iNaturalist:Views.observations.show.community taxon desc html/en

The community taxon (or community identification) represents what taxon the %{site_name} community thinks is depicted in an observation. If you're interested in how we choose the community taxon, see the notes on the algorithm below, but in general, we try to choose a taxon that more than 2/3 of the identifiers agree with. Sometimes this means choosing a higher level taxon that contains a number of disagreeing taxa (e.g. you think it's a kingsnake and I think  it's rattlesnake, so iNat chooses suborder Serpentes which  contains all snakes). The algorithm also slightly favors dissent, because we've found that dissenters are often correct. The community taxon is the taxon we use when sharing observations with data partners, linking observations of the same taxon on the site, updating your life list, etc. If for some reason you don't agree with the community taxon, you can reject it, which means that your ID is the one used for linking to other observations, updating life lists, etc. It also means your observation can only become research grade when the community agrees with you. If you don't like the whole idea of community taxa, you can opt out of them entirely by editing your settings. The algorithm: for all identified taxa and the taxa that contain them (e.g. genus Homo contains Homo sapiens), score each as the ratio between the number of cumulative IDs for that taxon over the sum of the cumulative IDs, the number of more conservative IDs added after the first ID of that taxon, and the number of IDs that are completely different (i.e. IDs of taxa that do not contain the taxon being scored). For the identified taxa that have a score over 2/3 and at least 2 identifications, choose the lowest ranked taxon.