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

General
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I don’t want to create a feature request here because any time i do it just gets rejected by admin because they say ‘post it in flags instead’ or else i just get harassed and called lazy. Why spend a bunch of time creating something to get insulted about?. So i keep posting because others do seem to care about this issue, but honestly, it’s time for someone else to make the feature request, or for inat to just follow its trajectory and become unusable, because clearly i can’t help fix it.

But yeah, it’s totally true that people use the site for different things, which is why having more flexibility in names and groupings works better than just forcing one rigid taxonomic regime on people (which is what happens now.) But you don’t seem to see that this works both ways.

Well, this is just it, isn’t it Why should i spend a bunch of time building a compelling argument to people who just assume i’m an idiot because my view of taxonomy differs from theirs? People like you could help by actually following the ‘assume good will’ thing and assuming my concerns are real and not because i’m secretly lazy. I keep my job out of it, mostly, because i am having a discussion about the iNaturalist community, not about my employer. This post was motivated by the ponderosa pine change, and given Ponderosa Pine doesn’t occur in Vermont, it isn’t relevant to that. I don’t need harassment in my professional life from people who think i am lazy and useless. My motivation is concern for the community. If i were lazy, why’d i post here or use iNaturalist at all? if i’m ‘unscientific’, then your definition of science seems to have nothing to do with challenging ideas and everything to do with just following a status quo. Which isn’t how the history of science has been in the past at ALL. Like, can you name a prominent ‘scientist’ who just did what they were supposed to and didn’t challenge the main paradigm? The ‘unscientific’ comments are themselves unscientific and miss the point entirely.

So really, i’m near the ‘just let it burn’ point here. Like, have fun with your sandbox. But i want to at least be able to say, people pushing this framework ruined it for me, and whether you think that ‘should’ be the case or not, it’s my experience and it’s for you to care about, or not. One contingent of people ruined the grand iNaturalist project for another contingent of people, and i can’t make you care, but you can’t undo the damage you did with the way you are acting now. I spent 10 years working in southern California, so i understand the difference between California and New England plants probably as well as anyone on this site. if you actually want to know about my professional workflow or the projects i am working on, maybe start treating me like a colleague not a lazy and unscientific, unintelligent person who just likes to argue, and maybe i’ll engage. Until then, yeah, i won’t be writing up any more feature requests here. If you don’t like my occasional posts calling out the problems with the site’s taxonomy, just mute them. i’m sure i’ll eventually actually go away.

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… is not facilitated by a rule of this forum forbidding - and justly so - discussing specific issues, even as mere examples, even if explicitly acknowledging good intents… vague statements are therefore unavoidable (“some curator enforced some merge for some taxon, but!”).

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4 posts were split to a new topic: The nature of species (and other taxa)

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It looks like at least in the pine split all 3 daughter species are in Subsection Ponderosae.

More broadly there are a couple issues here. The main one that can be addressed at all at the moment is that creating infrageneric taxonomy for the large genera that really need them is a ton of work. There often aren’t global sources for the entire genus so you have to patch together the taxonomies of different papers and floras from different regions. Some regions haven’t been updated for decades so they use old subgenus/section names and it doesn’t work, and then progress in putting it in iNat stalls for years due to lack of clarity on how to move forwards. And then if you do finally settle on a system, you have to manually move all the hundreds of species into their categories one by one. It’s just really tedious and low priority curation work. Fortunately the bulk of the work has been done for a lot of popular genera.

The second issue is a practical iNat functionality barrier; if similar species get put by taxonomists into different bins instead of together (e.g. like these situations) then there isn’t a way in the iNat system for curators to make a group that keeps them together while also having them apart.

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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? How would you implement it? What are the pluses and minuses to various people? What are some alternatives? Are any of them feasible? I put in a feature request recently that seemed very simple and would solve a lot of problems with taxon changes. It was rejected because it was unfeasible. So, come up with a solution that is, if there actually is one.

If you won’t put the time into making a compelling argument, how do we know you even have one? If someone is making a taxonomic change, don’t you want a compelling argument for it? Why shouldn’t that go both ways? I don’t think differing taxonomic views is the main issue with how you present yourself on the forum. I think the lack of compelling arguments and clear solutions is the issue. I mostly just see complaining and often a dismissive attitude towards people who think differently than you. What is a feasible way to address your iNat issues while not negatively impacting a lot of other users? There is no way to make everyone happy but you might be able to think of some minor fixes that could be implemented and improve some things. You do have some very valid points sometimes for some taxa. There is no reason iNat can’t be improved on some of those points if you don’t take things to the extremes. You’ve debated enough on iNat that I’m sure you could easily do a post on your top 10 iNat improvements and you possibly should, but they should be constructive, balanced, and offer clear solutions that could be feature requests. You could even do 10 posts, each a draft for a feature request and asking for feedback on how to make it work or if it could work. I mean this topic itself is a great example. It is a big issue. What is a solid feature request that could actually resolve the issue? I suspect several have already been made. Have any good alternatives not been requested and, if so, why not?

That could definitely be applied to all the taxonomists that have done a huge amount of work creating compelling arguments for the changes they are making to further conservation efforts. Same applies to all the curators putting in a lot of time to help make iNat better. And the same applies to all those using iNat for conservation purposes that want the ability to monitor and collect data on recently described and unlumped taxa. Your assuming good will could help a lot. If you put as much time into trying to come up with a good solution as you put into complaining and dismissing other people’s uses of iNat, maybe you wouldn’t have as much reason to complain. But, as iNat isn’t perfect and never will be, maybe there is a better alternative for you. That is for you to decide.

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If you are interested, you can look on my journal which has some ideas
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/charlie . I may add some other ideas there too. I’ve also posted dozens if not hundreds of suggestions on this forum which you can look up of you want (including this post when it started), but i don’t really want to put in the time searching for them, because i’ve already spent countless hours presenting my case and still keep getting called lazy, which doesn’t feel very good.

I’m not interested in the ‘feature request’ aspect of this forum which involves putting a lot of time into writing something that will get deleted if the mod who sees it doesn’t like the idea, without any chance for others to see it at all. I won’t be using that any more.

I don’t want, or need your tone policing and if you persist with that you will just get muted. Usually the way it goes is i spend a bunch of time trying to mask to the tone i’m told to use and i get dismissed anyway. I’m 45, i’m not a child, my form of autism makes me blunt and i’ve got other reasons i am not always ‘nice’. I take responsibility if i hurt feelings, but am not going to apologize for not sugar coating things. I don’t need condescending ‘guidance’ on how i should interact with others and i’d ask you to keep that to yourself in the future, please. If you really hate hearing from me, you can mute me which will also have the added benefit of you not calling me lazy and stupid any more. Thanks.

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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):

Given that these guidelines exist:

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).

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.

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Yeah, that idea in that post is meant as “what i would do if i could do whatever i thought was best, regardless of politics or any other users’ needs” and isn’t meant to be presented as a serious request, since like you say, it isn’t going to work for everyone and angers some people in power.

Yes and that’s been a dead end. I can’t bring up exact examples here, and when i do in flags most people other than the ones doing things they aren’t supposed to don’t see it. So it’s just a lost cause. iNat devs are aware of at least some of the issues could do something about it but haven’t so i am assuming they aren’t interested or don’t view it as a problem. And please don’t PM me asking for details, i don’t want to do backchannel gossip about this. Ultimately this isn’t a democracy, we don’t have ‘rights’, we are beholden to whatever the people running the site want to do, and they choose not to address the issue there’s no further recourse other than just choosing whether i want to use inaturalist and the forum or not. I was hoping more broad concern and interest in taxonomic policy would result in more attention to the issue and at least some modest changes, but that hasn’t happened, and it’s just resulted in increasing levels of insults and accusations flying around, so that’s just the end of the line for this for me. Especially if:

which is pretty much my life path with everything. So be it.

Well, if anyone else wants to do that, i may weigh in if i still have a forum account, but i’m not interested in doing so myself. I had hopes i’d get somewhere with this concern, but i haven’t, and even if i am right that it excludes people and breaks the site for a lot of people, it doesn’t break the site for the people in power or the ones with the most influence, and there’s no alternative way to gain support, so it’s just a dead end. maybe someone who people like better, or someone ‘more important’ on here will eventually take a stand on this issue also and gain more progress, but for me and people like me, this forum just isn’t a place we belong. I know of others who have left for similar reasons. (no, do not PM me about that either, i don’t care if you believe me or not). I actually left the forum a while ago but came back for some reason, which was a mistake. i need to think of deleting my forum account. I haven’t done so because i think people find the ‘neurodiversity and inaturalist’ thread valuable, but it seems to be getting less views now or perhaps there is a way mods can keep that thread and delete the rest of my posts.

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Just FYI, deleting may not be possible, just anonymizing

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maybe just scrambling my password then.

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relatedly, it would be really nice to have an option to have all my IDs for others deleted when taxonomy change occurs. I am now getting a million notifications for people forcing pines into these new ‘species’, and i am not going to agree with those IDs but don’t really want to start arguments on others’ observations either. I’d just like all my IDs for anyone else for ponderosa pine or Joshua tree deleted entirely. Or maybe just all my IDs for anyone else full stop. Is it possible to do that without deleting my own observations and my own identifications of those?

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Going back to the question originally posed in the title of this topic, Should taxonomic changes on very important, high profile taxa be discussed more broadly than flags?

  1. Yes, imo. And,
  2. Early in the replies to this topic, this feature request was mentioned, and seems like the most practical and feasible idea anyone has come up with so far to address this question. Apparently the devs agree because it is currently tagged as “under-review.” I think this could go a long way toward improving the much-lamented status quo.

I think having this option available in one’s account settings could also be a reasonable feature request (perhaps along with options to merely withdraw the ID, or to leave it alone). I think the argument could be made that this is the system “forcing” an identifier to identify beyond their confidence level, which has always been actively discouraged by the site. (Practical feasibility, of course, is not something I can predict…)

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Right. Most of these entities are being identified based on location alone. There’s a push to not identify subspecies based on location alone, and to me these entities seem equivalent to subspecies, and i don’t feel confortable identifying any of them based on location. I’ve got automatic taxonomic updates turned off, but would consider turning them on if my IDs just switched to a sensu latu version or were deleted. (To be honest i’m really disappointed this is a thing after all the talk of data autonomy and am disappointed i spent so much time adding IDs to this site when they will just get rejected of fought over. I shouldn’t have bothered, and now only do ID help for friends or colleagues) I recognize that varying levels of research go into the splits and some people believe there’s sufficient data for some of them to justify location-based identification, but i don’t agree with the practice so won’t be doing it. Perhaps at some point in time one could justify a spatial ID happening, but not now as the changes are just forced in. In particular, with the ponderosa pine change which is creating a trash heap of notifications I don’t want on my account, it may be that the new proposed ‘species’ that have been forced in really are geographically based, or were once, but the US Forest Service is notorious for planting trees from totally different mountain ranges after logging jobs and such. So i really strongly disagree that these ponderosa species things should be assigned based on location. another example was the whole affair assigning ALL tiarella in my area to stolonifera on the basis of solons that were not visible in most photos, and unfortunately it happened before i turned off taxonomic updates so i’ve got a bunch of IDs out there i don’t agree with… I recognize others want these splits, and it happened despite my objections, but forcing me to ID to that level when i don’t agree with it doesn’t seem acceptable.

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At least, opting-out of “automatic taxon changes” leaves a chance to catch them (after the fact, sigh) and ‘Update your content’ calmly, piece by piece - or make a mental note for later. In some cases, having observations stuck at ‘inactive taxon!’ is less problematic than seeing them propelled to a new ID one would not feel comfortable with.

A difficulty lies in getting notified of such taxon changes (committed or, let’s dream a bit, drafted), for it is easy to overlook the orange message box in one’s ‘Home’ feed.

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I mentioned this on the pine flag but this is probably a better place to discuss this. In both the pine split and the recent herring gull split, the parent taxon (taxons IDs 48461 and 204533 respectively) remained as one of the daughter taxa despite the fact that the new taxon concept is pretty different from the old concept. Is this standard practice? Why isn’t a new daughter taxon created for every member of the split to keep the old (now inactive) IDs accurate to their intentions?

I’m struggling to interpret the text in the curator guide but I haven’t tried to understand this before so it’s quite possible I’m missing something:

Splits: Most content just gets left with the input taxon.

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I agree that this would be ideal, but for practical reasons iNaturalist changed this about 4 years ago so that it was an option (not required) to retain the input taxon of a split as one of the output taxa. See this blog post for the full explanation (you have to scroll most of the way to the bottom to find it).

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Hmm, interesting. Seems like the same thing might also be causing issues with the barn owl split and the CV only knowing the parent taxon (but being applied incorrectly now by people using the CV).

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In addition to the taxonomic issues, there is a fundamental site structure issue here, and it is that flags are pretty hard to find unless you specifically go looking for them. I would venture to say that hardly anybody even knows that flags exist unless they are the type to poke and prod into all the details of everything.

The forums also suffer from being off to one side (many people never visit the forums ever), but they do have tools to make it easier to find conversations that interest you, and also to stumble across conversations that might interest you. And it’s way more intuitive to people that you should go to the forums if you want to discuss something.

It seems to me that right now, flags are places where these important conversations mostly are not happening. Compared to the forums, they get much less traffic and attention.

I’m not sure what the solution is. There appear to be real practical reasons for this separation. (The expense of maintaining the forum platform, basically.) But just saying “this should be discussed in the flags” does not seem to be working. Maybe some tools to make it easier to find the flags would help?

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I agree flags are extremely hard to find, to the point where I would assert non-curators are not supposed to know they exist. Why would the site designers bury the links otherwise?

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It’s not just that it’s buried in a menu, it’s that the menu is labeled “curation”!

This method of obscuration is a very effective way to limit the number of people who accidentally stumble across something they should not be messing with right now, which I think is appropriate for, say, editing taxon photos. But it’s certainly not encouraging people to look at the flags.

I think a bigger issue is that as far as I can tell, even for motivated and informed users, there’s no way to subscribe to be notified of new flags, nor is there a particularly easy way to browse for newly-created flags other than constantly reading through https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/ (which I hope is easier for curators to find than regular users). Maybe even just a few more search filters there would help? For example, if you could more easily search for taxon changes for birds, or a specific insect family, you could just keep that link saved. (Edit: I think you can do that by searching under “taxon”, it just doesn’t look as slick because this is a behind-the-scenes interface.)

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