Make captive/cultivated not automatically "no ID needed"

Feature Requests
106

I’ve been thinking about all this and here’s an idea for how to address the various issues that have come up:

The problem I see with dividing up Casual grade is that currently it performs two overlapping functions (which have already been discussed above):

  1. to designate lower quality observations
  2. to take the observation out of the Identify pool (a function shared with Research Grade).

If you split up Casual then you’d need to address both of those functions.

Based on both recent and older discussions related to the nuances of the different grade labels that apply to observations and how they affect the visibility, perception, and identifications of affected observations, I think these grade labels would help:

  • “Casual” (observations without media but with metadata)
  • “Not Wild” (captive animals, cultivated plants etc.)
  • “Missing Metadata” (observations without essential metadata)

Based on discussion above it also seems like it would be helpful to have the “Needs ID” and “Community Consensus/Reviewed/Identified (AKA Research Grade)”* system work more independently from the wild/not wild system.

*(I’m going to just call this “Community Consensus” from here)

So “Not Wild” aren’t in the ID pool by default, but you can choose to filter for them. Once you filter for them, they act as Needs ID in that they leave the filtered pool once a ~community consensus (>2/3 agreement) is reached.

  • Both wild and “Not Wild” observations can get the “Community Consensus” status, so the new equivalent to “Research Grade” becomes observations that have that status and are also not “Casual”/“Not Wild”/“Missing Metadata”.
    That sounds complicated as described, but it would be easy to tell by looking at observations because they would just have the one green “Community Consensus” label and not have any of the other labels.

“Casual” (no media) and “No Metadata” observation would continue to function as current Casual observations do with regards to the ID pool.

There are 2 edge cases I see which don’t fit well into these categories:

  • One is observations of fossils etc. (fails “recent evidence of an organism” in the Data Quality Assessment).
  • The other is organisms that have a community consensus, but are too high level to qualify for Research Grade (family or higher).

We want a way to remove those from the ID pool, but they don’t fit well into the previous categories. We could add 2 more grades, something like “Ancient” and “Unidentifiable”, or we could force them into the new “Casual” category.

When you’re choosing what to include in a Collection project, you would by default want to have normal “Community Consensus” and “Needs ID” included, but ones marked “Not Wild” excluded. You’d then have the option of including the other 2-4 categories but would rarely want to.

Downsides to having more of these categories? They add complexity to the filters, but the filters are already pretty complex already. They also add complexity to graphs and statistics, but those seem overly-simplistic at the moment. The current system mostly works as is for most users, but for people who focus on the edge cases it’s frustrating.

I’m sure there are other potential ways of addressing all of these questions; this is just my synthesis to put it out there.

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