Flag for Taxon: Aloe framesii
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| loarie | Aloe framesii |
duplicated as A. m. framesii |
Mar. 30, 2020 17:29:23 +0000 | loarie |
see comments |
Comments
I know little about Aloe, other than that it is a political hot potato that continuously gets kicked around.
BODATSA has it as Aloe framesii (with Aloe microstigma framesii as the synonym).
I have not kept up to date with all the politics, and books and publications: seems everyone has an opinion.
It does not matter to me, just dont mention me if you change it to the subspecies: it seems to me that at present the "score" is 0 for subspecies and 14 for the species.
@bobby23, ok to get inline with POWO (ie go with Aloe microstigma framesii)?
By all means!
I added the deviation because I was unsure what the iNat community wanted. I have unnecessarily ruffled feathers in the past when attempting to curate our plant taxonomy by trying to align ourselves to POWO.
OK thanks - I swapped it https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/74597 it was flagged for a week. If folks are adamant that we need to deviate after seeing this swap we can always wire that up later since there's only a few observations involved
We need a way to be aware of any issues about deviations. Having an open flag is one way, but it invites resolving the flag, and is a pain to have unresolved. Closing the flag hides it: it needs somehow to be linked to the taxon mapping and flagged on any swaps between saving and committing.
Another issue is that posting a swap and leaving it open for comment, does not really work as most people remain unaware of the swap or only find out about it long after it was done. I only found out yesterday that you had sunk the subspecies for the Sacred Ibis that you did in January (no issues: the two extra subspecies are now elevated to species, but I do have issues with the Cape Weaver subspecies sunk, which I detected about 3 weeks after it was aligned with ?Clements?).
I dont have any solutions, other than that perhaps (potentially controversial - but how does one know?) swaps should be left open for two weeks, and should appear on the dashboard of anyone who has posted an ID for those taxa, with a note to comment on the swap if they have any issues with it.
But (like the taxon framework) that just makes curation more complicated and onerous.
It would be nice though to have the curation procedure more transparent, interactive and streamlined. As a matter of interest what is the proportion of deviations in the different iconic groups?
In southern Africa, we are striving to get our BODATSA database congruent with POWO, and at present it is about 50% each way (being out of date - POWO missing local journals, and BODATSA missing global work where only few local species are affected). POWO - and IPNI - is superb at updating when they are out of date, usually updating within days.
On this topic, we have a few cases were iNat is being used to collect data for taxonomic reviews, and feedback to observers is critical to getting more data: these groups have a dozen plus undescribed species many with lots of records, that need to be viewed with other species to allow people to see what needs to be looked for. The turnaround has to be fast as some species only flower for weeks. Using fields does not allow "species summaries" to be posted, and in these cases I have created manuscript species (for those with more than 5-10 records on iNaturalist). Do I need to create deviations for these?
POWO has this as Aloe microstigma framesii, @bobby23 has a deviation here https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/344740/taxonomy_details but someone has added Aloe microstigma framesii - can we get in line with POWO? Thoughts @tonyrebelo?