Editing an "Allowed value" in a "Datatype: text" observation field does not update its observations

For example I edited this observation field and changed the value “T. cf. aquilinus” to “T. aqulinus group”: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/8909

Now the graph shows that value as having 0 observations. In addition, I can still sort for observations labelled “T. cf. aquilinus” and find all of them: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&field:Toxomerus%20identifiable%20group=T.%20cf.%20aquilinus

I could just manually edit those 4 observations, but if I understand the meaning of “cf.” properly I think I should change the “T. cf. duplicatus” value in the same way and I’m not going to manually change all ~400 of those observations.
I wasn’t sure whether to post this as a feature request or a bug, so feel free to move it, but I figured because it messes up the graph and ability to sort for the observations that it shouldn’t be like this.

The ‘allowed values’ just restricts which values you can enter, it doesn’t change any existing field contents. So yes, what you are asking for is a new feature.

The ‘allowed values’ are a simple list, one of the things I quite often do is re-order the values in the drop-down list (eg to put commonly used values at the top of a long list, for convenience) - I wouldn’t want the system interpreting this as replacing one set of values with another!

Hmm. I guess to allow both your use and what I’m looking for, the way “allowed values” are made would need to be redesigned then. I’m thinking if they looked more the way tags on an observation do, then you could drag them around or edit individual values and it would still look like it was the same entry that is being edited or moved around. Whereas in the current design with just a text box, there’s no real way to distinguish one value from another. Not sure if that makes sense…

A post was split to a new topic: Can’t update an observation field to the newly edited value

The observation field values / edit page could definitely be improved. I think that’s worth a feature request but would take some thought as to how it would look and work.