Hi,
I flagged the cranefly genus Gonomyia to add the subgenera. Now there is only one added. As it a very large genus subgenera are pratical. I waited 9 months already but I don’t know how or who I can ask to speed it up.
Thanks,
Micha
Hi @mdoliveira. I am not familiar at all with this genus so I can’t do anything directly but I did tag in the comment section of your flag asking a curator of fly species to see if they could take action, enlist help from another curator more directly knowledgable about this genus or provide comments as to why no action has been taken yet. Hope that helps move the ball forward a bit. Thanks for your first post in the forum; welcome. Maybe others can provide more direct help here or in iNat. good luck.
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If you have specialist knowledge, e.g. some diptera families and would like to regularly update taxonomy and add new species, consider becoming a curator yourself
Also, @ mdoliveira Here is the iNat curator guide, if interested, https://inaturalist.ca/pages/curator%252Bguide
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In general, there are a lot of unresolved curator flags - all non-staff curators are essentially volunteers (and staff generally don’t curate taxonomy much except for large actions that only they can do). Mentioning potentially knowledgeable curators on a flag (as done above) is a good way to start.
It also helps to write out the reason that the taxa to be added would help contribute to iNat. Not every taxon needs to be added - curators generally focus on those that are useful for IDing iNat observations (i.e., not adding taxa that don’t have any observations, etc.). It will also help to provide citations/sources for the taxa you want to add, including any taxonomic authorities that iNat uses for a given group.
Thanks for the help! Let’s see if there is a reply.
So it would also be possible for me to become a curator of only the craneflies (Tipulomorpha) for example?
Curators aren’t split up by taxon groups, but yes, if approved you could choose to only curate craneflies.
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@mdoliveira There is some discussion in both flags opened for Gonomyia including some questions for you about the requested change. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47991/flags
It was nice to see some informative answers here finally given to this user. I’ve directly made the initial requested curatorial steps on this taxon. Waiting 9 months on a taxonomy flag without response reflect very poorly on iNat. If it were exceptional, i would suggest that, but it’s not, i’d sadly say it’s typical. Thanks to @cthawley for some direct suggestions of how this or other users might encourage response. As i understand it the flag system now encourages users to give expanded detail, that’s a system improvement.
Anyway, just for context on the scale of “flag(s) not being resolved”, i can only speak to the scope of flags arthropods which this falls under. Indeed there’s a backlog. Currently there’s about 1000 unresolved taxon flags for arthropods as a whole, and notably more than half of those are for the single insect order Lepidoptera, i.e. butterflies and moths. For flies (Diptera), as the case here, it’s only about 50 flags unresolved and some of those are just technical issues that seem unsolvable unless staff change setup. If i have a message, i’m saying it looks to me like those going into taxon flags for Diptera have been doing a good job. However, this one floated unresolved, and needlessly went unanswered. I will further say, that within current backlog of taxonomic flags for arthropods, nearly half are from just the last 6 months, and we get a continual stream daily, sometimes a deluge - at the start of this week one new user made nearly a hundred flags. The backlog has also been steadily decreasing, but it’s a continual battle and feels to me like it’s typically less than 10 curators doing 95% of the work for the ‘taxonomic flags’ across all arthropods, and please notice, doing it voluntarily. Even if staff don’t want to be directly involved in the taxonomy curation, i’d love to see them encouraging and reminding past curators to re-engage and bringing potential new curators into the system.
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Would you say most of these are unresolved because no curator ever responded to the flag, or because there was some response but then the conversations stalled?
In my experience there is often a quick response by a curator who doesn’t have direct relevant experience (which is fine for simpler issues like common names or conservation statuses), but then things stall because of difficulty getting input from curators/identifiers with more relevant expertise.
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“Would you say”. Well, any view i suspect will be very subjective. Right now (and limited to those remaining for arthropods), then i’d say the vast majority has some sort of response. However, i contextualise that by saying i suspect over the last year, much of the backlog clean-out has favored those with few or no replies - i can assure you that many i’ve resolved over last year were at least several months old, or even years old, and yet had no replies. We should of course hear from other curators who likewise have been pushing resolution of ‘old flags’. I’ll factor in there’s a bunch of flags where a curator has indeed responded, but they asked for more information or feedback yet then nothing back from the person who made the query. That said, many such replies were months later, i suspect likely long forgotten by the person who initiated. Some of those replies from the curator end were because thy didn’t feel they had relevant expertise but often tried to push conversation forward, or lacked access or knowledge of resources, etc. Sometimes the person making the query is far more informed than anyone who can answer!
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Yeah, there’s always the tension between being too hasty and making changes that staff end up having to revert, vs. being too cautious and leaving the issue stalled indefinitely. It’s easy for flags to sit for months or years because the one or two people who happened to see the flag decided in the moment on the latter option and then forgot about the flag (instead of e.g. coming back 2 weeks later and just making an executive decision).
I’ll admit as a curator I take a pretty lazy approach and don’t systematically go through flags or anything. When I’m browsing taxon pages for other reasons and there’s an open flag I’ll check it out, and it often is a situation like this where bumping the discussion or tagging someone helps push things along a bit. But there are also many situations where I forget about it after that and it didn’t really help.