@mreith I’m glad you noted the point about cropping the images. While I know it would be (prohibitively?) time-consuming for some, I think that a quite a bit of confusion/discussion/etc could be avoided if observers would include a cropped version of the subject of the obs along with the original “context” shot.
This would have the added benefit of providing better “training materials” for the computer vision/AI algorithms, as cropped images will teach it more quickly and accurately. It does a remarkable job a lot of the time, but it does miss occasionally :-)
With respect to the ownership of the records, as I’ve posted elsewhere (with a slightly different focus), I think observers should own and have control over their observations until such time as they go awol, either voluntarily or as a consequence of the march of time (“awol” needing definition), at which point some aspects of control could be assigned to curators, staff, and/or other august individuals.
I agree with the many thoughtful posts above suggest - using comments to suggest splits or to confirm obs target is a great approach. It’s also a good way to bring overlooked observations to the observers’ attention. Some of the most prolific observers have blocks of unidentified or otherwise unclear observations, and I suspect that when uploaded there was a glitch, or they thought they’d IDed the whole page before hitting Submit but hadn’t, or intended to return but forgot, etc.