Around a year ago, i made another forum post about the number of “Taxon flags” and especially with focus on arthropods. There was a backlog of unresolved issues. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/reduction-in-flags/61724 To be clear, at that time when i wrote that, it was after efforts from several …

Just posting this link to a much earlier forum post with the same general focus (backlog of taxon flags) from 2020 for context: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/big-ol-backlog-of-taxon-flags/4464

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 …

[image] sjl197: … if you have curator permission … 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.

[image] sjl197: 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 act…

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! …

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. [image] Ajott: Thanks so much for your work…

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 communi…

Reduction in flags, a year later

Curators

Ajott January 30, 2026, 8:46am 9

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?

Topic		Replies	Views
Reduction in flags Curators	11	885	June 22, 2025
Curators, would some more of you at least add some requested taxa? Curators	28	843	April 1, 2026
Flag not being resolved General question , taxonomy	12	345	January 20, 2026
Big ol' backlog of taxon flags Curators	20	4021	February 8, 2026
How to draw attention to unresolved flags Curators	5	580	July 27, 2020

Reduction in flags, a year later

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