I haven’t done much taxon editing and wanted to check here first. The iNat taxonomy currently has two names for one crane fly species, Limonia maculata (the name used on Bug Guide) and Rhipidia maculata (used in the Crane Flies of the World Catalog, subgenus was elevated to genus by someone). We have observations under both names, a few more under Rhipidia than Limonia. If I want to merge these observations, do I use a Merge or a Swap? And which name do I use? It sounds like there is no recognized authority and this is a worldwide species… maybe go with the newer name? @treegrow@edanko ?
It would a swap from the one you want to eliminate to the one you want to keep.
My two cents: One way to help figure out the best authority would be to first add a flag to the one you want to eliminate, then draft, but don’t commit the swap. That means it will be visible for comment for a while on the flags page. If someone feels strongly, either about the authorities or about the swap itself, you will hear about it.
If you get no comment, after about a month, I would feel comfortable committing the swap.
If you get experts saying it’s all good, commit the swap.
If you get experts telling you it should be the other way around, then you can draft the swap the other way around and commit that one instead, and resolve the older flag with a note saying the swap went the other way.
Also, tag in local and taxon experts/ top identifiers for both iterations of the species in a comment on the flag. That way they can’t complain they weren’t warned, and will hopefully respond in their own comment.