I’ve been trying to understand the rationale for the automatic addition of updated observations and withdrawal of prior identifications when there is a taxon change. An example is the gastropod genus Ilyanassa (Western Atlantic), which for a while was synonymized with Tritia (Eastern Atlantic), then…

[image] gparosenberg: why not change the observation to say some like “originally added as X, currently represented as Y”. This has been proposed before: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/improving-inaturalists-nomenclature-taxonomy/36143 There didn’t really seem to be much buy-in at that time…

Thank you for pointing to the prior thread! You said that “One of the major concerns is that editing IDs can break the flow of comment threads”. I agree that making the change retrospectively could be difficult. An example of such difficulties is this observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observa…

Changing the way taxon changes are handled

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Improve wording of IDs created by taxon changes Feature Requests issue-made , implemented	10	918	May 6, 2025
Question about taxonomy changes General question	5	422	September 23, 2021
Observations stuck at genus level after taxon swap General	6	393	October 31, 2023
Why are withdrawn IDs updated with taxon changes? General	5	502	March 6, 2020
Scientific name changes General	8	791	June 24, 2021

Changing the way taxon changes are handled

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