I was wondering if this kind of improvement was ever considered. Glad that I found your feature request!
I’d really love to see “withdrawn” replaced with “refined” where a user has started with a coarse but non-conflicting taxon and subsequently chosen a more narrow taxon (e.g. kingdom to family; genus to species within the genus; species to subspecies; etc…)
Such a display change could also allow a user’s initial ID to keep the “Improving” label" when the ID is subsequently refined. Removing that “Improving” acknowledgement seems to dismiss the initial contribution of the user if he or she updates on account of agreement with a refined taxon. The current treatment that just shows “ID Withdrawn” robs the user of that small acknowledgement. I would wonder if that might be keeping some people from refining their IDs, as people generally have a psychological need for acknowledgement, and some more so than others.
Another potential benefit that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned is that it might help to encourage users to guess less (when they are uncertain of the species ID) and encourage users to select broader initial taxa of which they are certain (which assists in allowing more knowledgable identifiers to see it). This way there’s no “penalty” nor negative label. Because let’s face it: for some, “ID Withdrawn” is seen as a negative label.
Recently there was a thread about “rampant guessing of IDs”. Although it is not something that I’m terribly worried about, one user noted how when a user is too specific and wrong, it often creates additional work for others:
My experience agrees with that. I see that happening occasionally (most often with correcting plants mis-IDed as either Oregon Grape or Cascade Oregon Grape).
Another piece of data to take into account is that the vast majority of identification is largely done by a very small number of frequent (often knowledgable) identifiers. According to iNat’s own data, the “top 1000 IDers contributed 70% of all IDs”. iNat should consider whether there’s any incentivizing behaviour that creates less or more work for frequent identifiers.
And since iNaturalist does, in many ways “gamify” citizen science, and since some people are “keeping score” (if only mentally), this would be an improvement that would recognize how the current features might be interacting with those aspects of participation. iNat is essentially using a sticker system, however there isn’t much acknowledgement that they’re doing so. Better to realize, if not acknowledge the type of system, and then try to eliminate any perverse incentives which the present implementation creates.
It’s a small encouragement to users to ID in a circumspect manner simply by not punishing it; that kind of inaction seems a small cost.