I know that inventing common names is an ongoing issue on iNaturalist, but here in South Africa it’s quite extreme. It’s also being done systematically.
Genus after genus has a full set of common names invented for it. Often even subgenera, sections, subsections, etc., all have invented common names. The Proteaceae are a great example.
The specific adjectives + genus nouns layout of the invented system is actually quite consistent, which is nice. In fact it seems to be a single person who’s mostly been going through South Africa’s flora, genus-by-genus, and is making an effort to invent consistent names for all plant taxa on iNaturalist. But there are still some issues here:
Firstly and obviously, almost all of these names don’t exist outside of iNaturalist, except on sites that draw from iNat data. And inventing common names is against iNat rules as we know. (Maybe that rule needs to be changed? Because it’s being ignored, and there’s no way we can keep up tagging the invented common names for removal. There are far too many. Thousands of inventions, just for SAfrican flora)
Secondly, the invented common names are often misleading. They can refer to deceptive or unimportant characters that aren’t diagnostic or consistent, or just confuse users. Here are some examples https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/736770 , but there are many more.
Thirdly, the invented common names are superfluous. They can occasionally be for taxa that have English common names already in use. The Aloe nobilis hybrid is a good example https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/706637 In many other cases, they are for taxa that are exclusively known by their scientific names, even by us normal ppl on the ground. Here’s an example https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/764298 Regardless, the invented names can sometimes mean users need to remember multiple names for a single species (scientific name, real common name, iNat invented common name) even when they turn off the common name option in iNat.
There are also the silly but harmless examples, like Elegia recta, where the inventor created the name “Bum deckreed”, presumably thinking that “recta” was Latin for “rectum” rather than “erect”. In fact, this might be quite a good common name, if only because people will remember it!
There are lots of great existing common names here. However, they often refer to broader groups, e.g., all Astrolobas are referred to in Afrikaans as “Steekaalwyntjies”, never distinguishing species. If we distinguish Astroloba species, then the scientific names are used. Also, I believe the names are mostly not in English. Outside of the cities, most South Africans speak Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaans, and other languages - we’re not usually mother-tongue English. Traditional plant and animal knowledge is also usually conveyed in mother tongues. So English common names are relatively rare here, and relatively general.
Just brainstorming here.. one solution might be to use the common names for genus (and higher), but to automatically let species-level common names (and lower) have a lower emphasis than the scientific names, so they’re less likely to confuse, or to clog users’ memories with superfluous names.
Another might be to give default priority, within South African flora, to either scientific names or to the common names in our indigenous languages? Not sure how that’d work in practice though.
I’m sure this topic’s been discussed for many other parts of the world, so there must be tons of ideas already. This post is just to highlight the situation in the South African flora.