2 agree = RG
1 wrong. Now you need 3 identifiers. Okay.
1 wrong. I broad / hard disagreement. Which CID kindly counts as 2 against.
Now we need FIVE identifiers. I can usually find the first 3 (including myself) but the two more is hard! And utterly pointless that iNat defies logic
Which is where we started. So @jhbratton 's ID with good intentions is held against him by iNat. The five we need do not include him.
If you are certain the existing ID is wrong, please use the orange box – even if this means pushing the ID back to family or whatever.
As long as you are aware of the consequences of ancestor disagreements and follow your notifications so you can withdraw if necessary, this seems preferable to allowing an incorrect identification to remain active. Withdrawing your ID if it turns out there is a lower-level common taxon doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong – it is simply part of navigating how iNat is set up, and inevitably it happens to all of us now and again.
I agree and would like to add if e.g. it’s a flowering plant, use Angiospermae (or if you can tell monocot or dicot) rather than Plantae. That avoids losing phenology annotations due to being bumped back too far.
That is not how I normally see it being used, though. Normally, people use it when they believe that the taxon inherently cannot be identified to species level from a photograph. Which technically is
And should therefore be green.
That is almost always how I use it. That’s why it’s such a pain that the higher-level disagreement continues to block further IDs, because almost always the next person who comes along gets it right.
It looks like there are 3 or more concurrent discussions about identification disagreements, so since the original question has been answered, I’ll close this particular topic.