@pisum’s comments about leading disagreements make a lot of sense:
i think you’re making it too complicated. all you need to do is make observation taxon = community taxon.
We changed how the Observation Taxon works so that in most cases it matches the Community Taxon, the exceptions are in an update to the blog post that I copied below.
While the idea of making it so people can arbitrarily set the branch they are disagreeing with and also disagree with any identification is interesting and certainly something we could do down the road, it does introduce a lot of complexity. I think pisum is right that with this tweak to the Observation Taxon, our existing simpler plans for dealing with ancestor disagreement problems will be a good first step. And we should hold off on the ‘can of worms’ for now
In contrast, the Observation Taxon will always match the Community Taxon unless:
a) there is just a single identification, then the Observation Taxon will be defined by that identification
b) the observer opts out of the Community Taxon, then the Observation Taxon will be defined by the observers identification
c) there are no disagreements and there is an identifications of descendants of the Community Taxon, then the Observation Taxon will be defined by the finest such identification (because the community likes that a single non-controversial identification being able to ‘move the ball forward’)**if that finest identification is of infra-species rank (eg subspecies), the Observation Taxon won’t roll forward to that rank from the Community Taxon if that identification was added later (because the community doesn’t like what would be Research Grade observations at species rank being rolled forward to Needs ID observations at infra-species rank). However, if the Observation Taxon was initially set at infra-species rank from a single identification, a non-disagreeing identification of an ancestor won’t roll the Observation Taxon back to the Community Taxon.