Senseless caution, how it could be adressed

Something I think could be improved about the design of INat, as a website.

Problem: what I call "senseless caution", both from the human identifiers and the AI: IDing something as a single-species taxon, instead of that species, for example "genus Elona" instead of "Elona quimperiana", or I think "Class Ginkgoopsida" is a striking example with only Ginkgo biloba in it. There's never a reason to register such IDs and they can always be improved without any loss of accuracy. (Logically this should apply to the single genus families and so on, all single-descendant taxons.)

Solution 1: hardcode AI to straight up never recommend single-species taxons and recommend more precise ones instead. Indeed, many such IDs come from silly automatic recommendations.
(More controversially: to be honest, I'd like to go further and forbid AI to ever suggest "Genus Cornu", "Genus Arianta" and the like. Giant waste of time, that.)

Solution 2: Put an "Improve" button on the ID form (next to "Agree" and "Compare") that will only appear on the senselessly cautious IDs. Pressing it would automatically register an ID of the single species in the taxon that appeared in the original ID. (That is: you press the "Improve" button on a "genus Elona" ID and it automatically adds an "Elona quimperiana" ID.)

Solution 3, low impact: add an icon to the senselessly cautious ID (perhaps a blue exclamation point). It would do nothing at all, except that when you moused over it you'd see a text along the lines of: "This identification could be improved without any loss of accuracy by replacing it with taxon such and such." Purely informative.

Objection: I can't think of any strong objections, but you could say: "what if we replace all "genus Elona" with "Elona quimperiana", and then a new Elona species is described, or a taxanomic change happens. Then a clean-up will be required." I think this is reasonable but in practice much less of an annoyance than the one that senseless caution currently creates.

(Not posting this on the forum)

Publicerat 8 juni 2023 08.24 av tasty_y