404. Taxon history in iNaturalist since 2022

I missed this https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/taxon-history-is-now-live/30008 one

Since Februari 2022 Taxon History functionality is added to iNaturalist as a way to improve transparency and accountability when users edit things like conservation statuses and add/edit/remove taxon names. Some of you have come across it, but I wanted to give a brief overview of it - sorry for the delay on this post.

For the below examples, I’m using Phaethon rubricauda. All of my screenshots are from our staff-only test server, so you won’t see these specific changes on the actual public site.


If you go to any taxon page and click on Curation, you’ll now see a “History” option:

image

That will take you to the taxon’s history page, which shows changes to the taxon in reverse chronological order.

Concurrently, we also added an optional Note field in a few places for users to explain their changes, eg when you add a name or edit a taxon, you’ll see something like this:

So the Taxon History page will show not only the changes, but any explanatory note included with the change. I highly encourage everyone to include explanations when making changes.

For example, here’s what it looks like when I added example tropicbird name as a new name:

You’ll see when the name was added, a link to the name, who added it, various details about the name, and what I wrote for the Note section.


Curators can not only add or edit common names, they can edit other aspects of a taxon, like conservation statuses, wikipedia entries, etc.

Here’s an example of what the Taxon History looks like after I both updated the Wikipedia link for the species and added a new conservation status. The new state is in green while the previous state is in white.

It looks a little weird because the Note only shows up on one of the updates, but you’ll see they were made at the same time. Please make sure your Note covers all changes you made before saving.

Curators can also change the order of common names, and when you do that things can get a bit funky, since moving a name in the order creates a ton of changes (many or all of the other names’ positions change). Which is a “Save Changes” button appears after any change in order has been made:

When you click on that button, it creates quite a few records on the Taxon History page. Here’s a partial screenshot of those changes on the Taxon History page:

So it’s a bit messy but should still allow anyone to see which changes were made, when they were made, and by whom.


Also, if you mouseover the a few items, like the Record, User, etc you’ll see a magnifying glass:

image

Clicking on that will filter the taxon history by that value, so you can see all updates associated with it.

Taxon History currently covers most of the changes which can be made to a taxon, although a few (like default photo edits) are not recorded as yet. And note that changes prior to the launch of Taxon History are not included.

If you find any bugs, please make a new topic in #bug-reports.

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/taxon-history-is-now-live/30008


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  • Posted on February 10, 2023 01:00 PM by ahospers ahospers

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