Homonyms in Organism Names

for subspecies sharing the common name of a species, there was for a while a big issue with people accidentally adding the subspecies via the common name. For a while we were adding the word ‘nominate’ before the nominate common name of the subspecies… ie (nominate red oak for Quercus rubra ssp. rubra if such a species existed which it probably doesn’t).

It’s been a while since i did this so i am not sure if it has fallen out of favor or is still acceptable.

Great ideas! And I get about the venerable naming body and its opinion of the lowly and unwashed masses lol. I like the various tagging suggestions. It would be interesting to know how many records might be affected by this, and how many were fixed vs not. The former are probably identifiable but the latter would be more of a challenge, tho by tracking over time one could establish a rate. The kind of data mining I really enjoy :-)

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There’s a start here if you’re interested:
https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_valid_homonyms

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Cool! My programming days are long in the past, but I’ll start with that and build some views and see what happens :-)

Is there a way (in the url language?) to be able to ID records that ever had a given taxon ID as part of its ID stream, along with the dates that changes were made? That would be a key step in figuring out what the incidence of corrrected incorrect IDs were. Also see how long on average they took to be corrected. My hunch is they are either correctly very quickly or they languish for a long time, but data is necessary :-)

You can look at IDs and observations with the API: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/

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Thanks - I look forward to geeking out :-)

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Most of these are quite old, from times when online taxonomic frameworks (or computers, or the internet…) weren’t a thing and people had no easy way of knowing if a name had been published or not. They don’t reflect current “taxonomic behaviour”, they just stuck around because different groups of organisms have their taxonomy ruled by nomenclature codes that are independent from each other, as already pointed out in previous comments.

That being said, the problem has been acknowledged, and there are already lists of hemihomonyms out there: http://herba.msu.ru/shipunov/os/homonyms/index.php

It may be worth creating a feature request for this - I would spend a vote on it!

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Same here, not to mention that data from iNat are exported to other global databases such as GBIF. Having “made-up” names used only on iNat would be a nightmare for data scientists and people modelling species distributions, for example.

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I agree - I don’t think iNat should make up names - my naivite came in thinking that a request/suggestion to fix this would meet with any interest from the official naming bodies. And yes, I know that most of these instances came from people genuinely believing they had found new things and should name them. I do really like @jdmore 's suggestion for providing visual flags with the taxa when they are displayed. A simple and elegant solution :-)

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Having an extra visual prompt when choosing a name that has valid homonyms (as @jdmore suggests) seems to me to be a straightforward way to go.

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@janetwright @duarte @KitKestrel @mftasp and all, Feature Request now posted.

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Not very complete.
One I am constantly rubbing shoulders with is
Tritonia (Irid and Nudibranch)
Tritoniopsis (Irid and Nudibranch)
including Tritonia pallida.

There are a few surprizing ones:
Erica = Heath (700 species) and Jumping Spider (in Hawaii)

Note that the names are governed by three laws, so in theory one could have a Hemihomonym for three organisms: Animal, Plant and Bacteria. At this stage there are no names shared between all three systems.

In my experience, mistakes (which are very easy to make - I have made many) are rapidly detected and sorted out. It is just a temporary inconvenience. I dont really think any further bells and whistles are needed to the current system on iNat.

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As I said, a start. Anyone can edit Wikispecies, so feel free to add missing info.

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Of course, the same thing happens with common names. More than once (maybe less than thrice :smirk:) I have seen a tree identified as a buckeye… but the buckeye chosen is a moth. And there it’s pretty obvious—there’s a picture of a moth, or a picture of a tree. How hatd can it be to choose the right one?

On the ither hand, the same affordance is there when choosing between similar taxonomic names. How hard can it be to distinguish between a picture of a spider and a picture of heath? To some extent, it’s just that people are in a hurry, and less attentive than they should be as they go through these IDs.

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One possibility is that people are using the app offline and just writing the name in the ID text box, and then when they upload the observation the wrong species is automatically chosen for them.

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Another possibility is that they are using the app and the pix are very small and eyes are not so good anymorr

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Both worms and bugs are covered under the Commission for Zoological Nomenclature, so this is a violation and one or the other should be changed.

A plant and an animal can have the same name. (Here plant = non-animal; plants, fungi, algae, etc.)

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That’s an interesting one! I’m an amateur and self-taught in taxonomy, mostly through my experiences in iNat. My understanding was that Class and Phylum etc all had certain types of endings, and you could usually tell from that ending what they were. There are also capitalisations and italics that are indicative of position within the hierachy, so a genus would always be distinguishable from a phylum just by virtue of being italicised. I have no idea of the actual “rules”, and I must get around to reading them!

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This rule only applied to Genera, not to taxons on different levels on the taxonomic tree. So this has the potential to cause more confusion.

Another example:
the Sword-billed Hummingbird: Ensifera ensifera
crickets and katydids: Enisfera (suborder)

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