Thanks for the detailed response! I’ll try to give a condensed summary:
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You are right, I had forgotten the Lepzig Catalogue. I did not include World Plants in this context (although I carry on a great deal of correspondence with Michael Hassler, and had the pleasure of meeting him this summer) because he has not set up URLs with unique identifiers for each of his species, and does not intend to do so. Therefore it cannot be used as a taxon framework. (I see in his “News” that much of the Catalogue of Life plant data draws on him, though.)
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I think the discussion of what is a database, website, list, framework, etc. obscures the point I was trying to make, perhaps not very well. TPL was a coalition project. WFO is also a coalition project, intended to replace it, but it was very slow getting off the ground. So POWO, which was intended as Kew’s contribution to the WFO coalition, wound up occupying that ecological niche of “global checklist of plant species”. I’m grateful they stepped up to do so, but of course that means the checklist has more strongly reflected Kew’s particular sensibilities.
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I’m not sure what is meant by stating that POWO “wants to present legacy data as originally published”. POWO does update parts of its taxonomy as literature is published (I distinctly remember the circumscription of Ranunculus having fluctuated). It is hard to track down changes in what POWO has recognized over the years; the fact that they have abandoned GLOVAP Pyrus sensu latissimo now doesn’t mean that they never recognized it. (There is a complaint about POWO adopting lots of GLOVAP combinations in 2020 at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-do-we-deal-with-the-thousands-of-highly-contested-glovap-new-combinations/10277 but they were accepting Cotoneaster hence rejecting Pyrus s. latis. by 2021.)
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Even new combinations only entail taxonomic decisions if the original species was already in our taxonomic tree. But yes, most taxonomic changes to vascular plants here were, and are, uncontroversial. The recent agita has come about because formerly there was more use of taxon framework deviations or just leaving taxa unlinked to the framework when people did not want to follow the POWO treatment. Site policy shifted to discourage that, trying to reduce deviations and “relationship unknown” taxa. But that led to more taxon changes that followed POWO but were not popular, were contrary to recent literature or common floras, etc. Further policy changes like waiting period for swaps, voting, etc., are attempting to facilitate cleanup while avoiding taxon changes that will be rejected by the community.