As mentioned above, I have been engaged in some direct communication with @carrieseltzer about how we can move forward on trying to deal with the backlog of national and regional conservation statuses that exist. We would like to propose the following guidelines be added to the curator guide, specifically for adding net new statuses (ie only for cases where the data has apparently not been entered before). These guidelines would not apply to existing entries or call for any changes to data, conservation statuses or obscuring already done.
We would propose, for new entries:
- any species regionally or nationally classified as Critically Endangered (CR) or Endangered (EN) be initially loaded as obscured
- any species regionally or nationally classified as Vulnerable (VU), Near Threatened (NT), Least Concern (LC) or Data Deficient (DD) be initially loaded as open
- that in all cases, the existing process by which a species may be reviewed to change its obscuring still applies, if there is a justifiable argument that there are benefits and/or no risk to unobscuring a species, that remains acceptable, likewise there may be arguments to obscure a species with a less serious status
- if a national or regional list happens to use a different terminology than the IUCN codes, the curator should use their best judgement to map the ones used to an IUCN equivalent and then apply the above
- the curator doing the load should not unilaterally decide there is an acceptable argument to change the obscuring and simply change it. Rather, in keeping with the current process for existing data, they should initiate a community review/discussion via a flag on the relevant species page.