Basically you get to a point where you just have to tag common IDers of the group to help push it to a finer identification.
It isn’t a wonderful solution, but it’ll work, eventually.
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We have Tribe …
How about being charitable and assuming that others mean well and that the people who entered those IDs were doing the best they could in accordance with their knowledge and level of understanding about how iNat works. Remember that iNat is not always simple or self-evident, even for those of us who have been using it for some time (as this thread has demonstrated!).
Yes, high-level disagrees can cause annoyance for those who encounter the observations later. But I would argue that it is a fault of the way iNat is set up and not something to blame on individual users. If you need help getting a particular observation “unstuck”, the best way to do so is by tagging people with expertise in the relevant taxon, not complaining in the forum.
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Complaining in the forum is a way of exploring and explaining how things could work better in a sandbox where several staff members listen. Sounds like exactly what you would want to do if this is the “fault of the way iNat is set up and not something to blame on individual users”.
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It’s possible to point out problems without calling out specific observations or actions of users who have long since left iNat and can no longer respond to criticism.
We don’t know if the person who entered the disagreeing ID of “plantae” was merely “saving time” (the implication being that they were short-sighted and not thinking about the problems they were causing for others by not choosing a more specific ID). Maybe they chose that ID for any number of other reasons. We don’t know. It ultimately doesn’t matter.
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Tagging other iNatters to help resolve an ID is something I do infrequently and mostly for my own records and usually it’s someone I know. Not a method I want to over-use. Some IDers don’t mind being tagged, others might not like to see too many of these.
Is the Ancester Disagreement problem. That waits for better management by iNat. Not the fault, or the intention of the identifier.
Over time it will get more obvious which IDers can be tagged in those cases. I surely have some (and am one of those) now that are happy to resolve these kinds of issues so I can tag them anytime without being afraid to overstimulate them.
But then there are others, where I am also careful to “use” them only on occasions, because I don´t know how they feel about “overtagging”. You get a feeling for it.
But I agree, if in doubt use it sparingly or just ask the person on how they actually feel about it.
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