I agree that there’s almost never a need to get into an argument with other iNat users, and there’s no need to fault, ridicule or coerce anyone. Everyone is here voluntarily, and almost all users have very positive intentions. If I’m lucky enough to believe I know something more about some organism, it’s an opportunity for me to try to share that knowledge. Certainly, I’ve learned a great deal from others who helped suggest IDs better than my initial attempts.
However, I do think there’s a valid case to tag other identifiers and politely ask them to review previous IDs. This needs to be phrased right, as there’s no benefit to people “piling on” to support IDs they can’t independently justify. But the current notification settings on iNat simply make it way too easy for people to overlook observations where others have added conflicting IDs.
In general I tag identifiers when I add an ID that disagrees with theirs (and I try to provide a rationale). If I come across an observation where it seems there are likely incorrect IDs and people haven’t responded in a month or more, I’ll often add something like this: “Hi @username. Did you get a chance to review the suggested IDs for this observation?”
Sometimes identifiers may be too busy to keep up with notifications. I know it happens to me, especially during finals weeks and other busy times at work, or while traveling without reliable computer access. Tagging can help but those notifications, too, can slip through the cracks. I know how to get my maverick IDs and clean them up, but I wished there was an equally easy way to check on “pre-maverick” IDs - the ones where someone added a disagreeing ID after mine but there aren’t enough total IDs yet to make anything maverick. I bet I’ve got a good number of those that I missed notifications for.
This will be much easier when new notification system comes, if you can disable ageeing ids on non-yours observations all notifications you get in a tab for others’ are valuable ones.
One of the problems with links to new papers (or any, for that matter) is that they are often paywall protected, and are not much use to us amateurs. I try to read papers if I can, but a lot of times I cannot. @becksnyc If someone replies to an ID in the comments, it prompts me to make a search for their reasoning. I would prefer that people say why (and I do myself), but such are the vagaries of working with a community. I have met some people who were brusque, but fortunately, not rude.
I tend to refer to hard-copy field guides, and use the citation shorthand, but I can see how that might not be entirely useful. For instance, if I say, “Niehaus and Ripper 1976 described…” that is a lot fewer words than saying, “In the Peterson Field Guide to Pacific States Wildflowers by Niehaus and Ripper (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), you can find…”
The problem is that not all such books are easily (or at all) found online, and not all library systems have them in their collections. I grew up in a time before there were online identification materials, and went to college initially when finding scientific papers tended to involve thumbing through the multiple tomes of Science Citation Index to find the information to write on the library’s periodical request form. Hard-copy field guides were much more necessary in those days, and so they are what I know best. Unfortunately, at today’s level of technology, they may not be much use to amateurs anymore, either.
Have you tried a full title search? I have found papers behind a journal paywall for $$ that are public domain on the usda.gov (United States Department of Agriculture) Forest Service website because the paper was written by gov’t employees on gov’t time! The Forest Service publishes a lot of papers on nature from species to ecosystems, great resource.
As an example here is a link to the Pacific Northwest publications https://www.fs.usda.gov/pnw/search-publications-list?tid=General%20Technical%20Report%20(GTR)&page=99
There are ways around paywalls to find papers. E-mail the author directly and request a reprint of their paper. Join ResearchGate (it’s free) where many papers by members are posted. See if the author has a professional page, such as through their professional/academic affiliation, where PDFs of their papers are often posted. For old literature, where the author might not be still alive, you can often access papers via JSTOR without having a paid subscription. As a last resort, you might make a trip to your local university’s science library and access their paper journals.
I’ve learned that with a Google Scholar search, links on the R side of the page indicate ‘open’. And often I do use the full title search. It’s kind of gratifying to receive one reply instead of thousands!
I copy and paste the paper title from wherever I’ve found it and drop it into Google Scholar to do a search. Often an accessible PDF will show up, such as on the author’s publication site or in ResearchGate. At minimum, you’ll likely find the author’s email address through your search and most authors are very willing to share their work. I’ve never once paid for an article, there’s always a way to get a PDF copy.
Here university libraries have access to a huge number of electronic journals. Registered students can download pdfs. I guess that is the case in many countries. So if you know a helpful biology student …
If you’re willing to make some contributions to Wikipedia (500 edits over at least 6 months), you can qualify for membership of the Wikipedia Library, which includes a free subscription to most JSTOR content that would typically require a paid account. That’s something I’ve found surprisingly useful.
Combine those two with the resources that @jnstuart cites and I’d say that 90% of botanical papers are freely accessible somehow. When research was published in a textbook or a thesis, those are typically much harder to track down without access to an academic library.