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Step 1: This morning I saw an identification for one of my observations, but this evening it had gone without trace. Should this happen? I don’t think there was any controversial about my white climbing rata.
Just to clarify, are you saying that someone else had added an identification of Metrosideros diffusa (in addition to the one you already added), but then when you checked later this identification had gone?
If yes, then in all likelihood someone added an ID, but then deleted it, presumably because they second-guessed their ID/weren’t confident confirming your ID. Typically when this occurs, many users will simply withdraw the ID and thus its existence will still remain visible on the observation, but sometimes users choose to delete it instead (generally due to a perception that having a visible incorrect ID will reflect poorly on them [which it shouldn’t, everyone makes mistakes])
I leave my mistakes visible although I may comment on them! I work with Carex sedges, so mistakes are inevitable, especially when using only photographs. As someone mentioned, mistakes are part of science. After all, we build on the work of others. I’m glad I don’t have to name all the plants and animals I find, like Linnaeus did! Someone already made some mistakes and helped sort things out for me. On this website, I often comment that I may be wrong if I use a photo to provide an ID and can’t see things perfectly clearly. But mostly, I am reminded of the 1990s when I would send a list of Carex IDs to Tony Reznicek and he would graciously returned a list of corrected IDs. Was I wrong with some IDs? Most likely. Are my mistakes still included on the plant labels??? Certainly! No one is going to white out my original IDs. Does Tony make mistakes? I think he would say “Yes!” Have I found any? Maybe once! My point? Making mistakes is part of good science. Without mistakes, I could not learn neither Carex nor the Chinese language!
Or from realizing that they had a misclick. That is a different kind of error than a misidentification.
I delete my misclicks, I withdraw my misidentifications. But that wouldn’t look like an ID just disappearing, because after I delete my misclick, I add the ID that I intended.
I delete mistakes if there’s nothing I can add to the observation, it automatically unsubscribes you from it, I hope people don’t really percieve each deleted id as an attempt of staying with clean reputation.
