Disagreements move community ID too far up taxonomic hierarchy for specific species/genus

Bug Reports
1

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Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/6422112
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/5811820
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/6593779
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/6422112

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Observation is originally identified to species level, specifically Eulithis sp.

Step 2: A user disagrees with the species-level identification and provides a genus-level identification, specifically Eulithis.

Step 3: The Community ID is reduced to subfamily level, specifically Larentiinae. It should have remained at genus-level, specifically Eulithis.

Step 4: Community ID can be corrected by switching DQA votes on/off (re-indexing?). I have not done so (yet) for the above links so that you can see the issue.

Although this is easily resolved, I wanted to bring it up because I can’t imagine what the original cause may have been. There don’t seem to be any Taxon swaps involved, though even so, any disagreement between a species and the genus of that species shouldn’t reduce it to subfamily-level.

2 Likes
2

This seems like an indexing bug usually caused by taxon or ancestry changes. Looks like maybe that one species should be reindexed. If you find more you can flag the species and a curator can manually “refresh” it.

3 Likes
3

I just checked the listed observations and they all show current community ID at genus level, so this must have been a temporary glitch.

4

I’m afraid I don’t understand what action this refers to. Could you explain? Do you mean adding a yes/no to one or more DQA’s or some other action?

5

yes, that’s what it means - adding a vote but then removing it, which can “refresh” the observation

6

? checked the third one.
It is still - Community Taxon at Subfamily.
While the ID displayed at the top is Genus, as expected.

Community Taxon algorithm remains firmly UNconvinced
that Genus + species = Genus not Subfamily.
Something is broken somewhere.
Hard disagreement with sp should still = Genus
?

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/5811820
adding IDs to force a reindex does convince the algorithm. But the WHY remains.

1 Like
7

These are pretty old observations, the community taxon calculation might have been affected by a bug.

Unfortunately just reindexing via a DQA vote or Fave won’t recalculate the community taxon, you need to add an ID (which you can then remove).