The nomenclature used in the taxonomy of viruses is somewhat different to that of cellular organisms. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV; the authority on virus taxonomy and nomenclature; comparable to the ICN and ICZN in botany and zoology, respectively) states that virus species names are allowed to contain numbers. This is stated in section 3.12 of the ICTV Code. However, iNaturalist does not allow species names to include numbers (which is appropriate for cellular nomenclature), but this has forced curators to deviate from correct virus names and spell numbers out. For example:
I believe presenting all nomenclature consistent with the accepted form is a goal to which iNaturalist should strive. This helps to reduce confusion with names and contributes towards iNaturalist’s reputation as a serious and reliable resource.
Currently the iNat system for viruses has an English spoken version of the numeral*(number) in the name instead of the Arabic numerals following the Latin genus. This means that non English knowledge users need to translate the numeral they are looking for into the spoken English version. It would seem that if they are filtering through species of a genus, the order has the potential to be in English spelling of the number rather than in numerical order - am I correct? Granted every language does not use Arabic numerals but I would think in scientific literature they do.
from Wikipedia " A numeral is a figure, symbol, or group of figures or symbols denoting a number."
Just as background, numbers used to be allowed in species names and was removed.
They were removed as an additional block on people entering undescribed species, which is not supposed to happen under site guidelines, but some folks persisted in doing it regardless.
If curators were either unaware of the guidelines, or even worse were aware of them and felt ignoring them was appropriate then, I dont think there is any reason to believe that will have changed.
if this is to be done, it probably should be done in conjunction with the other virus name feature request (Italicise all viral taxa - Feature Requests - iNaturalist Community Forum). there’s a note in the Github issue referenced over there which indicates that the change will not be trivial and will require some up front tasks (some of which you may be able to provide input on). if there are other things related to virus names, it might be efficient to describe them all together, rather than as separate requests, so that they can all be done at the same time.
is there any significant advantage to being able to sort alphabetically within the species? and especially given that only the first eight would be sorted…? Surely a partial solution like that takes the pressure off a more “correct” and workable solution being implemented, so I would rather see the effort be towards bringing the taxonomy into conformance, as it were.
Clearly iNat taxonomy is capable of handling the arabic numerals, so perhaps lists could be submitted to staff such that they can implement the numeralled taxon names manually from the back end, rather than opening up all taxonomy into allowing it. How big of a list would it be?
[edit] I’m thinking that going forward, ie after the bulk of the already entered names are fixed, the english (or french or whatever) spelling could be used initially, and then a flag raised for staff to implement the numeralled version to replace it. Or perhaps staff can somehow grant permissions for a suitable curator to handle that… (it’s not me, btw… I’m amateur as…)