Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to explain all that.
But, I’m also already aware all of that. My point was that since - due to iNaturalist’s design - only the groups which are well documented are accurately identified, you might want to focus less on the Sisyphean task of fixing individual observations and more on creating better documentation aimed at a non-expert audience. Then the voting system will work, and a lot of these misidentified observations will get fixed much more easily. Sort of a “many hands makes light work” approach.
I think I may also be more optimistic than you about the identifiability of live spiders to species from photographs. There are a lot of unknowns and uncertainty about how to do it right now, but new knowledge is being created, collected, and distributed at an amazing pace. I am reminded that until Peterson published his first field guide in 1934, bird identification was in a state much like spider identification now: a focus on characters measurable from specimens in a collection, an assumed familiarity with taxonomy and anatomical vocabulary, and restricted to experts. That changed completely, and I think the same thing will happen to spider identification in time. It happened faster for the highly visually attractive species like birds, butterflies, and dragonflies, but I have no doubt it can be done with spiders as well.
Anyway, we’ve veered well off topic, I think. iNaturalist isn’t a great source for range maps for many species thanks to the number of misidentifications, the bias towards populated places, and so on. (Though occasional species have a surprisingly useful map.) I tend to prefer range maps which show the known breeding range of the species, plus regular and expected migratory corridors and wintering ranges for those species which have them. I think range maps should not include places vagrants are occasionally spotted. Although, a lot of range maps would be much improved by some indication of density, so if you did that then areas of sparse and/or rare occurrence could easily be added.
A lot of existing range maps are pretty arbitrary along the edges, honestly. While doing some field work in Iqaluit (Baffin Island, Canadian Arctic Archipelago) I was able to photograph 3 species of birds breeding there which had never been recorded breeding there before. (Junco, Savannah Sparrow, and White-crowned Sparrow. Got them published too. The Junco was particularly far north of its published breeding range.) We also failed to get photographic evidence of several other species breeding there. Before you ask, this wasn’t due to climate change, just because nobody had noticed yet. (Nunavut has roughly the same land area as Indonesia or Mexico but the population of a small town.) Another example of arbitrariness is the range map for Rattus norvegicus. There is (Edit: was; check the rather entertaining comments in the file history and the discussion tab) a hole there for Alberta, because Alberta is known to be rat-free, but rats generally can’t survive in the boreal forest and tundra to the north. The range map shows them there because they can and do overwinter in heated buildings, and they aren’t known to not be there, but they aren’t nearly as widespread as the map implies. They probably aren’t present in most mountains, deserts, and other high-altitude and arid areas. But a global map like this can’t reasonably display that level of detail.
For iNaturalist specifically, the computer vision system probably shouldn’t suggest a species unless there are 10+ research-grade observations within a certain distance, with the exact number and distance depending on the density of research-grade observations of the species.