Sometimes you see a comment along with an ID that helps you to understand how the ID was made or that expands your understanding of the ant in question. I love the feature where you can nominate such IDs. And I also find the “Identification Tips” panel on species pages where you can look at all of the IDs about a species very helpful.
I only wish it were possible to nominate comments that aren’t IDs too. Sometimes a user will give some important information in a comment in response to an ID dispute or question. This won’t show up in the ID tips and that seems like a bit of loss.
Also, slightly related, what does “cf” mean? I know it’s Latin for “compare” but compare to what? I don’t understand.
When you’re not definitively sure about an identification, you add that to the binomial.
I have asked to be able to nominate comments which are not included with the ID.
Part of the issue is that the system is automated. While it is blindingly obvious to a human that John’s comment belongs to his preceding ID – we would need a dedicated space to link to the taxon.
John’s comment applies to That species
Please check out the Discussion on the topic about the ID tips feature:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/new-search-and-sort-tool-for-identifying-identification-tips/80268
There’s pretty extensive discussion of adding tips from IDs vs. comments there. Since the other part of the OP’s question about what cf means has been answered and the thread above is still open for conversation, I’m going to set this thread to close. Please add any additional comments about this topic to the existing thread above.
I have not even begun to fully explore the new feature, but when I run across useful standalone comments like you describe, I consider them for this project.
(edit to add: oops, sorry if I am not meant to add here. But that was all I was going to say, addressing the OP’s original situation, not comment on that discussion which is far above my head.)
I use cf. to mean “compare to this species to see a similar example, but I’m not suggesting it’s actually this species.” For example “Catocala cf. retecta” means “I’m sure it’s a Catocala. I don’t know what species. Catocala is a massive genus, and yours looks similar to retecta. But don’t interpret this as me suggesting that this moth is retecta, because there are lots of similar options”.
I see cf. used in two ways in Britain. Firstly as above, referring to an individual to mean this specimen looks like species X but might not be. But it also gets used in checklists as a taxonomic limbo, to indicate that there is a taxon which is close to species X but isn’t species X and hasn’t been formally named yet.
I can sense this is about to be split off into a separate discussion.