Flag for Taxon: Blue-winged Scoliid Wasp (Scolia dubia)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| allisonbf | jonathan142 | Blue-winged Scoliid Wasp (Scolia dubia) |
It's no longer showing as being inactive. I think it may be causing confusion with people adding observations who are unfamiliar with the specie. |
Oct. 17, 2020 02:34:03 +0000 | loarie |
see comments |
Comments
It had been inactive. @jonathan142
Perhaps it was added as inactive pending confirmation then changed to active?
Oof, taxon changes really shouldn't be used to assign subspecies identifications. It's always been the case, but Scott (@loarie) mentions that explicitly here in the comments:
It sounds like you want to use a taxon change to 'bulk identify' alot of observations from the species rank to the subspecies rank? Taxon changes should never be used to identify species like this - they should only be used to make sure content gets moved to the right spot in response to alterations to the structure of the tree. I know it might seem tedious, but once you add the spp to the tree the proper way to try to identify those observations currently sitting at species Epilachna mexicana to that subspecies is to add identifications.
[...]
As long as you're not using taxon changes as a way to replace other people's identifications of species with identifications of subspecies which should not be done.
I agree with bouteloua on this. Looks like this was committed by @jonathan142?
I'm unsure what you mean. Jonathan had explained the difference between those species, and so I began ID'ing them. There were a lot of observations where I had to ID down to S. dubia dubia. I can't recall if he let me know why the change was made. So it did make organizing the species much easier. Now that it no longer says inactive, people are getting confused again and asking why it is S. dubia dubia instead of S. dubia.
Will it be changed back? I know that the change did place some observations in the incorrect subspecie.
Thanks for replying. Sorry that I'm having difficulty understanding what you mean. If no change is made, I'll continue ID'ing as usual, no problem. :)
I think it's too late for his taxon change to be reverted right Scott?
@allisonbf There's no issue with the species ("S. dubia") being active - it should be! :) It is perfectly correct for people to identify to the species level or to the finer subspecies level if they'd prefer to be more specific. The species is one big bucket that covers all the observations, while the subspecies are two buckets nested inside of it. Just like the genus is an even bigger bucket with several species buckets inside of it.
It is unfortunate that there are two listings for the species though. That's confusing. Thankfully only one will appear in the search dropdown when people make an identification though (along with the subspecies selections).
(more esoteric note: there were still several observations that were stuck as being listed under the original species listing. I reindexed all those observations and it seems OK now)
attempting to revert - @jonathan142, please don't use taxon changes to refine the identification observations from active taxa to other active taxa. They are meant to help move content as the tree itself is restructured.
Once this is reverted, I'll deal with the weirdness associated with the multiple Scolia dubia and make sure the ssp are grafted to the right one
This is confusing though as now I'm seeing a lot of S. dubia that haven't been confirmed or corrected. Awhile ago, I went through all of the observations which needed ID'ing. Have my ID's been deleted on some, or are they being sorted different?
ok took a few hours but I managed to revert this and delete the change
@allisonbf IDs to subspecies that you had made manually shouldn't be affected
I'm still seeing a bunch of these where my original species-level ID is "maverick" -- e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/38035053
There are also a bunch that have two or more species-level IDs that have reverted to "Needs ID" because the system doesn't recognize the IDs somehow, e.g., https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59629390
In both cases, adding a species or subspecies ID seems to reset everything correctly, but that's a lot of unnecessary work?
Ok I think I manually fixed those - reverting taxon changes leaves alot of carnage
Hey all, just for some background here as this isn't quite what's been suggested. This should have progressed from inactive taxon to active taxon; if it was showing active to active, then an old concept was reactivated by someone else. There should not have been multiple active taxa under the same name. These taxa had been imported from BugGuide, which until recently only included these as "Scolia dubia" and "Scolia dubia haematodes. This created the issue that, on both iNat and BugGuide, those identified simply as "Scolia dubia" are taxonomically identical with "Scolia dubia dubia" (that is, as a taxonomic concept, not simply as identifications). So it really was a restructuring of the taxonomic tree. For reference, BugGuide has since been updated to recognize its old "Scolia dubia" concept as "Scolia dubia dubia". This should have always been the case for BugGuide, but regrettably it wasn't.
thanks jonathan142 - definitely sounds like a weird edge case of a messy situation. Thanks for your help curating
If the input was inactive before the swap was committed then definitely something else screwy had happened previously if it had so much (orphaned) content on it. In any case, if the goal was to get the content from an inactive Scolia dubia to an active Scolia dubia I would have swapped the inactive one into the active one. If I also wanted to create a missing ssp I would have just created that and let the community foll the IDs forward. In general splits are really complicated and should only be done if we're narrowing what we mean by a taxon and don't want to misinterpret lots of existing IDs. (e.g. lots of IDs meant S. dubia in the broad sense, but we're narrowing S. dubia and alot of those IDs would come across as disagreeing with the chunk we're carving off). Anyway glad this is cleaned up and happy curating
Hi,
Thanks for addressing this. I do need to clarify though because I’m unfamiliar with taxonomy in that I can fully understand this.
1). During the summer I began going through the entire database of S. dubia, and ID’ing when appropriate down to subspecie- S. dubia dubia. Jonathan had explained about the two subspecie and also T. ardens. But I left those two alone to prevent errors. (Due to the exact range, and two species looking similar).
2). I searched for all S. dubia, and S. dubia dubia listed as “ID needed”.
3). I think the search was inaccurate because at random times, it would populate observations in the date range I’d already checked.
4). The taxa was changed, and some S. dubia went to subspecie level. But they were unconfirmed and should’ve been previously found.
5). I corrected inaccuracies. (Any automatic specie that went to the incorrect subspecie.)
6). I got caught up with it and continued ID’ing observations when submitted.
7). Taxa started showing active again.
8). Flagged it, and a lot of unconfirmed observations appeared, so I began moving them to subspecie.
9). Those are gone. So I’m unclear as to if they are all now either S. dubia dubia or S. dubia haematodes? And why were so many unconfirmed showing up a few days ago- which hadn’t shown before I flagged it?
10). Basically, why didn’t the database give me the entire list that needed ID’ing?
I’m trying to make sure that all previous observations are now either S. dubia dubia or S. dubia haematodes, and have been confirmed. I saw that it’ll still make RG if for example, if it shows specie, then subspecie- even if the chosen subspecie is incorrect.
Sorry for the long message, with probably too much detail!:) Just want to make sure I understand everything and that the previous observations are in the correct subspecie. I’m happy to continue on with old observations. I enjoyed going through them as it was educational. I also found it interesting to see the range, and plant preferences, as well as comments added by the person who added the observation.
Allie
Hi Allie,
I'm really not sure exactly what happened here to get things into the state we tried to revert from. And reverting is an imperfect tool that doesn't revert everything. So its certainly possible if you added ssp level IDs after the change was committed (September?) that they may have been incorrectly handled by the revert. If that happened I apologize.
The thing the split did that for me was a priority to revert was thousands of instances where user A added an ID of S. dubia and the split withdrew that ID and added a new ID of S. dubia dubia. This situation where a taxon change narrow what a user meant by their ID is something we'd like to avoid
Hi @allisonbf, not quite sure what you're referring to - inactive? I don't see any previous taxon changes for this species. It appears to be an accepted species:
https://bugguide.net/node/view/431
https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=154191