It is great how at least for some organisms, there’s an international, consensual taxonomic database able to function as a reference, and able to please taxonomists and amateurs alike. 
The grievance about taxonomic instabilities might stem more from groups whereby the situation is less idyllic; one of iNat’s weaknesses is a limited support for synonymy and parataxonomies (edit: see e.g. the post above mine), whenever consensus is less strong or reference databases have shortcomings.
In some ways, yes, because I have learned not to “waste” time as a curator on taxa with 0 observations. It’s not hurting anyone to leave it alone if no one is posting them.
I don’t think these criteria quite get at the heart of the problem. It’s worth looking at the list of all taxonomic changes committed to see how much curatorial activity is occurring, and largely unnoticed–it would be a bad idea to suddenly cut that off.
Most of the controversy I have seen revolves around vascular plant taxonomy, which is in a peculiar position. We have some taxa, particularly vertebrate orders, where there is a centralized external authority, down to species level, that updates on a regular schedule, which we usually follow very exactly. We have other groups (many invertebrates, fungi) where there is very little central authority, and the tree is evidently kept up by knowledgeable curators engaging with the literature.
Vascular plants are in a weird place. Right now, we have 16,776 “relationship unknown” taxa in vascular plants, which sounds terrible when contrasted with the 15,550 total taxon relationships for reptiles…but we have 288,718 taxon relationships for vascular plants, so that’s about 0.5% of the total.
We theoretically have a big central database in the form of POWO…but botanists (on and off iNat) don’t regard it as wholly definitive in quite the same way we treat the Clements checklist for birds. They take a very conservative approach to recognizing infraspecific taxa, among other things, and they’re probably also understaffed relative to the volume of taxonomic decisions they have to make. When we have a missing relationship, sometimes that does indicate that POWO got it right and we should be rearranging our taxonomy. However, sometimes it’s POWO that’s overlooked a piece of literature and needs to be updated, which they are good about doing, once it’s brought to their attention by correspondence.
Unfortunately, we have multiple curators who appear to be barreling along trying to “fix” the unknown relationships by setting up and executing swaps without any knowledge of the taxa involved and the relevant literature, and who are blowing off polite feedback suggesting that they wait before committing them. This is basically what’s called a scream test in IT, except that curators don’t actually have a way to reverse changes once they’ve committed them.
To be frank, I don’t think there’s a huge amount of low-hanging fruit in those ~17,000 unknown relationships. Curators have been working over our vascular plant taxonomy for years; when we see an unknown relationship there, that now suggests that there’s some underlying controversy or disagreement, rather than lack of attention. I think we should amend the curator guide to tell curators not to make taxon changes solely on the basis of aligning with POWO; there should be some sort of additional literature supplied to show that the problem really is on our end instead of in POWO.
Sorry, where can you see those 16K unknowns, on the suggested pages there is nothing https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_framework_relationships/365465 I can see
Click on the link ‘View taxonomy details’, “Relationship unknown count: 16795” appears.
Is there a way to browse taxon flags and see if there are any that one can address? I have been thinking of applying for curator, but I would first need to propose a taxon change that I want to make. If resolving existing flags can meet this requirement, that would be great, but I would need to find out which flags I can potentially resolve.
Example: Any taxon flag for Passifloreae (already resolved or not)
Thanks, It seems there are many with no observations, hybrid formulas, varieties that are cultivars, strait forward orthographic variants and incomplete splits or lumps where some are in one genus and some left behind in the other, so there is still a lot of low hanging fruit which I would not think controversial.
edit: Oops, sorry, didn’t know it was against the Forum Rules to link to a very good and informative debate between curators under a flag. Too bad, the arguments were excellent and conversation extremely polite, but hey.
We have a single not very active curator here on the island with 2000 endemic plant species and even more endemic invertebrates. So for most endemics we depend on taxon swaps and taxon additions from people who never observed these taxa themselves. Does remind a little of the old colonial period, i know…
I’d rather taxon swaps just took multiple people’s input to approve.
Just noting that we started an experiment for vascular plant curation that involves a waiting period. It won’t fix everything, but it will be interesting to see how it goes.