‘trialed policies’. I also i can’t help glancing at the similar massive numbers of beetles alone and not seeing much curatorial backlog for them - but in fairness, i then look at the relatively smaller number of Lepidoptera and the seemingly disproportionate number of taxon flags they cause. Global numbers and comparisions have value, but so does extracting the interesting facets!
Well, yes, facets. Speaking on as yet unresolved flagged taxon issues
Insects: 91% (48% of those being leps, 21% being Papilionoidea)
Versus arachnids: 5%, crustaceans 3%, myriapods <1%
Vernacular names