to me, it seems like trying curating taxa as an individual would eventually become a Sisyphean task anyway just as a result of the growth of observations over time.
i think that overwhelming growth in observations – not that others might come in and override existing community IDs – is really the reason it’s a mistake to try to curate as you might a museum collection.
to me, it seems like the paradigm shift that’s really needed is to prioritize helping others develop the skills to be able to help identify. that way, the burden of watching over a taxon can be distributed among many.
this doesn’t strike me as a huge problem. in my experience, most of such identifications are by the observer, and if an observer wants to stick with an obviously wrong ID, that’s their own right. it would be no different than them opting out of community ID.
that said, i’m not against trying to teach people how to identify better, but i think it would be a mistake to overload folks with too many rules to learn if they’re not ready for it. also, i think a “hey, i appreciate all the IDs you’ve been doing. have you seen these pro tips for identifying?” approach would be better than a “you’ve been messing up a lot of IDs. please learn these rules before continuing to ID” approach.
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one last thought… for folks who are really sticklers about “correct” identification, i think the way i would create a technical solution for that is that would create a new kind of “curation” project where an ID added by any project member would cause the observation to be added to the project, if that taxon was set up in the project criteria. for each observation in the project, there would be a project taxon id determined by only the IDs from members of the project, with additional tools to show when the project taxon ID <> community ID. i think this kind of mechanism would help teams that were working on curating taxa in a distributed way.