ThankyouThankyouThankyouThankyouThankyouThankyou!!!
This is SO helpful! I especially like that it is written in such an accessible style. And the follow-on discussion is excellent as well. I have pondered many of these and have handled some situations rather less well than others. Ah, welcome to the human species lol.
So how do the site stats handle withdrawn IDs? Are they accounted for in any way? Does withdrawing an ID have any impact beyond that particular observation?
This point talks about doing research on the suggested taxon. Is it worth suggesting checking the commenter’s profile? If the commenter is the world expert on that taxon, it’s probably pretty safe to accept their suggestion. If all you find is “John Q. Public is a naturalist!” (or even a world expert in a completely different taxon) you probably want to do a little more research. Or is this getting too close to suggesting some people’s opinions are worth more than others’? Which I suppose they are, but there’s probably a nicer way to put it!
And a suggestion to add - I just realized that in identifying a sea anemone as Tribe Anemoneae I had consigned it to being a buttercup lol. Somewhere (maybe in the google group?) someone mentioned that “someone”/the great “they” somewhere were keeping a list of taxa that have been used for more than one organism/genus/whatever. If it’s not too long, perhaps we could include it? Or link to it? My guess (stab in the dark) is that there aren’t too many, and becoming familiar with the list could avoid a lot of embarassment!
Suggestion 2: do you want to expand the “hard/impossible to identify/verify to species level” part to include the comments about how different kinds of research look for different levels of granularity, and observations may serve many purposes? I keep thinking about a comment on the google group from someone who was responding to a comment about the undesirability of observations of flowers in gardens by saying that she had her class studying the activity of honeybees (I think), and the bees really didn’t care if the flower was cultivated/wild/native/imported/escapee/you get the picture - the class needed to know what flowers were around. Which is not to say I think we should encourage observations of potted aloe plants on someone’s apartment (flat) window sill, but again, you get the picture.
I think I’ve finally run out of things to say. Thank you again for doing!