When typing in certain moths in the genus Cisthene in a Species search, inactive (deleted) taxa come up as suggestions. This is annoying if not downright confusing. For example, typing “Cisthene schw…” brings up the following suggestions:
C. schwartiorum has been a full species for at least two years; the listing of
“Cisthene tenuifascia (Cisthene tenuifascia schwarziorum)” is now inappropriate. Here’s a screen capture of the Names section on the taxon page:
Q: What functionality (iNat or external?) governs suggested names for autofill?
I saw in other posts where inactive taxa were being suggested for IDs; I’m not sure if the present circumstance is the same or different. I’d be happy to convert this to a Bug Report or a Feature Request as needed.
It looks like Cisthene tenuifascia, an active taxon, appears in your search because it also has “Cisthene tenuifascia schwarziorum” in its list of names.
I think the two “schwarziorum” synonyms at Cisthene tenuifascia should be removed, if it’s in fact a separate valid species. This would solve the problem.
I don’t know of about the specifics here, but that isn’t always going to be the best approach. “Unaccepted” names are often left in the system for specific taxa when there is a chance that many users might still be using them to access a specific taxon. This could happen if there is a recent change, there’s taxonomic uncertainty/competing sets of names, etc. So there are good reasons for names to be not accepted but still in the system.
Chris, you’re absolutely right that there may be a number reasons for keeping older names in the list. Deleting such names should be considered carefully. In the case of Cisthene schwarziorum, along with the now outdated placement of that taxon as a subspecies of C. tenuifascia, there were some other archaic and even erroneous synonyms. After reviewing the historical literature, I cleaned those up.
Such historical names have a place somewhere in the taxonomic literature but in most cases, I don’t think they should pop up (confusingly) as ID suggestions. It’s the autofill function that is my concern, not the importance of documenting the proper taxonomic history.
In this situation, the name is not coming up as an ID suggestion per se - if a user chooses that dispay option, the ID will enter as whatever the valid scientific name that is prioritized is on iNat at that time. Unaccepted names don’t appear as observation ID or CID for the taxa that have them. The name is only appearing as a search result. If the name didn’t appear as a search result, then it wouldn’t be useful for search, which is the rationale for these names existing in iNat in the first place. iNat definitely isn’t a taxonomic database that tries to have all inactive/past names for taxa like Reptile Database or similar - just names that curators/users think are important for use in searching/disambiguation.
