"This Taxon has no default photo"

Hello everyone. Noob here, stumbling through your back yard, stepping on things…

A user has provided a link as a comment to an observation:

The linked page, has been populated with relevant details, except for the photo. I assume that the user (someplant) is suggesting that I complete the representative page for this taxon. However, I am unable to upload images:

Additionally, some of these pages include code to help start a wikipedia entry, despite the existence of the relevant wikipedia topic.

I’m flummoxed. What obvious thing have I missed? Do I even have rights to create such a page?

users can only add/edit taxon photos once they have hit a certain minimum threshold number of observations + a few other requirements (this is a preventative measure to stop trolls creating new accounts and changing the images to intentionally correct species, gory photos, etc)

That’s what I figured. Makes total sense.

Thanks!

They were merely indicating that the taxon is now available in iNat’s database, as iNat does not maintain a full list of every single species ever described. If you observe a taxon that is not in the database, it needs to be added before you can select it as an ID for your observation. The user probably did not add it as an ID themself because they are not a diatom specialist and thus aren’t confident identifying your observation, but you can now use Amphibelone.

The images on the taxon page normally come from iNaturalist observations, so newly added taxa will not have any image. This is not a problem, though of course it is not as attractive or useful as a page that has images. Usually the pages get populated automatically once there are Research Grade observations of that taxon, or users who meet certain minimum requirements can edit the taxon images themselves.

iNaturalist links to Wikipedia on its taxon pages, but Wikipedia is a separate website, meaning that iNat has to find the correct page to be linked to, and sometimes something goes wrong here, particularly if there are multiple Wikipedia articles with similar names.