the problem is the taxonomic splitters ARE the curators who enforce the guide, so they do what they please, which often includes forcing through hypothetical changes to everything including unpublished, non peer reviewed ones. The two or three iNat staff who can moderate that don’t have time to address all the thousands of changes being pushed through, most of which shouldn’t be. They also havent addressed all the problems with POWO which needs to be abandoned immediately.
well what i am trying to explain here is people ARE pushing through their fringe hypotheses, because the type of taxonomy practiced on iNat is fringe in a broader setting, and isn’t what is being used in most of the community of people who identify plants. I agree with you, except i think there’s some issue with perspective. The splitters should put their proposed split in blogs, i shouldn’t be in a blog asking them to stop while they shred the database. I can write about it in a blog and i do write about it in my inat journal, but that doesn’t fix the site being broken. But i guess i’m just hitting a brick wall here and am gonna get told my issues don’t exist and get mad and leave again.
I think the dicussion would benefit if you would distinguish between taxonomists (i.e., the people out there publishing papers about relationships between organisms) and the people implementing taxonomic frameworks (on POWO and curators on iNat).
Because these are distinct groups.
If taxonomists are engaging in unnecessary splitting because of currently prevailing ideas about how species should be defined, this is an issue iNat probably cannot do much to address directly, though it might be possible to develop better strategies for dealing with the difficulties it creates. (An excess of splitting is also certainly not happening with all taxa – most taxonomy changes I see with insects are concerned with groups that have always caused problems or the relationships have always been a subject of some confusion.)
On the other hand, if an overly rigid adherence to POWO is limiting the ability to implement useful groupings like species complexes that are in widespread use by botanists or other botanical organizations, this is something that we can try to find a solution to.
If some subset of iNat curators (not all!) are regularly making changes based on unpublished papers or proposals that are not yet widely accepted by the scientific community, this is an important discussion that needs to be had. Taxonomy curation is always going to involve a certain amount of judgement calls that not everyone will agree with, but if there are (for example) lots of changes happening that later need to be reversed because they were not well-thought out or overly hasty, this is a problem and maybe there need to be changes in iNat curation policy and/or the behavior of individual curators. But if you blame this problem on “taxonomists”, it doesn’t address the real issue.
I don’t think that people in the forum hate you or want to silence you. But when you present things in absolutist terms, you distort what is actually going on and it makes it very difficult to try to find solutions or even arrive at mutual understanding. This has nothing to do with whether we agree or not. The threads I have seen that have been locked were not locked because people did not agree with you, but because the discussion was both off-topic and unconstructive. If it is clear that positions are entrenched and people are not listening to each other, further discussion will only produce unhappiness and resentment.
If curators are in fact violating the guidelines, then escalating the issue up to other curators or eventually to staff would be entirely appropriate. I haven’t seen any instances of this though.
I think it’s a pretty big stretch to say that the entire field of taxonomy across all taxa of life is “fringe”. Cladistics seems to be consensus among moden taxonomists, presumably for good reasons due to not have a better feasible alternative currently.
Charlie probably the main reason you get so much pushback is that most of your posts (on like most of the threads you post on regardless of the topic) are venting frustrations (which are understandable frustrations!) but without proposing feasible solutions to dealing with them. People have a certain degree of patience to hear out frustrations. But when they go on interminably with no clear way out, the patience starts to wear thin. It’s not that the issues you’re talking about don’t exist. It’s that you care about them more than most people, and are telling people that things need to be taken down but without proposing clear options for replacing them. It doesn’t work to gesture vaguely at foundational parts of the structure of iNaturalist, say “this is bad and needs to go”, without proposing a new structure to work from.
(I think maybe you have proposed some clearer solutions but it’s hard to keep them straight when these conversations go over hundreds of messages between multiple threads. Please do refer back to them if I’ve missed them.)
The curator guidelines indicate that the staff want iNat’s taxonomy to be based on external secondary sources, rather than by a) using primary literature or b) making up a new taxonomy system in-house. They are almost certainly not going to accept a solution based on one of those other two options. Correct me if I’m wrong but in the POWO thread, nobody offered an alternative viable external scondary source to use rather than POWO. Until someone does, POWO is apparently the best option that exists anywhere in reality. If POWO is bad, then someone needs to find or create a better option.
What I mean by proposing a detailed alternative is like an actual plan written out for what it would look like and why it would be better than the current situation. For example, I have a bunch of frustrations with how Casual and Research Grade work on iNat. After thinking about it for a while, I came up with this plan that accounts for all my frustrations and also accounts for all the intricacies of iNat’s structure that need to be worked around. I’m pretty sure that the staff won’t ever want to implement such a complicated plan that changes such a foundational part of iNat structure. However, I’m also pretty sure that this would significantly improve iNaturalist and at least I can point to it whenever the subject comes up.
Taxonomy is substantially more complicated than the Casual/Needs ID/Research Grade categorization system, and so a feasible plan for a different way to do it would probably need to be more complicated and detailed. Which is why no one yet has done it.
That seems to be a recurring theme in posts here. It’s not a problem for you therefore it must not be a problem for anyone. Some sort of ‘theory of mind’ issue. It’s up to you whether you believe me or not. Broadly this speaks to my whole point. Staff don’t have time to deal with this stuff, and most curators who flex their power are lock-step revisionists. So going up the chain of power doesn’t yield results, it just yields a few splitter zealots arguing on and ignoring my flags.
it would be a big stretch, but that’s not what i am saying. I am talking only about iNaturalist. Across the broad history of taxonomy there’s a long history of lumper vs splitter and revisionist vs not arguments that span well before i was even born. Much like US politics, taxonomy can verge into a certain extreme that becomes very damaging. It’s also important to remember that taxonomists are only a small percentage of the humans who use taxonomy. It needs to work for other users as well. But for what it’s worth i did calculate out the percentage of people interested in nature who are academic taxonomists and the percentage is indeed very tiny, so statistically ‘fringe’ isn’t wrong even for ’ all taxonomists’.
Ok, so i’ve proposed a ton of solutions, in my journal, flags, and in this forum. At this point it’s very hard to read anything from your post other than that you just don’t like my solutions and so are ignoring them. My ‘patience is running thin’ too. I feel that i’ve proposed a ton of good ideas and they just get dismissed without any reasonable reason. Ultimately your sect has an iron grasp on iNat, which is going to make it crash and burn. You’re going to break it fully. I don’t know why the admin wont do more to push back, but in the end it’s not my decision, and it’s maybe just time to abandon iNat as a serious tool and just treat it like pokemon go. I don’t see much point in laying out my ideas in even more detail if no one will budge a bit from their whining about informal taxonomic groupings that they dont have to use or even look at being "polyphylletic’ and therefore they can do nothing to help a large different use case and we just have to suck it up or leave. And i’m all out of ‘suck it up’.
At this point i’m gonna need more listening and responsiveness from you before i engage with this further. I’ll probably still keep stating my objections until i get banned or judge it too bad for my mental health. But i’m not engaging with your rebuttals until they have more substance and address my actual proposals.
Sorry. I don’t think you’re a bad or mean person or anything like that, but i do think you’re out of line here.
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.
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. it isn’t just a place to try to make the most current plant taxonomy database possible based on speculative unpublished papers, and right now, in my opinion, that’s how it is being treated.
well, it’s not accessible to me, due to aspects of my neurodiversity as well as my family and financial situation. Going back to school to try to offer new ideas on cladistics isn’t an option. it isn’t for a lot of people which is part of my point here.
I’m just tired. I’m tired of trying to prove myself again and again and tired of getting attacked. So yeah i’m gonna take a pass on that. if you don’t believe me, that’s ok, it doesn’t really matter as it’s clear nothing will be done anyway. Admin are aware of some of the issues and it hasn’t changed, so it probably won’t.
Thanks. I’m glad you are here too and am not meaning to say otherwise. I doubt i’ll do the full rage quit and delete my observations, i’ll probably continue to use it for my own purposes, just not be in the community as much. 2024 is actually going to be my record year for number of species observed, though some of that is probably because of the splitting…