Ok, i tried a provocative click bait title, my apologies!
There are several people likely to read this who have made great efforts in curating the taxonomy. Some of you were doing that long before i personally started, and several of you with significantly more edits. I don’t mean to negate the efforts of such people, or anyone (regardless of scope or scale), but rather start a discussion about how few ‘curators’ seem active, and how to push things forward, as personally i’m feeling burdened by scope of what’s still to do.
As context, it’s good to recognise that number of edits (etc) are not directly meaningful, but rather contributions. Many MANY volunteers have made useful updates or comments on the iNaturalist taxonomy. I’m sure that (for diverse organisms) much of the taxonomy is vastly closer to modern knowledge than years ago. Everyone who moved things forward should be immensely proud.
Those of you who i’ve exchanged dialog with likely know my arthropod focus. In other threads, those of you who love plants or fungi can offer an often slightly different perspective, which is welcome. Anyway, i mention arthropods as a hyperdivese group. In nearly every lineage i look at when a flag/curation issue is raised by a user, then usually there’s many missing taxa, or names that need revising for updated schemes. (Note, here, i’m going to glance past the little central direction i’ve seen to ‘not needlessly add empty taxa’ etc. Here, I understand efforts for any curation/updates taxonomy can be best directed towards lineages of direct relevance to users and their observations, rather than the vast multitudes that require “microscopic dissection”, “genetic analyses” or whatever fine-scale thing is beyond any visual-based scheme).
My point though, is at least for arthropods, many recent user created flags are “please add this species”, fully inline with policy. Many of these can take seconds to resolve, but of course defensibility of any actions can depends on the state of knowledge in external sources, which vary hugely in reliability and quality, and often defensibility is dependant on which taxon being evaluated. Here’s two concerns:
[1]: The “name import” for users is horribly outdated, notably from Catalog of Life. I was once told that’s still importing from 2012 download, and if so that’s absurd. I keep seeing users import taxon names from that old CoL scheme which are since changed in literature, and importantly also have changed on CoL or other external databases. Lepidoptera is one notable group where many names on the 2012 version of CoL were already stupidly outdated (due to that itself making an uncritical mass import of historic combinations, some going back to the 1800s, others never published). Many of the lepidopteran names on CoL have since been updated at that end into more defensible modern combinations. Yet iNat with its outdated importer still allows users to import those long outdated combinations. Please stop this.
[2] There are large numbers of silent “curators” with access to the functions to access and alter the schemes, but few or no actions. Several discussions have been started on topic but zero action. I’m sure many of them could be re-engaged and be valuable, but i’ve never seen anything active on that front from staff. I’d love to see a clean out of the in-actives, others requested to re-join on their request etc, as other proposals. Any engagement in the in-actives can likely encourage a few to start participating and remove those who cannot but in my view shouldn’t have access to certain features. I wish that the recent fallout from the big AI discussions had taught the staff to listen to the community. Well, there’s a community of curators also - and it seems a vast body of that community isn’t actively being engaged in need for curation. So, please.
Ok, two points is maybe already too much for a thread, but let’s see! Edit: Above my thought process is unified by the multitude of “please add this taxon” flag, which make up the bulk each week or incoming new issues. I’m hopeful that steps to address either or both of the two points above could really help on that front - either users able to add some more current names themselves, and/or engagement with some more users just willing to do rather quick simple tasks - if you want to call yourself a ‘curator’ then how about you at least add a few taxon names!