Deleting an ID on my observation creates common name placeholder

Bug Reports
1

Create an observation, then

  • Add an ID, e.g. Tabanidae
  • Delete the ID
  • Observation taxon is now “Unknown (Placeholder: horse and deer flies)”

Expected result: No placeholder is created and observation taxon is simply “Unknown”

3

And if there was as placeholder, it gets overwritten by the common name of the former observer’s ID.

But maybe all this is as intended (by iNat) ?

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4

I’m not surprised.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/18268
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/228758886

So species_guess is the placeholder, and it can be overwritten by the observation taxon. As such, if everyone revoked their IDs, or a curator or staff member deactivated their taxa without swapping them, or the observer opted out of community taxon and didn’t have an ID; then the name (sometimes, it’s English, sometimes scientific, and sometimes even another language, I’m not quite sure how it works) of the former observation taxon would be the placeholder.

My preference is Scientific Name (Common Name), so I don’t know why iNaturalist has set the placeholder for my tomato observation to “tomato” rather than “Solanum lycopersicum”. I’m guessing it’s not about the observer’s preferences at all, but rather it uses the name in the language of the region, and if there is no name in that language, it uses the scientific name.

But https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/245545720 disproves this. Despite the observation being in India, species_guess is “Попугаеобразные”, it is in Russian.

So it seems that it is about the observer’s preference, except that it will prioritise common names over scientific names even if the observer puts scientific names first.

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