Common names are not common

Please consider Aelurillus v-insignitus (Salticidae): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/153729819
In French, the old common name “saltique marquée” (marked jumping spider) was commonly used and well understood. Now someone has added a new common name that I have never heard of and that has never been used on the whole internet: “asianelle marqué” (marked Asianella). And there is another genus of Salticidae called Asianellus, so this new common name is also very misleading.

I don’t see any way to revert to an old common name on INat, since it’s the most recent one that is used and we can’t suggest a name that is already in the database.
There should certainly be a voting function for common names, as unlike scientific names, they are based on social consensus. And if someone wants to add their own fancy name for each species, I don’t see anything to stop them.

What do you think?

On the other hand, I know that scientific names should be used first, but common names are still useful for some groups (mammals, birds) and for some species with very long scientific names.

That’s weird, in english the first common name to be added is the default one that shows up, not the last

However curators can change which name shows up by default

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the name in question was added by @victor_85 , can you provide an explanation here?

by the way, if wrong or improper common names can be flagged explaining the issue and a curator will fix them, i did it multiple times before applying for curatorship myself and fixed many names that had typos or other mistakes

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Already send a message to explain to raphaelgrellety in DM ;)
Basically, the French branch of the IUCN Redlist published a redlist of french spiders, and this name was within the publication, so I thought that because it was registered into an official report, I should prioritize this name from the other !
cf : https://uicn.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/tableau-liste-rouge-araignees-de-france-metropolitaine.pdf

Alright, I just saw your message :)
That’s a good reason to change them, however I will try to contact them and know where these names come from. Still, I think common names should rather come from the majority than from one person (maybe).
I’ll change the post category to Feature suggestion for this voting feature.

edit: I cannot move it to another forum category

In general, conversations about specific taxa like this one should be raised in flags on iNaturalist itself and not on the forum. As such, I’m going to close this thread.

Feature requests should be made specifically for the request, so we wouldn’t want to try to turn this thread into a request. Feel free to make a feature request for any ideas arising from this conversation - you can always include a link to other threads in a feature request for context.

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