Secondly,
The potential difficulty in choosing a threshold for expertise should not sidetrack the central idea of value-ing the existence and importance of expertise. Which is part of what seemed to happen on the other thread. The value-ing of expertise also should not devalue the amazing work amateurs and experts in other fields do in sifting the coarser IDs into the right place or to species where possible.
One of the many triggers for my original comment was for an ID for a parasitic Chalcid wasp by Roger Burks here on iNaturalist. I tried to confirm this offsite within the UK. Only two records of this species exist within UK. In addition, even the senior curators of parasitic wasps at the NHM were unable to confirm, as “we have no specialist for Chalcid wasps in the UK”. Even the parasitic wasp experts, people who devote their entire lives to studying parasitic wasps are unable to confirm species level ID of this entire parasitic wasp superfamily for me.
So, I have a choice.
Do I blindly agree to his identification in order for it to reach GBIF?
Or do I do some amateur research to confirm ?
If I blindly agree, then I am simply acknowledging his profile indicating he’s a researcher in the field.
I am essentially, empowering him. Just as @thomas_everest mentions others blindly empower his IDs. All I am saying is why not formalise this to save time and energy and encourage other experts to participate?
But lets say I choose instead to try and research this field…
The insinuation in other posts talking about amateur input seems to be that I might be able to research this myself to confirm. I think perhaps(?) some of these arguments stem from lack of familiarity with more complex taxa. For example, comparing bird identification with insect identification is simply not comparing like with like…
An issue central to the premise of this often linked thread incidentally
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identification-quality-on-inaturalist/7507
where its noted
“accuracy varies considerably by taxon , from 91% accurate in birds to 65% accurate in insects”
Lets breakdown the species numbers for UK
Birds = 620
Insects = 27000
Relative to species totals, those stats start to look a little misleading…
And the comparison of the two in terms of the possibility of amateur input, radically different.
Breaking down some fo the insect species further, we have
270 bees…
4000 beetles…
9000 wasps…
Wait, 9000 wasps?! Holy moly… so as an amateur the suggestion is I might be able to grapple with a group this complex? Even the 2500 distinctively marked and large Ichneumonids are notoriously difficult to identify. I can’t even find a figure for the number of Chalcids in the UK, but all the Chalcid wasps I come across seem to be a few mm long and black or dark coloured without distinctive markings.
But lets say I really really really like a challenge.
How long will it take me to really have a degree of certainty to back up Rogers IDs?
How much would I have to study?
Would I then be an expert at the end?
If so, isn’t that just further recognition of expertise and the need for it?
Maybe if we replace the term expert with experience this will be less contentious.
Etymologically they seem to stem from the same place - the latin experiri, meaning to try.
Why not empower recognised experience?