For taxon changes that require staff, how do we actually pass them off to staff?

Curators
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When a taxon change to a taxon with more than 200,000 observations has consensus to be implemented, how do we actually request for it to be implemented? Is there some designated staff person for us to ping or some other workflow we’re supposed to follow in those cases? I couldn’t find any documentation about this.

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2

On the taxon page, there’s a dropdown menu titled “Curation” – on that menu, there’s a spot to “Flag for Curation”

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I’m talking about changes that already have flags and the discussion in the flag has consensus to move forward, but the action can’t be taken because it requires staff priviledges.

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4

I would email staff and/or tag loarie.

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5

Yeah, I suggest tagging or messaging loarie.

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6

I tried pinging @loarie, but no response. Is anyone else able to help with such requests?

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7

can you share an example URL?

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Oh hey Scott! Hope I’m not being a pest! https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/616388.

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@loarie - Just wondering if it would be possible to move forward with https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/616388.

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10

I’m beginning to be tired of the gentle approach falling on deaf ears. There’s a flag with discussion, context and proposal for next steps, all it needs is a commitment for resolution. The practicalities of such an update is something that any of the vast multitude of even the most inexperienced curators could enact, but of course, any subsequent steps would be best done at discretion and timeline of the management

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11

Just adding a comment as if not these posts get closed automatically, this issue isn’t resolved.

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12

I’ve removed the timer for this topic, so it shouldn’t close automatically.

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13

We’re having difficulty getting staff to respond to this flag also: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/763383

Is this common, or just a one-off? It seems like there needs to be a more official way to report taxon curation issues that require staff. I’ll try a message to @loarie since tagging hasn’t resulted in a response.

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14

I think there needs to be a different “staff response required flag”, so they don’t get buried in hundreds of other basic flags for curation or such that curators can handle. Like a “Flag for Staff” escalation that’ll ask you if you’re sure, etc.

That would also enable a dashboard for loarie and other staff to only see critical matters in one convenient place. That would probably significantly help these issues piling up and requiring staff mentions for attention constantly.

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15

I think situations like this are quite upsetting for curators and identifiers. This really shouldn’t be the way it is. Taking 2 months to revert a massive breaking change is too long. Not to mention that in this timespan, a bunch of new observations already appeared. It would not be an issue if we were able to have staff pay attention to such requests quickly and for them having a mechanism to revert it instantly. Instead, what we had is that first response from staff only appeared one month after the flag was created, and solving of the issue started after another one month.

For mammals, or maybe even for majority of well known taxa, I would even suggest having the waiting period practice (such as currently in vascular plants?) to further prevent such disasters.

For this flag it was obvious that there was a disagreement and no prior discussion, so it shouldn’t have waited any longer.

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