Thanks, I was more bewildered than anything (at first anyway). I’m open to differences of opinion provided there’s evidence to support another person’s conclusion. In cases where we’ve moved on from subjective observation into community consensus on what the objective truth is at the species level, this is especially crucial.
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I’d settle for being able to paste in certain frequently used phrases with a hot key or something. I don’t mind copy/pasting something that’s specific to a species/group (with links to references, etc.) from my canned text. It’s all the generic text that’s a pain to have to type in every time. Phrases like “for reference, compare to:”, which I would then follow with a URL for a species specific web page that I’ve copied from my canned file.
see @dianastuder’s workflow above which I think could be adapted for what you want
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Thanks, I will look into this.
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As someone who does lots of IDs in groups with many unidentifiable-from-photos species, I may be guilty of doing this sometimes. I try to leave some sort of copypasta if I’m bumping back a lot of the same genus at once, but I’m sure I miss plenty of them.
My philosophy is that I’ll give a detailed response to an ID I disagree with in direct proportion to the detail with which the original ID was explained. If I see a CV-suggested ID and an “agree” with no explanation given by either user, for a species that can’t presently be identified from photos alone, I don’t feel the need to give a detailed explanation as to why I’m bumping it back to genus or complex, as it doesn’t seem that much thought went into the original ID beyond just “that thumbnail seems to match”. If, on the other hand, I see an ID where someone says something like “I keyed it out with X resource” or “I compared to the photos on X website” or “I’m basing the ID on the following field marks”, then I feel I owe them an explanation as to why I disagree that the species-level ID isn’t warranted, as it’s clear that some thought and work went into the ID that they suggested.
I guess I just feel that the onus for defending an ID is on the person suggesting the more specific ID. I’ve had plenty of my own observations in taxa where I’m a novice (like plants) get bumped back to genus after I went with the CV suggestion and got an un-explained “agree”; I figure the implied message of the disagreement is “a species-level ID isn’t warranted from what’s showing here”, and I can live with that. If all I did was click the Suggested ID button, I don’t expect someone doing 500+ IDs a day to sit me down and explain why my ID isn’t warranted, unless I ask them for clarification. If I’m the one trying to claim a more specific ID than someone with more experience, I’m the one who owes them a persuasive argument, not the other way around. But I know not everyone agrees with this philosophy.
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Oh that sounds awful. Glad to hear they finally stopped though.
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