Trying to clarify the open questions here.
Obscured taxon geoprivacy kicks in with any identification of a taxon with obscured taxon geoprivacy. This ensures that someone can’t just add a disagreeing coarse identification to change the observation taxon and unobscure the location, for example. This is why there are some obscured observations:
This likely means that there are some species showing up on the list due to this scenario of one maverick ID with obscured taxon geoprivacy impacting an observation.
For the Herring Gull situation:
@cmcheatle you are correct; they just needed to be re-indexed. If you ever suspect this (and it happens occasionally), select something in the DQA (I also undo it), then reload the observation. For the Herring Gull observations, all of the maps updated to show the true location, in keeping with the open taxon privacy designation. Since it was just a handful of records, I did this manually for all of them. If anyone comes across a larger batch, we can trigger a reindexing of the taxon.
This is the current end result of the approach the Ontario CDC decided to take.
In places where we have formalized relationships, I think it generally makes sense for iNaturalist to work with relevant, local organizations to take the lead on what should be obscured. However, it is far from clear how best to go about that. We’re trying it in Canada by starting with provincial-level decisions that can be changed with input from the community (and can technically be changed by curators). Most provinces opted to unobscure more species, but Ontario (which also has more than half of Canada’s observations) is still obscuring extensively.
iNat staff are not in a position to manage these kinds of decisions at scale, so it makes sense to connect the knowledgable users and curators with the CDCs to work together to refine the obscuration list.
At this time, we do not have any sophisticated infrastructure to facilitate such a dialogue or concise expression of opinion. @cmcheatle proposed a possible ‘voting’ approach that could be further developed to make the process more community-driven. I’m interested in further conversation in that thread on the topic of how to improve the infrastructure for this in the future.
For the time being, the tools we have are basically words and spreadsheets, so let’s figure out how to do the best we can with what we have to work with. Do folks think it would be helpful to start a wiki in this thread where you compile a list of species you propose should be unobscured? Or are folks already making those separately elsewhere?