Since it is your own workflow - would you consider putting in the feature request? You can motivate out of actual experience, where I am thinking of silent despair from someone who carefully worked out plant A is ssp … and the info is GONE. Link here and we can support you.
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I know the question is for Diana and I don’t mean to speak for her, but what it looks like from the outside: maybe the expectation comes from the the journals for CNC South Africa, which have been very emphatic that they only want people to ID plants to family or lower, else not ID them at all. I am not sure how that workflow originated, but I can imagine perhaps “the experts” have been roped into doing IDs for the CNC even though they don’t enjoy it, and they want to spend as little time doing it as possible, so they’re only going to look at observations somewhat ID’d already. Meanwhile the middle identifiers doing the pre-IDs seem to be too few to keep the unknowns/Plantae obs moving to family.
iNaturalist and middle taxa IDs are kind of an interesting problem. Everyone’s ultimate goal is to get to that elusive species level ID. But there are so many ways to get there. Quickest case, one identifier can take an unknown straight to species, but more often the ID trickles several middle taxa first. Which middle taxa are most visible/useful to others? How could I possibly guess, not knowing who other identifiers are and what filters they prefer? Diana says labeling things “Plantae” doesn’t work for her, because no one looks at Plantae in her region. Why not? There is an iconic taxon button for it, so easy to use. I use it, but I’m not in South Africa. Are other people using it in other places? Again, I can’t know.
Plant family IDs are surprisingly hard. “I know this belongs in that family” seems like it means “I know less than the person who could ID this to species” but it takes rigorous studying to be able to place a plant to family. For me step one was memorizing a booklet listing characteristics for each of roughly 100 families. Step two basically flash carding live specimens provided by an educator, for 10 weeks. Then years of practice since then. And it’s still hard. Different geographic areas have different families, or the same families but different defining characteristics, so all my learning becomes less relevant as soon as I travel 100 miles in any direction, never mind leaving the continent or hemisphere (where it’s pretty much useless.) Or in modern times genetic analysis often proves plants are not in the family their morphology suggests, which breaks down the whole method.
Meanwhile people who are self-taught often memorize plant species one by one as they encounter them, and give perfectly valid species-level IDs despite knowing nothing about taxonomy above that. I haven’t met anyone who has self-taught themselves plant families. So in a way it doesn’t surprise me to hear it’s hard to find people who will take unknown plants to family. Probably people who are local but unsure of species should attempt an educated guess to genus.
(Sorry if this is off topic… it’s not about placeholders like the title of the thread, but it is in the first post and a few subsequent ones)
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Thanks for this thoughtful sidebar. One would expect that someone filtering Family would recognize close Families and suggest those when correction is needed and possibly @mention balancing support for this correction in case the user that made incorrect suggestion is not monitoring notifications - possibly when on boarding expert IDers this could be suggested if it is not already a practice. Close counts.
So many users get VERY angry because someone identified their Unknown-with-a-placeholder observation with a coarse ID. Altering the placeholder system seems like it would do a lot to prevent some unpleasant interactions.
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Pave your way with words…
I think it is helpful to let them know what I am doing, when I am doing it. I may only move the ID back only a little coarser when I do this, maybe to family or if I am a little confident, genus - if I am not confident then yes, coarse. This may at least calm anger down to eye rolling… 
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Because sadly, there isn’t anyone to go thru plants. Reality check. I know I can @mention for help once the plant ID is already at family - that is fairly easy to find someone to tag. Or I can ask you for cultivated from the nursery.
At the end of gsb22 there were still about 500 obs for Kenya I never got to. Still 500 (mostly difficult dicots), and no one else was able to get to them either. I haz a sad.
I have never used placeholder text. I submit my best guess as the ID for my own observations, and elaborate in the notes as needed. I try not to worry myself too much about being incorrect so long as it’s not tremendously far off— e.g. incorrect on the species level but still the correct genus. Other times, I leave it at a higher taxon if I’m particularly unsure. As an example, recently I’ve been leaving my suspected observations of Regulus calendula at Passeriformes because I do not yet know how to differentiate them from lookalikes that belong to different families. However, I recorded my guesses in the notes. Luckily knowledgeable birders always come around and offer their IDs, even when it’s left at a higher taxon level.
I honestly don’t really understand the purpose of placeholders either, at least in their current incarnation. A higher taxon saved as an ID along with additional notes is more effective than leaving an observation at Unknown with a temporary unsearchable label that gets overwritten by other IDers. As far as I know, placeholder text does nothing that notes can’t. I think @kgrebennikov states it well.
In case observers isn’t aware, IDer overwritten placeholders aren’t permanently gone either— edit the URL to .json, and they will be there. This is inconvenient, of course, but the misconception that they are effectively and irrecoverably “deleted” by IDers contributes to occasional hostility towards IDers. Maybe if this text is displayed as an element somewhere else on the observation page (or… kept where it is until research grade?), it would be less of an issue. Blame won’t befall an IDer nor the observer for neglecting the extra step of commenting the placeholder.
@graysquirrel is correct about the hostility on behalf of observers. My college workload has been lighter this semester and my mental health is going easy on me, so I’ve been taking up ID binges more frequently. Typically I like to focus on combing through the taxa I am most knowledgeable on, such as Theridiidae and Anacardiaceae. I’m also aware of the huge chunk of Unknowns that need identification, and the overall deficit of IDers to observations. I’m sure I’ve overlooked placeholder text in the past (we have to admit this is very easy to do as this feature is not used very often, and especially when moving very quickly though Identify pages), but in a very recent instance, I was met with anger and profanity from the observer for overwriting their placeholders! The comment was removed by a curator and my feelings aren’t hurt, but in my opinion this clearly demonstrates that placeholder text is an area in need of fine-tuning, whatever that might entail. Overall, I wouldn’t mind removal of this feature altogether in favor of the use of notes (maybe a different popup in the search as @fffffffff suggests), but because this would possibly be destructive to all the placeholders currently in use, I think the best alternative option is to retain the placeholder text element somewhere on the observation page regardless of whether new IDs are added by others.
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There is already a similar system whereby things get bumped back to State of Matter Life because there is a plant genus and an animal genus that are exactly the same.
Not for every family. Aside from the obvious Asteraceae,
- Lamiaceae everywhere have square stems, opposite leaves, and bilaterally symmetrical flowers;
- Faboideae everywhere have the keeled “sweet pea” flowers, Mimosoideae everywhere have tuft or puff flowers, and all Fabaceae have leguminous seed pods.
- Arecaceae are obviously palms everywhere; you would only need to know how to distinguish them from Cyclanthaceae in the Neotropics.
- Poaceae everywhere have jointed stems, to the point that there is a mnemonic referencing 420 culture: joint=‘grass.’
Yet even these are often left at Unknown. Very ferny-looking ferns are left at unknown. Animal tracks are left at Unknown (not “Animals”).
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Your notes on plant families are very helpful - thanks!
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