Interpretation of rule against invented common names

General
1

The curator guide states “If a species has no common name in usage, do not make one up. For example, do not create a new common name based on its scientific name or based on a translation of a common name from another language.”

As I understand that, the criteria for a name being permissible under iNat policy is that the name has use outside iNat. The way this gets controversial is that some people interpret this policy not only to require external use but external use originating prior to anyone adding the name on iNat

So I’m curious how a broader sample of the community would interpret this.

I should note that having an external source does not require the name to be used, and even names that are sourced and permissible under iNat policy may be removed if the consensus is that the external use is too limited or from bad sources and/or the name is confusing or otherwise bad. I would rather not get sidetracked into discussing the infinite variables affecting whether a permissible name should be removed, I want to keep this focused on when a name is permissible under iNat policy

The scenarios I am thinking of (exact years are not meaningful they are just to give a sense of the order things might happen in)

1: Someone (against policy) adds a name they made up in 2018, this name is removed in 2020 once curators realize it is made up, so far, all good. Except that in 2019 one or more legitimate sources began using that name, so if someone adds the name again in 2025 citing those source(s), are they acting against policy? If someone flags the name now, must curators remove it? Or can the flag be resolved as keeping the name?

2: Someone (against policy) adds a name they made up in 2018, and no one ever realizes it is made up, so the name is still in place until being flagged in 2025. (Again external sources adopt the name in 2019). Now must curators remove it because it was invented when added? Or is keeping it an option because it now has external use? If the name in scenario 1 can be kept I would think the scenario 2 name could also be kept, otherwise scenario 2 is removing a name that someone else is justified in adding.

I think in both scenarios keeping the name is an option, and the 2025 re-addition of the name in scenario 1 is not against policy, since the policy only requires external use and prohibits making up names, and adding a name that does have external use is not making up a name, even if that external use could be traced back to someone in the past on iNat making up a name.

I also think any other policy would be impractical for the following reasons:

A: Refusing to use a name that has external use simply because of the origin of the name defeats the purpose of listing common names that are in use, why should some who knows the organism by that name not be able to find it on a search?

B: Having name flags involving trying to trace origin of the name (which may be impossible, we may never know if there was earlier use we did not know about, and may not be able to clearly trace origin or even when the name was added to iNat) adds controversy and confusion while serving no practical purpose.

C: To say that a name had no use prior to being added to iNat requires proving a negative, so trying to require the removal of names that originated on iNat requires guesswork by curators in sometimes contentious debates. Whereas simply saying you need a source to add a name, without worrying about the origin of the name, is asking to prove a positive, which can be done with clarity.

D: How are we to know that the names used by sources in scenario 1 and 2 even came from iNat? The sources could have independently come up with the same name that someone added to iNat without the authors of the sources ever knowing about iNat

2

See https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/common-names-invented-on-inat/27452 and https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/common-name-being-deleted-mardi-gras-sharpshooter/12137

If you were hoping for my opinion, unfortunately I disagree with iNat here. I support the making up of common names. Authors of papers do it all the time.

3

When a scientist describes a new sp, do academic guidelines require a ‘common’ name (suggestion at least) as part of the description?

4

no, there is no requirement, but it seems to be on the rise. I can’t speak for other taxa, but certainly for plants, it seems like I read more taxonomic papers now (published in last 5 years) that do provide suggested common names for newly described taxa than those that don’t

5

I agree with you that if external sources have begun using a common name that originated as one made up on iNaturalist, then iNaturalist can use that name. It is in use outside iNaturalist at that point. I would also say that there’s no obligation for iNaturalist to use it.

My colleagues and I have suggested common names in papers formally describing plant species. People aren’t obliged to use the name but they generally do.

6

This is why I use scientific names, even when talking to non-Inatters.

7

For better or worse, there is a subset of iNat users who strongly believe that every species/group should have a “common” name, and they spend a lot of time on iNat making that happen. Once these names filter out to the broader internet (even if only through automated sources that index iNat data) they can then point to “established” use as justification for keeping them in place. Ultimately, regardless of iNat’s guidelines on this topic, the people who advocate for inventing “common” names seem to have more energy than those who are against it. iNat itself doesn’t seem to want to wade into this aside from repeating the “you shouldn’t do that” guideline, which is understandable. So, my take is that the “every species should have a common name” camp has won. Go hog wild - eventually the people who disagree with this practice will give up (and maybe leave iNat altogether) :+1:

8

Generally I think you can infer this from the dates involved (often you can see the date when the name was added on iNat, and the date when an external website page was updated), the quality of a name (novel names often feel less thought out than established ones), and the quality of the source (a random person’s blog is more likely to copy an iNat name without questioning it than BugGuide or an academic paper).

9

There’s nuance to be honest, or there should be. A lot of obscure snails in the southwest have common names that make a lot of sense eg “Cuyamaca shoulderband” which only lives in the Cuyamaca mountains, and most of these names were essentially made up by one author (or set of authors) when they were described. I think these species greatly benefit from having intuitive english names like that. And while it’s against inat guidelines to do this, would I have a problem (if the guidelines didn’t exist) with someone adding an intuitive name like that to some random nameless invert? Not really.

A much bigger pet peeve of mine for iNat names than inventing them is when multiple things have the same generic name because it causes massive amounts of misIDs. I constantly run into this with agaves/yuccas, right now there are two different species with the common name “Pulque agave” and I’m probably going to remove one of them for causing mass confusion

But common names are names people actually use. In scenario 1, if the name is actually in use right now, I’d say it’s valid even by guidelines even if the original invention of it years ago was on iNat - at the end of the day every single common name was made up by someone out of thin air

10

Part of the nuance is what counts as “in use”. In cases where I’ve investigated situations like this, there are usually only one or two instances of the new name on the internet outside of iNat, and usually those cases are where an amateur photographer has used them in a caption on their personal website or blog. The situation is pretty clearly that they photographed a bug they didn’t know, got an ID from iNat, and then reshared that photograph and ID on their website.

If I were in that situation I probably wouldn’t remember the common name the next time I see that bug, and I don’t spend enough time on group outings with other bug nerds for the name to have any chance of catching on with other people even if I did.

Since you can tell from search results that only one place on the internet is using the name, and infer why they’re using it, and guess that nobody is really using the name in real life, it seems like a little bit of a stretch to say the name is “in use”, although technically the case.

11

I think that’s fair, but I also just feel like we place far too much emphasis on the purity of common names nowadays when historically they are just names and the standardized “unchangeable” solution was meant to be the latin names. Case in point would be the disproportionate drama around the AOS decision to rename some birds

If I want to start calling the western fence lizard “chicken lizard”, the only reason I’m technically incorrect is because I haven’t convinced enough of the population to use that name too

12

Given that displaying common names is optional, I’m not sure why anyone would quit over this?

13

If any user can just invent a name for any species, and that becomes the de-facto “common” name, it reinforces the unfortunately-widely-held opinion that iNaturalist is not intended or appropriate for any serious scientific use. The response to that is usually something like “well, we don’t need those snooty taxonomic experts here anyway” which further reinforces that divide. Anyway, I don’t want to derail the original topic or rehash the broader argument about common names so I’ll leave it there :slight_smile:

14

They’ve probably won because all us folks who generally stick to scientific names are just too tired to argue LMAO

15

I think this is somewhat of an overreaction? Inventing common names is certainly against guidelines but the fact is that you can’t do that with latin/scientific names, and you have the option to make that the default name. I don’t understand why scientific use of iNat would care at all about the common language names for anything.

16

Specialists do occasionally complain about poorly worded common names leading to rash IDs leading to a feedback loop with the computer vision, and I don’t think those complaints are unwarranted.

One example I know of is that flesh flies (Sarcophagidae) are infamously unidentifiable, and Sarcophaga carnaria is sometimes called “Common Flesh Fly” which led to many people across the world identifying any flesh fly as that species. This issue is most likely to occur when the name includes “Common” or “American” or some other feature that applies equally to a number of other very similar species.

Same complaint here, with “Spiny Assassin Bug”:

Another example is leafmining insects with names like “aster leafminer” or “oak leafmining fly” when there are multiple species of flies and moths that might produce leafmines on those kinds of plants. I’ve debated with one of the powdery mildew curators about this because all the common species have common names in Dutch but are generally removed in English.

17

Here is a real world variation of the above scenario: For a few sets of moths I have studied such as aquatic Crambids in the genus Petrophila and lichen moths in the genus Cisthene, I posted journal articles on iNat in which I personally created new common names for several species. Those names were created simply for ease of reference; none of the species had common names in the primary literature at that time. In compliance with iNat policy, these “invented names” were not added to the formal iNaturalist taxonomy at that time. However, for both of these genera, I later published identification articles in peer-reviewed journals and newsletters (such as Journal of Lepidopterists’ Society and Southern Lepidopterists’ News) in which I included those novel common names. Thereafter (and only after those articles were formally published), I took the liberty of adding the common names to iNat’s taxonomy, an action I view as being in (self-serving) compliance with policy.

Elsewhere on this forum, in other posts on this much-discussed topic, I have argued that journal entries on iNaturalist are an appropriate place to discuss or even generate common names for species which lack them, but the policy barrier which prevents such made-up names from being added to the formal taxonomic structure is a wise one and should be adhered to. In the above scenario, there ends up being some circularity in the origin of common names later adopted from the “primary literature” but, hey, I complied with the rules!

18

A blog would not even be a legit source for a name in the first place. Taxon history only does back to 2022, If a name was added before that you have no way to know when it was first added to iNat. Also websites might list time of last update, but the last update is very often not when the name was first added to the website

The situation you describe with blogs would not count as “in use” in the first place, my question is about the relevance of the name originating on iNat assuming it is now in use outide iNat. What counts as “in use” is a separate complicated question

The scenario you describe is different than the one I am describing, I am describing external use that originates with a policy violating name on iNat, what you are describing is external coinage of names by the same person who adds the names to iNat after coining them externally

19

But if both of them are, in fact, commonly called pulque agave, removing the name from one of them will only cause misidentifications – people see only one option for “pulque agave,” they know the plant they are looking at is called “pulque agave,” so that’s the option they choose.

20

If the case is that the name is unquestionably being used (e.g. published in a book, maybe used by a specialist on a taxonomy website) and clearly associated with a particular species then it should be accepted regardless of the origin.

Judging what counts as an “external source” or “in use” is way of trying to outsource the vetting of names, similar to how we try to outsource taxonomy to secondary sources. The iNat guidelines don’t cover this since it would be very difficult to articulate well, but part of the calculus that curators end up debating about is the quality of the name and how likely it is to be misleading and lead to ID issues. In practice that’s why some names are removed when there are only tenuous external sources while others aren’t; it’s all interconnected.

By the way this thread came out of a situation like this:

Usually BugGuide is fairly conservative in adopting common names and as a result tends to be trusted. In this case the people who curate iNat overlap with the editors of BugGuide and thus were able to personally remove the existence of the primary external source for the name. At the bottom of the thread there are links to 2 more informal external sources that fit my “iNat ID->photographer’s blog” scenario.