“only 400,000 species” doesn’t sound like a non-huge undertaking to me. I think every botanist I’ve ever worked with has expressed that POWO just doesn’t have the staff attention to keep everything up to date properly, let alone to discriminate knowledgeably between competing treatments. I do think they try their very best at Kew, but generally can’t succeed. I suppose if anything, though, that underlines your point even more: that the scale of millions of taxa is nigh-insurmountable even for a “massive community”.
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