Omitting discussion of edge cases in the documentation doesn’t make sense to me.
If the edge cases are not discussed in a FAQ or official documentation, there will be nothing for even the most conscientious users (such as myself, I would definitely read these FAQS in detail) to refer to, reference, or use as a guideline or standard in these cases.
What will likely happen under your recommendation (to resolve it by discussion, without official clarification in the documentation) is that the consensus reached will be left to the whims of the particular user(s) engaged in the discussion. And, from conversing about these topics repeatedly in the forums here, I have seen that there are a range of different views on how people would handle this. There could thus be wildly different conclusions in the data for different observations.
In my experience these edge cases are very common and actually make up a huge portion of the plants I and others report, because many iNat reports of plants are either from small wild areas adjacent to parks and gardens, or plants in parks, gardens, or landscaping themselves. Like, as a concrete example, the semi-wild area directly adjacent to my apartment complex is a mix of plants I and others have planted / transplanted as whole plants, ones we have planted seeds of and/or casually thrown down of, and volunteer plants that came up totally on their own. In many cases it is impossible to know what is what just by looking at a particular plant.
If I were a researcher using the data, I wouldn’t like this. I can think of a long list of reasons why the “wildness” of an organism would be relevant to scientific study…for example, studying the degree to which an organism is able to germinate or survive in a particular region and/or in various habitats.
These “semi-wild” habitats have come to dominate the landscape in a huge portion of the country, as urbanization, suburbanization, and agriculture have taken up more and mroe of the land. I think these issues are only going to become more important over time.
And I don’t see what would be lost by adding discussion of edge cases to the FAQ or official documentation.
This question has come up repeatedly in the iNat forums, see here, here, here, and here, and it bewilders me the resistance to addressing these questions. Isn’t a FAQ for addressing questions that are asked frequently?