How to draw attention to unresolved flags

Curators
1

As a non-curator on here, I’m curious what is the best way to draw attention to an unresovled flag. I often come across flags that I made months or even years ago that got overlooked, and my method has been to tag a particular curator who seems responsive… but this particular curator asked me to kindly not do so.

It’d be great if there was a little button I could click to bump a flag to the top of the list (at least for those that are of a certain vintage). If I leave a new comment on that flag, does it become more visible to curators? Or do I actually have to tag someone directly for it to get noticed?

[Edit: I’ll add that this is referring to taxonomy-related flags]

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2

It depends on the type of flags too.
Copyright infringement flags, for example, are only resolved if there was no infringement.
If there was infringement, it remains unresolved

[Edit: Ah, I see the new addendum that the topic is specifically referring to taxonomy flags.]

3

Tagging a curator is your best bet. Just be judicious (and flexible!) in your demands of the time of others.

Doing the legwork ahead of time also helps. The nature of the work depends on the nature of the tag.

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I can only speak for myself as a curator and what I do here, so this should only be taken as my personal comments>

  • your fish flags can only be resolved by the fishes curator, they are a locked taxa, no other curators can act on them
  • I personally am really leery about dealing with flags related to common names and asking they be removed. It is very difficult to review all the possible guides etc where a name may be used. Additionally, if someone wants that name there, if it gets deleted, in my experience, they just add it back as soon as they notice it is gone. It becomes kind of a game of whackamole.
  • there are some coral and other sealife I see. I will try and look at these, but again when the flag is stating that the ‘normal’ online references such as Worms etc are wrong, many curators dont have access to all the other books, papers etc to try and research it.
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Is there a list of who the curators are for certain taxa? I didn’t know there was any exclusivity.

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https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#authorities

What it does not do however is indicate which are locked, there are a few groups listed as having curators, such as plants, and marine inverts which are actually open for all curators to work on…

The list of ones that are for sure locked down to the listed taxa curator(s) that I know of are : mammals,birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, odonata, and spiders. I’m not actually sure about mantids and stick insects.

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