This is a point I made elsewhere - that people sometimes use “reviewed” in idiosyncratic ways, possibly because they lack other tools to accomplish the thing they are trying to do. We all have unique needs and workflows. I’m not against this kind of ‘repurposing’ in principle (I do it myself), but at a certain point, one needs to have the right tool for the job. If many people are resorting to an assortment of hacks to get the job done, perhaps it’s time to look at some kind of enhancement/redesign of the existing functionality.
The same argument could be made here. Using the number of times an observation has been marked as reviewed as a proxy for the “difficulty” of the ID is an interesting idea. However, several people have pointed out possible pitfalls. Since we’re mostly talking about observations that are already being looked at and are being pondered, it seems to me that we should take advantage of that. We should have some kind of “difficult ID” indicator that can be upvoted, as this would “capture” some of the effort that reviewers have already put into the observation. I don’t know if it’s practical, but if such an indicator existed, perhaps it could be used to influence the community ID algorithm in some way (require greater consensus for RG? - I haven’t thought through this part).
One pitfall of using a reviewed count that I just thought of:
For my region/taxon, I frequently see that when somebody posts an observation of something unusual/exotic, there are an unusual number of people who “agree” with the ID, even when it’s a straightforward slam-dunk (no question of what it is). I see a number of power-identifiers from across the continent chiming in with the exact same ID. Sometimes, the confirming IDs are added years after the observation goes RG. I have no idea why folks would do this - I NEVER feel the need to agree with an ID that has already been firmly established (I just click “reviewed” to get it out of my work queue). This might confound the attempt to detect “difficult ID” scenarios based on the number of reviews (since each agreement will also contribute to the reviewed count).
Sometimes, I see this kind of thing happening with ho-hum common species as well. I have no idea why certain observations for a common species draws a large number of identification agreement while others get far less attention. Perhaps it has to do with which projects the observations get added to. I see some observations that belong to a LONG list of projects.