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.
On the taxon page, there’s a dropdown menu titled “Curation” – on that menu, there’s a spot to “Flag for Curation”
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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I would email staff and/or tag loarie.
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Yeah, I suggest tagging or messaging loarie.
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I tried pinging @loarie, but no response. Is anyone else able to help with such requests?
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can you share an example URL?
Oh hey Scott! Hope I’m not being a pest! https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/616388.
@loarie - Just wondering if it would be possible to move forward with https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/616388.
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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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Just adding a comment as if not these posts get closed automatically, this issue isn’t resolved.
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I’ve removed the timer for this topic, so it shouldn’t close automatically.
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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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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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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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I’m just going to add a comment here as other threads like this auto-close after discussion goes quiet.
On the original question, my impression of “how do we pass them off …” is that we cannot.
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It would be nice to have a flag or ticket system just for taxon changes that need staff. Primarily so that they do not get lost and forgotten about. It’s easy to do that especially when there is no central place for flags / issues that need staff in order to proceed. Maybe a feature request can be made for that, it seems i’m not the only one to think of an idea like this as it’s been mentioned before.
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This thread doesn’t have a timer to close as noted above in a mod’s reply to you previously:
On a related note, please do not “bump” threads to keep them active if there’s nothing consequential to add/organic conversation. Thread timer settings are intentional choices and help to keep forum activity manageable. Threads can always be reopened to add something substantial via a request to mods, or threads can be combined.
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First, @cthawley thanks for pointing out about the timer, indeed helpfully revised by jdmore, you’re right here, i didn’t see that just now, and i’d entirely forgotten that after another six months.
Well, what i’d like to add to discussion here is to highlight another six months without any apparent progress. Feel free to consider it ‘bumping’ the thread, i call it wanting feedback on the discussion above and from statements findable though some initial discussion on the flagged issue linked above - where a staff reply was “we need to make some changes on the back end to make this more efficient but I made an engineering ticket and will keep updated here”. Six months later, any update?
Else, I liked suggestion above by @zoology123 where issues involving, or rather requesting staff input are greatly limited to a few select issues. These are especially where curators hit an impasse, e.g. chaos of conflicting opinions on issues needing a central decisive statement (which IMO are often handled very well by community support). Here this whole question highlights the rare taxonomic issues where we (i mean volunteer curators and the community) hit an impasse about practicalities.
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