Description of need:
It is difficult to obtain input from the community regarding drafted taxon changes, especially if people do not respond to mentions and if experts are not very active on the site. People often do not know about taxon changes until after they occur, when a dashboard notification is sent. People do not usually see this “heads up” on a taxon page that is an input for a taxon change draft:
Feature request details:
When a taxon change is drafted, send a notification to all users who would receive a notification if the change was committed. It could look like something like this:
Maybe the icon could be different so it doesn’t look as similar to the current notifications. Alternatively, the notification could look more like the above “heads up” banner.
Other possibilities to make this request more complicated:
Only the top IDers and/or observers (3, 5, 10) could be notified. I think at least IDers should be notified.
Curators could be given the option to send a notification on the draft.
Curators could choose who to send the notification to (top IDers, top observers, etc.).
Notify users associated with output taxa as well (i.e. people associated with split outputs but not inputs that wouldn’t get the notification otherwise).
I personally don’t love any of these additions, but I could see them being helpful in some situations.
I know there is a supposed notifications revamp in the works, so I’m not sure how pertinent this request is, but I haven’t heard about any updates about that for several years.
They aren’t new. You get them after the fact, but only on the dashboard. There is no push notification at the top. You might be able to subscribe to emails as well.
With the current workflow one expects to be able to work on the draft until it’s committed. Change the type, edit the description, etc. That could become messy if everybody gets notified as soon as the draft is saved. Perhaps there should be an additional step required, maybe
Just because multiple curators might be editing at the same time? That seems unlikely to be an issue, and it would be just as likely if you specifically mentioned top IDers.
That’s sort of what I was suggesting here.
Unless you mean the draft couldn’t be edited after it was published? Only deleted?
Ahhh I see I see, I didn’t know that. I get so many dashboard notifications that anything there quickly becomes drowned out unfortunately so I’ve never seen one
I thought of this yesterday, and I’m happy to see someone else has already proposed it.
My only addition is that I think this should be an opt in notification. The majority of users probably aren’t looking to delve into the nitty gritty of taxonomy discussions and opt in notification should significantly reduce the notification load to the relatively few people who are interested.
Perhaps it could be opt out. Part of why I think this is helpful is to reach experts who aren’t very active. They might not know to opt in. And everyone already gets notified for taxon changes after the fact, but only on the dashboard.
Cross-posting: I’m still waiting on some proposed resolution of the notification issue. The concensus-building of having multiple curators vote for a taxon change is useful and I support it, but without a notification system, that creates a dynamic of requiring the OP of a proposed change or subsequent reviewers to solicit (more) votes. Having some type of notification system of a proposed change, based on some metric of number of observations or identifications of relevant taxa, would grease the wheels towards achieving any required vote threshhold.
For example, a notification might be automatically sent out to the top, say, five Identifiers of a given taxon that a proposed change has been posted. Just one notification once to up to five Identifiers, no more. No notifications to subsequent voters or commentors unless they were @-ed. A notification would be targeted ONLY to the taxon subject to the proposed change but no higher or lower taxonomic levels–that could result in massive numbers of notifications.
Based on the news today that a curator voting system is being introduced for certain taxa, I think a curator should be notified of a taxon change in a taxon they follow (if the voting system applies to that taxon) so that they can go and vote!
Until there is a way to follow draft taxonomic changes and not observations, that won’t work for me. I’d love to get notifications about draft taxonomic changes but I don’t want my feed swamped in a bunch of observations.
