Taxonomy, Cladistics, and iNaturalist

I think the feeling is mutual here and we’re just repeating ourselves. I did actually skim through your journals before that post, I’ll take a closer look now.

Okay yes, I missed these details in your journal when I looked earlier, my apologies. The latter parts there are actionable things that could be done. But… 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. I think that’s just a psychological thing. Like ideally we would have a slower drip-drip of both lumping and splitting happening occasionally (which I guess is happening more with birds than with plants), but if that’s not the case. I’m not sure what to propose for you to make your proposal more appealing since I’m well aware you don’t personally have the time or energy or interest to fight against cladistics and splitting at higher levels in academia or whatever.

I am not actually a very regular curator (I used to be more but I have more things competing for my time now). Which means I probably don’t have as much experience dealing with various flags as you expect, but it also means I’m not going around forcing my taxonomic beliefs on everyone with my curatorial powers. When I said I hadn’t seen any instances, I meant it straight-forwardly and with the hopes that you could provide counter-evidence (I don’t care if it’s here or in DMs).

Overall I’ve appreciated our conversations here and if you leave iNat then I’ll miss your participation. I’m not here trying to enforce my opinions on you or anyone. I’m on the forum because I want to learn more about iNat and related subjects, and because I think discussing disagreements about iNat will improve the platform. I like to dig into difficult subjects like this, or dandelions, or weird salamander taxonomy, because those difficult ones are where you learn the most by investigating them.

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