there was a whole thread about this previously (intended mainly for others reading this present topic; I assume you remember that one since you posted there). staff made many of the same points about minimising “empty branch” curation and database load last time; I agreed, and I’m not sure I understand this notion of “wrapping up treatment of taxonomy for [a] genus”. taxonomy continues to change, and curating empty branches is a bit of a pain. I’m not hugely against adding unobserved species – I did open-endedly ask the original question in that thread after all – but it seems at odds with the reality of ongoing revisions to hope that addition of mass quantities of taxa (or even by the small handful) without observations will actually “finish” anything. hundreds if not thousands of species remain probably never to be observed on iNaturalist, even macroscopic eukaryotes, and the value of adding them for an ephemeral sense of completeness is equivocal.
anyway, to the current thread’s point (beside the fact that I also take issue with the poorly chosen title; Darwin made sure to lift Wallace up beside him, and also there have been entire books written on the fact that Wallace’s evolutionary theory actually wasn’t materially all the same as Darwin’s own, such that the version of natural selection we take for granted would probably not have been explained in the same way originally had Darwin never existed), in my own curating activities I have sometimes gone ahead and added the first ID of a taxon I added on someone else’s behalf, partly out of having learned something about its identification in the course of looking it up, and partly because it seems to have a marginally more effective “notification efficacy” than just commenting to say that I added the taxon. (that is, I feel that it’s more likely that the intended party will follow up and ID if I’ve added a demonstrating ID, whereas if I just say it’s been added then it sometimes doesn’t get used. not sure that’s the most common for everyone else though.)
I couldn’t care less about identifier stats on the GBIF end especially, and probably a great number of my own observations are not listed as first identified by me myself. I sincerely doubt that almost anyone else knew about it either. and given that there aren’t really any approximations of gamified charts on the GBIF end as well, I doubt there is any push to get that extremely obscure drop of fame via the portal.
in all likelihood I may even forget about this factoid by the time I next add a new taxon and decide whether or not to ID as it. there are too many other things to worry about, in the realm of biodiversity data quality as well as outside it.