Thanks, laying out the arguments here once and not having to repeat it on the countless flags seems like a good idea, if @raymie is willing to accept the result?
Since raymie has chimed in and referenced some of the particulars, here’s detailed background information:
The project which explicitly attempts to create English and French names for all species in Canada if they don’t already have one (full list of names available for download as an Excel spreadsheet):
https://www.wildspecies.ca/common-names
NatureServe imported some of these names, where they’re visible on their Explorer tool. This is the source raymie has been citing recently:
https://explorer.natureserve.org/
My interest is in spiders, so I can speak about the systemic quality issues in the made-up spider names. I suspect quality varies, e.g. I expect the bird names were just copied from the AOS names, so those are probably fine. But the spider names have (at least) the following issues:
- new common names created for species which already have common names
- new common names which duplicate existing common names of other species, e.g. “Striped Fishing Spider” for Dolomedes striatus when D. scriptus is already known by that name
- missed species and genera (I don’t even agree with the goal to create names for all the species, but the sloppiness pains me. They made names for all 400 dwarf spiders in Canada and then missed a whole genus of Wolf Spiders.)
- overly generic names (e.g. “Common Orbweaver”, “Eurasian Wolf Spider”)
- naming families after characteristics unique to one genus, e.g. “Feather-legged Triangleweaver” for Uloborus glomosus when the genus Hyptiotes are the only triangleweavers in the family (the other genera all do full orb-webs)
- names badly calqued from the scientific name, e.g. “Pink Orbweaver” for Eustala rosae, which is neither pink nor associated with roses - it was “Named in honor of Mrs. Rose Berlin of Salt Lake City who was a member of the collecting party.” (quote from the paper which named the species).
These are cherry-picked examples, but I think they faithfully demonstrate the systematic lack of care put into researching existing spider names and creating new ones.
You can download the full list in an Excel Spreadsheet from wildspaces.ca if you want to examine the names they came up with for taxa you know a lot about. I’m interested to hear whether the same sorts of issues exist in other taxa, and whether they’re more or less severe.
If the problems are as widespread as I suspect, it would probably be best to make a blanket ruling that names solely sourced from this list should not be added to iNaturalist so that they can be removed quickly if they are added to iNaturalist.