Common names invented on iNat

[charlie]

i think there is for some taxa, such as birds.

[optilete]

@charlie

Scientific names are mostly standardized, but common names are not.

There is a language were common names are standardized soo that in different countries the same name is used.

[bbk-htx]

alesbucek

@bbk-htx

To do justice, iNaturalist would have to list all the common names for each individual and I don’t think that is feasible

I don’t think iNaturalist is trying to say that the common name is the only one and it is indisputable.
Who decides what name should be used? I do not think that any individual, or for that matter any group has to right to say there can only be one “common name”.
I personally don’t see a problem.

At the top of the “Dashboard” you may choose “common name” or not.
" Would you prefer to view common names used in the United States?"

[raymie]

There is for birds, but I don’t believe there is an authority for the common names of any other groups (although there are some authorities in the process of standardizing common names for mammals and herps).

[fogartyf]

And even for birds, there isn’t a universally agreed upon authority. So you end up with multiple schemes that standardize common names, with some number of disagreements between them.

[bbk-htx]

Who determines what is a " meaningless made-up name"

“So be it and it be so
shut this book and let me go”
unknown

[bennypoo]

This has always been my understanding. Anything is a common name from the moment you use it, since there is absolutely no standard. That’s why scientific names exist.

[dianastuder]

Our South African birds have had their ‘common’ names tweaked to conform to usage in Europe. Those are birder’s official common names.

[sbushes]

@alesbucek

public expects the common names they use are standardized and that they mean something

[sgene]

I wouldn’t care what common names were the defaults on iNaturalist, if I could change the common names on my own observations on an individual basis, and my guess is that most amateur users would appreciate having the option to put in the common names they are already used to, or that they see in their favorite nature guides. It seems like this would be feasible if the chosen common names were linked to the observer’s username. If the various common names on observations (whether the defaults or the individually chosen ones) could then be searched by location, we wouldn’t need scientists or committees to tell us what the preferred names are, and in which locations.

[sbushes]

I think the very notion of sourcing common names seems out of touch with the reality of how they were once formed. The notion that common names should only be dictated by taxonomists or follow the meaning of the binomial seems similarly out of touch.

Ideas around what common names are or are not seem largely tied in to historical precedents from a pre-internet age. A century ago if I was part of a regional group to watch woodlice it wouldn’t seem amiss to me to imagine giving them our own name and recording it somehow in our documentation. If the modern equivalent is more globalised and online like iNaturalist, then we should expect there to be a natural shift in how names come to form. It cannot remain static. As others have said, we have the scientific name for that, and even many of those are up for debate. So I don’t see how it’s something which warrants policing or is realistic to police (beyond removing those which cause offence).

Doubtless an even more minority view than @charlie’s.
But for me, I think if anything we should all go in the opposite direction.
Encourage new names and ways of seeing and knowing new species.
Explore new ways to democratise naming.
Push more towards supporting a plurality of names and ideas around this topic.

[upupa-epops]

I think providing a source when adding a new common name should be required or at least strongly encouraged. That would reduce issues with people adding a new name that doesn’t make sense and nobody’s ever heard of, or names that would apply equally well to 20 other similar unnamed species (e.g. “aster leafminer”).

However, I’d also encourage people working with obscure groups to create checklists and identification guides and create common names to make that group more accessible to people. Then those names can gain traction and be added to iNat by other users.

[pfau_tarleton]

I’m not intending to contribute to any debate about common names, but just wanted to point out that there are many publications written by scientists that attempt to standardize common names (one might could argue that a “standardized common name” is an oxymoron). Some examples can be seen by scrolling through this search result:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&q=“common+names”+scientific&hl=en&as_sdt=0,44

And an interesting perspective here written by a scientist:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00288330.2011.621130

And this scientist’s perspective written in 1917 (behind a paywall except for the 1st page–but the 1st page is interesting enough):
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.46.1194.483

And another scientists perspective:
https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/EJC113199

[alesbucek]

@bennypoo

This has always been my understanding. Anything is a common name from the moment you use it, since there is absolutely no standard. That’s why scientific names exist.

Not by the iNaturalist guidelines which forbids creation of your own names unless they are “in regular use”.

[earthknight]

@cthawley

Another issue is that, for many languages that are not commonly in printed scientific discourse, those common names aren’t going to have sources that can be cited. That doesn’t mean those names are less valuable though. A system which needs positive confirmation and documentation would likely be biased against including common names from these languages, including many spoken by ethnic minorities, in smaller countries, or by indigenous groups.

This is an important point.

Also, even in the same language in a local area a species may have multiple common names that are all in use.

This latter situation is one I find quite often when working with my anti-poaching teams here in Vietnam. Even on one relatively small island villages a few kilometers apart will prefer different common names, and sometimes even members of the same team in the same village will use different common names.

When you look at the national level species information many species include 3 - 6 common names in their description, none of which may be what’s actually used at any given specific location.

[earthknight]

Attempting to standardize common names runs the risk of being deeply culturally insensitive and coming across as imperialistic.

[earthknight]

@alesbucek

But public expects the common names they use are standardized and that they mean something.

I’d suggest that the “public” expects common names that they personally use to be locally familiar, but not to be standardized in any manner. People are pretty well aware of the fact that many things have multiple common names (eg. bus, lorry, truck, sweater, jumper, soda, pop, freezer, ice-box, tv, boob-tube, etc, etc).

[twainwright]

@raymie

There is for birds, but I don’t believe there is an authority for the common names of any other groups (although there are some authorities in the process of standardizing common names for mammals and herps).

For North America (U.S., Canada, & Mexico), the American Fisheries Society (fisheries.org) standardizes common names of fishes and aquatic invertebrates, but this is mainly aimed at standardizing usage in scientific literature, not to preclude common usage of other names elsewhere.

[twainwright]

A couple other relevant Forum threads for this discussion:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/list-of-sources-for-common-names-wiki/10249
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/reliable-sources-for-common-names-on-inaturalist/5579

[alesbucek]

@earthknight

I’d suggest that the “public” expects common names that they personally use to be locally familiar, but not to be standardized in any manner.

This is not true based on my experience with public opinions: many people from my real life personal experience are surprised that the multi-word common names that sound complicated can be ambiguous or not meaning anything outside of a single online blog or website. Even in this topic you can find a testimony of a user who was not aware that the officially-sounding common names were not established through some coordinated effort. Personally, I did not know that before I started to be more interested in biology. Until there is a research that shows that majority of people understands limitations of common organism names, I will assume that there is a big portion of people - I assume more than 50% - who are not aware of that. Also, people use iNaturalist to determine names of organisms but they rarely use similar tools to check whether the thing in front of them is TV or freezer. Therefore, comparison of common organism names to common names of things of daily use is not useful in my opinion. Common organism name is more like a name of a particular model of iPhone. If people would refer to the same model of iPhone with different names, everybody would be soon very confused.