If you clear the Place in the Suggestions tab of the Identify Modal while the source is Checklist, I think it should show all taxa. In this example, I clear the Place while the taxon is set to Coendou and despite there being 15 species of Coendou in iNat’s taxonomy, it returns 5 species, plus the genus Coendou, plus an inactive Coendou species. It seems to me that it should return all 15 species because I’m essentially asking for all Coendou in any place.
@tiwane should I reformat this as a feature request? Personally I think it’s a bug, but maybe the devs don’t see it that way?
Using checklist as a source but specifying a place isn’t really the use case this is designed for, since checklists are tied to places. Technically you’re not searching for all taxa in this genus regardless of place, you’re searching for all taxa in this genus which are on a checklist. So what it’s doing now is showing all species in the genus which are on a checklist. Or at least, that’s what it should be doing.
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That’s totally what it’s doing, I just find it to be at best a little useless, and at worst pretty misleading. :/
I’d almost rather that you can’t clear the place than to have it search only for species that exist on any checklist.
I changed my mind, that’s not what it’s doing. I did a little fiddling and it’s even weirder than I expected. I can stay on a single observation and re-do the same query (checklist, Coendou, no place) and get different results. Sometimes 10, sometimes 7, sometimes 5, sometimes 4. I noticed something else weird too: sometimes the Taxon drop-down includes the current taxon and sometimes it doesn’t. Not sure if that could be related?
@tiwane getting different results for the same query definitely seems buggy to me. Personally, I still think the best thing to do when no place is specified is to return all taxa.