I want to opt out of taxonomy changes, as they have made the site near unusable for database crossover already and i want to minimize future damage. I see you can do so on the website, but i am wondering if there is a way to opt out for new observations too. For instance, if lady fern is turned into “Athyriumasfdasgdgwhe gasasgeewehwaawjjjawwrjerfd”, i don’t want my old observations renamed but i don’t want my new observations of lady fern to have that name either. Is this an option?
i think you’re asking for conceptually the same thing as this: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/improving-inaturalists-nomenclature-taxonomy/36143. seems to me like it’s a stretch to try to handle parallel taxonomies in one system.
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Nah, you can do it in Excel. :-)
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i don’t want to drag into a debate here, but when the changes are near constant, like they are here, that ends up taking up a lot of time. Ultimately i know it doesn’t matter because no reasoning, valid or not, will satiate the thirst of the splitters and revisionists, so why i want this to work doesn’t matter too much. It would be nice to just have another option beyond the radical taxonomy policy that iNat has adopted.
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My basic proposal in the other thread is “have iNaturalist store the original ID from the observer in a form that will be easy to find and work with”. So if you have external data that is linked to iNaturalist based on that original ID from the observer, the relationship between the two data sets would be insulated from change in taxonomy on iNaturalist.
It wouldn’t solve all the problems, but it might be a meaningful improvement in your uses.
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Opting out of community ID helps in some cases, and presumably you’re already aware of that option… the main difficulty is that you can still only enter whatever name is considered accepted on iNaturalist at the time of upload.
yeah. and i don’t want to opt out from community ID just the rush of constant taxonomy change.
I do think your idea is intriguing though unlikely to be implemented. If i’d seen your thread i would have put this thread within that one and phrased it a little differently.
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Are these disruptive problems from taxonomic revisions mainly a botany issue? Many animal taxa are also going through a lot of flux (too many phylogenetic studies, some based on rather thin evidence) and there are certainly disagreements and parallel taxonomies, but I haven’t encountered much angst from the vertebrate zoologists. Of course there are fewer taxa to start with in vertebrates.
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Back when I was paying attention to herp taxonomy, the situation in the herp world was way worse than in botany.
Personally, I think the appropriate solution is to just build data structures and processes to handle taxonomic change and disagreement well. A good system is one in which you and I can have different taxonomies without the idea that there’s a single correct taxonomy forcing us into unnecessary conflict. Flexibility, not angst. :-)
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“Athyriumasfdasgdgwhe gasasgeewehwaawjjjawwrjerfd” has a catchy ring to it.
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Yeah, I’ll grant you the herp folks have expressed some angst about all the changes. We who follow all that seem to have resigned ourselves to frequent shake-ups.
It’s too bad I don’t have a new species of Athyriumasfdasgdgwhe that needs named. :-)
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it’s a latin phrase meaning “without sperm but why is that even the name of this genus in the first place like, whoa, also did you know ferns literally have sperm so its false”. Its nice to have such a whimsical name but spelling is tricky and how do you fit it on the data sheet?
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I would assume there are no plans to allow users to opt out of splits, given this phrase on the iNat help page:
"So if you don’t want to follow iNaturalist’s taxonomy for a taxon, please refrain from adding an ID for said taxon - you can add a polite comment instead. If you have an issue with any taxon on iNaturalist, you can go to the taxon’s page, click on Curate (under the graph) and select “Flag for curation”. There you can write a note (citing evidence), and the site curators can discuss your proposal.
iNaturalist’s taxonomy is a communally-curated synthesis, and thus no one agrees with all of it. If you can’t accept a taxonomy that you don’t completely agree with, iNaturalist is probably not the place for you, and you should instead consider other data recording platforms."
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Hope springs eternal. :-)
You know how some species have long lists of synonymies because it was realized that earlier taxonomists were naming morphological variation within species? Well, it’s only a matter of time before the taxonomy world realizes that the same thing is happening now with genetic variation within species.
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Please stay on topic.
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Better to keep on with errors of old? Please, do not generalize.
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It is on topic. It is a valid concern about taxonomy changes, and whether to opt out of them.
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that may have been true once but it’s now completely dominated by one user group and philosophy at the expense of others. and also, i’d contend, at the expense of the ‘connecting people with nature’ mission that used to be touted as the most important thing.
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