The two big blockers, in my mind, are:
- Where do I put information I want to share?
- Where do I look to find information others have shared?
The natural answer to the first question is to put it where others will look for it and notice it, so essentially the two questions have the same answer. After that, it all comes down to hassles and obstacles which have to be overcome by content authors and editors to get anything visible done at all.
I think the most obvious place to look for information about (identifying) a taxon, on iNaturalist, is the taxon page. BugGuide does something like this, where there are tips for distinguishing species within a genus on genus pages, tips for distinguishing genera within a family on family pages, and so on, and detailed descriptions on species pages. When there are guides which cut across taxa, they’re linked to from all the relevant taxon pages.
Finding identification tips by visiting taxon pages on BugGuide is a lot easier than searching observations for rare identifier comments (something BugGuide and iNaturalist have in common). Having an obvious place to look shouldn’t be underestimated.
As for creating and hosting content, I’m probably more comfortable with the process than 90% of identifiers out there (I know how to edit photos, I have a degree in Computer Science, and I work with web servers as part of my day job), so I may have a warped perspective on what the common obstacles are, but I’ll try. I think normal people overwhelmingly prefer “What You See Is What You Get”-style editors vs directly writing HTML or Markdown or any other code-like things, no matter how simplified. This can be mitigated somewhat by having side-by-side code editing and result windows. WYSIWYG editors are also preferred over “Wizard”-style setup dialogs with multiple steps. People like to get immediate feedback from every change they make so they can experiment, rather than getting railroaded through a whole series of forms where it isn’t entirely clear what the consequences of each action will be. A lot of people will give up halfway through a Wizard.
It’s rare that a single person is able to create a fully detailed guide by themselves. I therefore think it’s critical that many users be able to edit and contribute to the same same content pages. Vandalism might become a problem, but it’s a much easier problem to manage than having zero content or masses of low-quality duplicate content which can’t be merged or improved. The Wiki model, content editable by (almost) everyone, seems to be better than all the other alternatives in the long run.
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. I’ve said it before (and elaborated). I don’t think I’ve emphasized, before now, how much the lack of bare-bones, free-form tools prevents things from getting started. Every thing a new person has to learn is an obstacle to them ever getting anything done.
I also haven’t emphasized how important it is for there to be an obvious place to start looking for information. Even a search box can be an obstacle if you don’t know what to search for. The flip side of this is that it provides an obvious place where working on content will have a big effect. Nothing’s more demoralizing than putting a ton of effort into something that you then realize almost no-one will ever see. Nothing’s more motivating than knowing that lots of people will see your work (or knowing that lots of people are looking at something incomplete).
So: set up a wiki. Put it somewhere obvious, like https://wiki.inaturalist.org or https://inaturalist.org/wiki. Import the content from taxon articles into the taxon pages, like you already do for Wikipedia articles.