Genus level IDs showing up as kingdom level IDs

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/4854584
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Hi guys! I often do fungi IDs, and specifically look up kingdom-kingdom level observations, because that’s the path of least resistance, and I feel like I can improve the data the most there.
I’ve noticed many IDs identified down to a Genus level are still showing up as “fungi” despite no one disagreeing with them. I’ve noticed that once I agree with the genus, or state a class because I don’t know enough about the genus, things seem to update to the most accurate taxa stated, but it should have already been doing that before my ID.

Question: Is this a bug, or is this a relic from an older time? I’ve noticed most of these are older observations, and perhaps they didn’t auto-update 3 years ago?

What I see

probably “yes”

Next time you see this, try voting and unvoting something in the Data Quality Assessment section before posting another ID. It will probably flip to the genus ID.

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Just to confirm


Basically just thumbs down, then thumbs up something in here, and see if it refreshes?
Ill do that next time I see one of these and let you know if it works :)

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yep! exactly, or just press thumbs up, then press it again to unselect. as you say it basically refreshes the observation in the database.

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Found another one from 1 year ago. Didn’t work. I think the fact the other one was 3 years old was a coincidence, 1 year isn’t all that old.

Can you link / send screenshots (before adding any additional IDs) next time you run into it?

certainly. will probably happen today at some point while I’m on.

Other possibility is nicolegallup opted out of community ID, IDd to kingdom, and didn’t yet narrow the ID. I see that most often with fungi.

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Never considered anything like that. Perhaps I could message them and see if they checked any boxes like that. Would take away some of the guess work

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/41360394#activity_identification_93577209



Made sure to refresh the page and thumbs up “observation shows an organism”.
Not an old one this time.

Lol I could have cropped that better. Don’t need to know what I’m watching :P

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In this case it is because the new ID is at subspecies level. I don’t know exactly why, but a subspecies ID after the only other IDs are at a higher level (even at genus) stays at that higher level until a lower level ID is added. If someone ID’s it as Suidae, the observation taxon (and community taxon) will move to that. same if someone identifies it to genus or species level.

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Hmmm, strange. As long as the techie people know about the bugs, why, where and when they’re happening, hopefully they can figure it out soon :)
Didn’t wanna walk past something weird like that without letting people know.
I feel I’ve probably done all I can do from my end now. Thanks guys!

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The subspecies thing isn’t actually a bug, it’s working as intended. See more here.

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So the subspecies thing is normal afterall.
Any idea about the kingdom-genus ones?

Not if it’s recent. If you find another recent one and post the link, we can take a look.

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It looks like that first one reported is now showing up as genus instead of family, so I’ll close this report. The database/indexing errors are hard to troubleshoot but feel free to send further examples to help@inaturalist.org or open up a new bug report if you notice them.