Changing a common name

Curators
#1

Hi everyone,

at first: I’m a new curator and wanted to introduce myself. I’ll focus mainly on Dermaptera, but I’m interested in all Arthropoda, “Reptilia” and Lissamphibia. Since I’m new I have to get used to the system more, the curator guides also helps, but I’ve got a question:

How does the procedure works if I’d suggest the deletion of a common name? I guess it’s better to discuss it in the forum, that’s why I started the topic:

The genus Apterygida has on iNaturalist the common name “African earwigs”. There are 3 species, 2 in Japan and 1 in Europe. I’d guess in older literature you could find the data that Apterygida albipennis also lives in North Africa, this might be because of confusions with Guanchia sp.

So the genus doesn’t even lives in Africa and I couldn’t find this common name anywhere - not on GBIF, not in wikipedia, not in dermaptera species file, not with string searches on google or in any paper.

→ the common name doesn’t exist (or I couldn’t find any source) and is misleading, therefore I’d like to delete it.

Do you approve that?

Greetings,
Stephan
(on iNaturalist you can find me as stephankleinfelder)

#2

Welcome to the forum, Stephan.

It’s a great idea to check with other users before making changes. However, discussions around specific changes should be had on iNaturalist itself, and not the forum. One reason for this is that many iNat users are not on the forum.

For changes to common names, you could raise a flag on the taxon in question, explain your reasoning as you have above, and see if you get responses. To increase the chance that others familiar with the taxon might see it, you can look through frequent identifiers and observers and tag them (especially if they are curators!). If no one objects (or responds after a reasonable amount of time), it should be ok to change the common name.

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#3

Thank you for your reply! I’ll create a flag for that!

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#4

to add to this, most common names are added by other individual curators. If you find what seems to be an erroneous name, click the edit button next to it on the taxon page, and the creator of the name will be listed at the bottom; you can then tag them in the flag to ask about where they found it

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