Catalog of Life 2012 importer

Curators
1

Dear Curators,

Please see this post below where @ einsum has taken active steps towards a plea to staff for update of the external taxon name importer (still using Catalog of Life 2012)

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/switch-from-col-2012-api-to-checklistbank-to-reduce-curator-load-for-new-taxa-addition/79266

I’ve lamented many times on it - i find it absurd to be using a database that’s now about 14 years old. I’d like to use words beyond “legacy” and “depreciated” for such content. In the following 14 years, that database has more than doubled in size, changed vastly in composition with recombinations and such plus a likely staggering number or errors like misspellings since fixed.

[Note, i have a variety of case studies to list that have been selected from flag requests over the last year to highlight many places where this outdate importer is creating pointless workload for volunteer curators, and repeatedly allowing erroneous and outdated names to be built in, making the taxonomy dataset worse!]

For now, i ask anyone who can appreciate how an updated taxon name importer will help curation efforts to please add an upvote on the linked Feature Request

3

Curators equally access, vote, and comment on feature requests as other users can, and this doesn’t seem to start a substantially different “discussion”, so I closed this topic. If the goal is to promote the feature request you could write a journal post perhaps.