The list has grown to over 800 entries over the weekend, I’m plugging away, but it is slow for one person.
Many of the updates seem to be of marine gastropods being imported from EoL. I’ve noted several issues:
the longstanding issue if duplicate genera being imported is still going on
some of these are extinct
most problematically as I have just discovered, EoL appears to be well behind in keeping in synch with MolluscaBase which we usually defer to for taxonomy here so many deprecated names are being brought in which is creating a right old mess,
Additionally, there are a good number of subfamilies, tribes etc that have been imported in other areas, that at some point need to be tackled, with the big issue of course being populating them and finding sources to manage these kinds of levels.
Any curator looking for a task is welcome to try and help.
i want to help, i already flagged a bunch because they were misspelled duplicate taxa and i’m unsure what to do in this case, swap to the correct taxon or just inactivate? it’s just straight up misspelled names that i can’t find in literature, they can’t really be considered synonyms, should they be kept as such?
Those should be swapped into the correct taxon. Swaps aren’t only for synonyms, they can be used for any time when a taxon is actually a different one.
The number of ungrafted taxa has suddenly ballooned to just under 600, from hovering around 100 for the last few months.
To keep up with the sheer volume I’ve started to just inactivate ungrafted taxa that were added more than two or three weeks prior and have no observations and no flags. It has become impractical to research and correctly curate them, due to the sheer amount of time needed.
I have been contacting users who add a high volume of taxa that become ungrafted and asking them to please only add taxa that they intend to make observations of in the immediate future.
Does anyone have any better suggestions on how to tackle this?
The big question here is why the auto importer is failing to graft so many genera. If it were working properly, it is not an impact.
I’ve done several hundred over the past few days, but I’m not keeping up with their creation.
I’ve been hesitant to attack all the tribes, subfamilies etc. not because finding their parent is tough, but finding reliable accessible sources for their children is
Unless the site has introduced, or has a policy on this of which I am unaware, I’m not sure we should be discouraging users from adding new valid taxa.
If a user is interested in a particular area and is willing to volunteer their personal time to enter the data, I don’t see that as a bad thing.
We should be encouraging the site staff to as quickly as possible allocate some developer time to figure out what has gotten broken in the auto uploader to cause all these ungrafted imports.
I think ‘valid’ is the key word here, and these are not always so.
I didn’t have a better idea to deal with it in the immediate future. Extra developer time would be excellent, but does not solve the issue in any kind of realistic horizon (not that asking users to slow down does, either, but might help slow down the deluge).
I think invalidating the taxa could lead to further issues, if you don’t have time to do the research then it might just be better to let someone else do it.