To be clear, at that time when i wrote that, it was after efforts from several to reduce backlog. Some being resolved at that time were complex, but many were super-simple, yet neglected.
Now, a year later (Start Feb. 2026) the backlog for arthropods is around 21 pages, or essentially about 1000 unresolved flags (i.e. more than a thousand less unresolved). We should be really proud of reduction. I’d love to see how the balance of the dates between when flags were raised versus and resolved has varied over time. To my eye - at least for arthropods - usually more flags are raised on a daily basis than resolved. I think then we fight continual battle of new flags, but the neglected ones are gradually diminishing. I hope the balance now is there’s a greater fraction of new flags yet unresolved than ones needlessly neglected for an age.
I write now though to highlight all this. The system has an absolutely massive pool of ‘curators’ yet those resolving flags seems a tiny fraction. I can count on one hand those i see regularly resolving taxon flags. Here i don’t want to negate any efforts, it all helps, but seriously, can we all be working in a better way for the system?
To turn it into a question of engagement, if you have curator permission, how do you engage and when? I understand that specified curators do a greater diversity of tasks than the system (with counts of activity etc) seems to recognise. Yet, open question - tell us about your actions as a curator? What do i also need to recognise?
More broadly, when I became a curator in about November/December 2024, I think we were touching 310 pages worth of open, non-copyright, non-spam flags - I’m certain it was over 305 pages. Now we’re down under 260; even hit 255 a couple of weeks ago. Definitely a fair bit of progress! (Not that flag reduction is the only measure of progress, of course)!
It would indeed be neat to be able to pull up some data on the median age of open flags, average resolution times, that sort of thing. Since we’ve been working pretty hard to clear out some of the low-hanging fruit, it’s going to be interesting to see whether we can keep up the pace of flag reduction. At some point I reckon we’re going to wind up with a relatively high percentage of pretty intractable issues.
What is “curator permission”? And how does one get it? Honestly, I thought we were all curators, because I thought that iNaturalist was an open “citizen science” project. But obviously there is something I have missed.
See the help page on different site roles – curators are those users who have been granted the ability to edit taxon entries, resolve flags, moderate comments, and so on.
1 Extensively curating a single family where I have expertise
2 Helping out a specific group of people who seem to observe or ID a lot of new taxa and don’t really create flags (but rather just leave a comment to add/change X)
3 Occasionally curating flags under “Coleoptera”, or creating new ones when I see inconsistencies / new changes. I was more involved in clearing up backlog here a few months ago but so far there are not a lot of flags left where I’m sure what to do. Some require consultation of experts (but this hasn’t arrived yet) or simply it’s not the right time to implement yet.
As a non-curator, my experience with flags has been very positive. I’ve added flags to change common names, add missing species, and merge synonymous species, and found the response time to be excellent: sometimes within hours and never longer than a week. Thank you to the curators who do this work!
Thanks so much for your work on the flags! As I have created some recently (taxon change, new species added) I wonder if we flaggers can do something to make your life easier?
First, thanks to everyone else for feedback and context, i was reading and happy to give you all scope. Having some overview of numbers as the first response was valuable. Else Thanks especially to those giving for direction on any followup questions.
Going on this, it’s certainly a challenge as there’s a floating pool of curators and equally for those flagging. In general impression, there’s some ‘serial flaggers’ of “oh hey again, another thing?”, some being focused on certain lineages, others on certain zones, some just helpfully making flags on behalf of others who seemingly had no clue how to begin conversation about the taxon scheme.
I’d like to hear from other curators and flaggers about this question. For me at least, anything about WHY they raised the question might be informative. Sometimes it’s a ‘new’ name in a brand new paper - which perhaps hasn’t had any chance yet for the focal research community to react on it. In others, they’ve pulled a long forgotten ‘missing’ name from an obscure and badly made database, in others the’ve found a name in a resource (book, database, whatever) but then not seeing a whole scope of bias of that author for example publishing their own vague taxonomic musings despite vocal pushback from their wider community, etc.
Unfortunately, taxonomy is not objective nor ever can be. Authors working on taxonomy often have biases, as does anyone at this end with curation permission. Thankfully with data, those usually eventually smooth out. Anyway, what do i wish flaggers to add to make life easier for a curator’s resolution? Context, explanation, and dare i say - answering if a curator then asks a question in return! :)
[Here the number of users who make a flag, even showing outrage, but then never ever look back at the issue is mindblowing to me!]
I will note that one flagging behavior that puzzles me is when curators themselves create a bunch of flags (either for moderation, conservation statuses, names) and then don’t address them themselves. I’m not talking about flags that are explicitly asking for feedback from other curators/the community (I’m all for that!) or even when some curators make a bunch of flags and then address them later (though I feel like this isn’t very efficient) but situations where curators just seemingly dump a bunch of flags for content that is fairly simple (conservation statuses, name additions/changes, joke IDs) for other curators to handle. It leaves me wondering why they didn’t just handle the issue right off the bat (in some cases, addressing the issue would be about as much work as making the flag itself).
Please add to Flag title “unproblematic” or something to indicate that this flag is easy to resolve (no taxonomic controversy; complete info provided: parent taxon; scientific paper; correctly spelled name)
same for a swap: please say in the title: unproblematic swap
I’d be willing to do these easy flags even for taxa outside my comfort zone!