One reason is that iNat has stricter rules about active taxa than inactive (e.g. must have active parents, can’t have siblings of the same name etc.) so sometimes it avoids problems to add them as inactive and let the taxon changes activate them.
The other reason is if you want to create the draft taxon changes and then let them sit for a while to get feedback from the community, it would be problematic to have the input taxa active alongside active output taxa
My preference is to:
- create the inactive output taxa
- create the draft taxon changes
and then when I’m ready to commit - move taxa
- commit the swaps
But I guess if you were doing everything at once then it would be fine to create active taxa from the get go.
Because of the performance problems we’re experiencing with committing taxon changes, its probably not long before we have to move to a system of people ‘setting up changes’ e.g. creating inactive taxa and draft changes and then us committing them later on in a way that doesn’t bog down the site, so this protocol of separating ‘setting up the change’ from ‘committing the change’ helps with that. In that spirit, all these 176 Clements 2019 update ‘structures’ are all set up and ready to go, but they haven’t been committed yet.