Most gazapatonic misidentification?

[DianaStuder]

There are lots of earlier posts around homonyms.

@bobmcd

From an earlier post (Homonyms happens) in another topic, I talked about these kind of entries into Life. Since then I have learned so much more about homonym and near homonym errors. Much of these errors are what I have called mis-clicks where the identifier is knowledgeable to the point that they can type in the name but the drop down menu trips them up with with the little thumbnails that can be hard to discern or the wrong taxon shows up first or the mouse hits the wrong one - sometimes the more prolific the identifier the more errors - but when the identifications are in the mid range of six digits and most of those are leading, what are the odds?

Even more interesting is when a common name was typed in and a homonym is picked forcing the ID to State of matter Life - this is a rabbit hole I go down once in a while when I can’t believe the identifier selected something so off base so I go to the taxonomies and try to figure out where there is overlap in common name because I believe they knew what was correct but things got messed up - more of a challenge when there is another language involved.

Open feature request from 2019

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/display-major-categories-in-taxon-name-choices-to-better-disambiguate-similar-names/1766

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/homonym-disambiguation/40664

@lotteryd

One more suggestion: If you know your plant’s genus has a homonym in another kingdom, look for an example that will most obviously present itself as “a plant” when appearing as a tiny thumbnail in the suggestion dropdown.

Ideally, someone should also choose a similarly clear “in this kingdom” example for the other homonym.

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/taxons-with-same-names-show-closest-on-top/51730/6

And @jeanphilippeb has some journal posts around Not-quite-homonyms Use scientific names, they say - none of the confusion you get with common names