Common names invented on Wikipedia

iNaturalist has picked up a bunch of “common names” that were invented on Wikipedia.

[There is a Wikipedia discussion about the editor who invented the names at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Alomomola_and_common_names_of_fish

I realize this is something that should be addressed by flagging the species pages, but I’m not going to track down all the affected pages myself.

Some of them are:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1376771-Pomacentrus-xanthocercus
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/786255-Pomatoschistus-nanus
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1416187-Rhonciscus-pauco

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If they catch on, there’s nothing wrong with this. Common names belong to the public to refer to organisms however they please.

The issue is that, like inat, wikipedia is supposed to refer to information from outside sources - it’s not supposed to be a place to do original research or create new names. This user essentially used inat and wikipedia to create a citation loop in order to give their newly-coined names the appearance of legitimacy in both places.

@plantdrew - Only curators can remove common names, so each of these taxa should be flagged and the issue explained. I’ll try to go through the list from the wikipedia discussion and flag them soon, if no-one else gets there first.

Edit: I’ve flagged all the names that have been identified so far in the wikipedia admin discussion.

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dear Tony spirits of the iNaturalist forum… please don’t let this be another venue for arguing about the legitimacy of newly made-up common names. please don’t let this be another venue for arguing about the legitimacy of newly made-up common names. please don’t let this be another venue for arguing about the legitimacy of newly made-up common names

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Hi Drew, I added a flag (to a higher taxon) for iNat curators to review.