How to go about spreading awareness on taxon swaps

General
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The recent swap to move the hairy woodpecker out of Dryobates has left a whole lot of incorrect IDs. Most IDs at the genus level for Dryobates (at least in the general New England area) are now invalid, as they were mostly meant as “this is either a hairy or downy woodpecker”. There are a gigantic number of such observations, almost 700 in just the predefined “New England” region. What is the best way to rectify this, just spamming comments with family level IDs? That kind of work would take a very large amount of effort and time but I can not think of another way.

Edit to add relevant link: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/no-automatic-taxonomic-change-for-hairy-woodpecker/72843

Evidently I should have looked harder before posting but I feel like this topic is different enough in scope from the linked post to keep it around

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i don’t know if you need to spam comments with the IDs, but it does seem like going through with others and doing a post-split correction of genus-level IDs would be the right thing to do. i think that’s basically what happened with Astur / Accipiter, based on https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/accipiter-split-has-resulted-in-lots-of-conflicting-ids/57837.

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Thank you for the link! I couldn’t find that thread but yeah that seems to answer my question.

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is this a situation that can be helped by thinning the genus and pushing things back to a coarser rank with another swap?

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There is a draft taxon change to resolve this issue without the need to manually make new IDs at the family level. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/166083

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The aforementioned genus split was committed yesterday and has finished processing, so all the (couple tens of thousands of) preexisting genus-level Dryobates IDs in North America should now be shifted to a higher taxon, no longer conflicting with hairy woodpecker IDs.

edit: and yep, for future reference, in cases where a swap (of a subspecies to a species, of a species to a different genus, etc.) leaves a very large number of conflicting IDs of the former parent taxon like this, you shouldn’t need to spread awareness of the change to try to get people to change hundreds or thousands of IDs manually—these situations are typically far more convenient to deal with via a further taxon split like this one, which will automatically reassign conflicting IDs of the former parent taxon to something more appropriate; in cases where that sort of split needs to happen but hasn’t (and it isn’t already set up but there’s just a delay in committing it, as there was here), you can flag the parent taxon to suggest it

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