Right now, if someone wants to use a taxon name that iNat doesn’t have, they can choose to search external name providers. If it exists in an external name provider, they can have it imported even if iNat intentionally doesn’t use this name.
One way to prevent this import from happening is to register the alternate scientific name as one that is not currently accepted in iNat. For example, this taxon has quite a few names that are not currently accepted:
Anyone trying to use, for example, Mazama cita will be redirected to iNat’s M. nemorivaga and will not be allowed to import the name.
This list of unaccepted scientific names is stored separately from taxon framework relationships, but I think if we could link those together, it might be another way to prevent unwanted name imports.
For example, this TFR shows that P. albiventer is known to be included within P. petaurista in iNat’s taxonomy:
And yet, because P. albiventer wasn’t listed as an unaccepted scientific name for P. petaurista, someone was able to recently import it using the search external name providers tool (which created more curatorial work):
Interesting idea, I’m just wondering what would be the advantage of the second option (including non-accepted names in TFRs) over the first option (adding non-accepted names to the list of names for the accepted taxon). If the first option is effective in preventing import of unaccepted names, then it’s something we can already do without needing to change how TFRs work.
I’m not totally sure I understand what you’re saying, but I wasn’t trying to suggest adding non-accepted names to the TFR. I’m suggesting that either the names in the TFR get added to the list of non-accepted names automatically, or that during the import process, before you can bring in a name it should get checked against both the list of non-accepted names and the list of TFR names. So for the example, either make it so that P. albiventer automatically gets added to the non-accepted names on P. petaurista when the TFR is created, or make the system check for P. albiventer in both the list of non-accepted names (where it wasn’t found) and also in the list of TFR names (where it would have been found).
Thanks for clarifying, that helps. This may reflect a difference in curatorial workflow between locked and unlocked taxa.
I guess with plants I’m used to the workflow of doing taxon swaps, merges, etc. first, which automatically populate the output taxon with the unaccepted names. Then adding any other synonyms from our source reference (POWO) to the output taxon (assuming the change conforms to POWO). Then adding or editing TFRs to reflect the new alignment of taxa. Don’t think I’ve encountered a situation where the TFR was more up to date than the iNat taxa themselves.
