How to deal with observations that attain research grade, though only ID of the genus should be made?

[kiwifergus]

@fffffffff @pmeisenheimer

this from Scott Loarie way back when the disagreements were being looked at (in June of 2019!!!):

@loarie

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

Branch Disagreements
Regarding ‘branch disagreements’, upupa-epops’s use case Let’s say someone posted a very blurry picture of a ladybug... is the one we had in mind. While we agree it should be rare and backed up by the community and comments, the idea is that there should be some mechanism for the community to role back the taxon that an observation is ‘filed under’ if the observer is not responsive and if the community consensus is that while it could be Seven-spotted Ladybug its really impossible to tell and we should err on the side of caution.

Regarding @Pisum and other’s concern that we’re lowering the bar with branch disagreements, eg: note that with the proposed new prompt, you’ll no longer need to know that there’s no way anyone could confirm / deny, you’ll just need to think that there’s no way anyone could confirm or deny. that’s a slightly lower bar for disagreement. those who ignored the letter of the current prompt to disagree would now have the new prompt wording on their side. the idea was actually to raise the bar (ie make it rarer for people to ‘branch disagree’). The concern with the existing ‘evidence’ based language is that if @charlie observed a plant and ID’d it to species because he’s an ‘expert’ but his photo didn’t capture all the characters necessary to identify it to species, someone else shouldn’t roll it back to genus merely because the ‘evidence was not sufficient’. The ‘I don’t think we can be certain…’ language was meant to capture the spirit that the community doesn’t think anyone is intentionally/knowingly advocating for that species which would eliminate the charlie situation (we can be reasonably certain charlie knows what he’s doing) but would cover for example, someone blindly clicking on a computer vision suggestion (in most of these cases the community can ascertain that the precision associated with such an ID wasn’t intentional).

Again, the idea is that the ‘branch disagreement’ lever should be very rarely pulled, so we agree with concerns about this lever being over-used. But we think the use case articulated by upupa-epops is legitimate, especially if the identification in question makes the observation sufficiently unusual/unlikely that it decreases the credibility of the site (even though it ‘could’ be that taxon) and the observer is unresponsive. But if folks think this is too niche a use case for a tool that could be broadly misused, thats fair.

note the bits about “should be rarely used”, “when there is community agreement”, etc etc…