The idea for the post came from seeing there were over 500 observations of a crabapple tree species (Malus fusca) outside of its known range. That seemed like wayyyy more errors than I was used to seeing for most species, and it reminded me of some previous similar cases that I’ve mentioned on the forum: Trombidium holocericeum, a red mite species that the internet had Decided was what all red mites were (and then CV too), which previously had hundreds of misidentified obs until I recruited a few people to help out, or Chrysoperla carnea, a similar case with green lacewing species, which helpfully has a species complex taxon now.
It’s most common with cryptic or just difficult to identify organisms; like @nathantaylor says, every dandelion is apparently Taraxacum officinale. Organisms that were misidentified in general and aided by CV seem to be some of the most extreme cases, so I would definitely include them here. People are generally more hesitant to refute an ID with a coarser rank than to refute it with a new species level ID. I don’t think this data quality task is as fun for most people.
So the purpose is to get help with clean-up. Maybe someone will browse the list and say “hey I know that species, I can help”, or maybe they want to pick one to learn something new.
I’m not expecting the staff to change anything at this time. They did do some supremely helpful tweaks to computer vision this year, since it will recommend different ranks like family or tribe when it’s not confident about species.
I’m trying not to break them into too many nodes, so I was just roughly grouping related organisms together and then alphabetizing them within the sections.
Looks like your “trust status” was updated, so you should see the edit button now.