Should taxonomic changes on very important, high profile taxa be discussed more broadly than flags?

[upupa-epops]

@keirmorse

So, post something constructive with clear solutions to debate that will work for the maximum amount of people and someone else can post it as a feature request. What would your policy change be exactly?

The most recent proposal I’ve seen from Charlie is here.

Personally I don’t think that proposal is going to be appealing to either the staff or the community, which makes it infeasible in practice. I explained my thinking on that a bit more in another thread and Charlie seemed to agree (Charlie, correct me if I’m interpreting incorrectly):

@charlie

@upupa-epops

I think most people would prefer a slow drip-drip-drip of splitting than a big radical change of lumping everything back to what they were 6 years ago.

yes, that is probably true, but my point here isn’t that i should get my way it is that the people who want to force the really rapid changes also should expect to not get everything they want, because this is a community of a lot of diverse people with a lot of diverse needs.

Given that these guidelines exist:

@upupa-epops

from the Curator Guide:

[list of guidelines intended to stabilize taxonomy changes on iNat]

I don’t think it’s fair to say that curators wanting to make hasty changes are getting or expecting to get everything they want. If there is insufficient enforcement of those guidelines then that’s a different discussion that would require talking about specific examples (which would have to happen on flags rather than the forum).

I think it’s possible that someone could steelman Charlie’s position in a feature request and format something in a way that’s more feasible and appealing. However most people on the forum seems more content with the status quo than Charlie is, and people who’ve cited statistics about rates of change have generally been disagreeing with him in doing so. But the difference in opinion could be more about the perceived impact of change rather than the rate of change directly. If Charlie and other people find the rate really frustrating it’s hard to tell whether it’s because of their particular workflow or personality or something directly about how the changes happen (beyond just that iNat doesn’t notify people about taxon changes well, which I think we generally agree could be improved).

@charlie

I’m not interested in the ‘feature request’ aspect of this forum

Generally forum discussions involve hashing out a lot of disagreements and opinions and tend towards being abstact and too generalized to be actionable. I assume the staff don’t generally closely monitor every discussion looking for advice for site improvement because of that. Because that’s what the feature request section exists for; consolidated proposals where the community can discuss and vote on specific actionable suggestions. If a proposal is turned down for being infeasible, then workshopping something more feasible seems to me more productive than continuing abstract discussions in other threads.