Correcting taxon swap error

Curators
1

On 6/26 I erroneously swapped a species (Solenopsis fugax) into its parent genus. As soon as I realized the mistake I re-activated the species taxon, but this did not stop the swap from proceeding. I then made a flag and emailed staff, and the responses from other curators on the flag were all saying that I need to contact staff. On 7/1 staff told me they were looking into it, and suggested that they would revert the swap. After this I continued to receive questions about the status of the taxon from other users, and it was suggested to me by another curator that I ask staff about this again, which I did on 7/8, and this time I specifically asked if I should go through observations that were swapped into genus and re-ID them. I have not heard anything from staff since 7/1, and, as the taxon is still active, there have been 124 obs of S. fugax since the swap. However, the 1,264 obs that existed prior to the swap were pushed back to genus level by the swap, and remain that way as of this posting on 7/20. I am used to doing mass IDs of ants, and I could go through all the ~2,400 Solenopsis observations in range of S. fugax and ID them to species level, but I do not know if this will interfere with a staff revert of the swap, so I have not done so.

I understand staff are busy, and I do not wish to put any pressure on them to respond to me quickly. I also don’t want to sit around and leave a mistake I made un-fixed if I could be doing something to fix it, so I am wondering if any other curators have any input on the best course of action here. I really just want to make sure that I am doing everything I am supposed to do to correct this.

2

If staff have given no direction on what to do in the mean time, not even (we’re busy, we’ll get on it in two weeks). I lean fixing it on you own.

3

I’m surprised that it has taken this long, and there’s still no clear direction from staff (I would not want to be in your shoes).

We’re bound to make mistakes now and then, and there should be mechanisms in place to revert them. If not, and we have to fix some of it manually, I’d still expect clarity from staff. I think I’d wait to hear a clear direction from staff, and tell us if they can undo the change (if they’ve already initiated) or if they expect us to fix every observation that was affected. If it’s the latter, please reach out to us for help.

4

I’m not. Absolutely not surprised. To be clear, i queried about staff responses earlier, but yet again i’m absolutely disappointed, but not surprised.

5

It has been reverted by staff