And the iNat policy on common names is:
- Try to add names that have been used elsewhere. Please don’t invent new names.
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If you don’t use them, doesn’t mean others don’t, there’re tons of new names that are useful. There’re other topics discussing offensive names, why write about it here and not there? This is completely different situation
@bobby23 Curious to know your opinion, given you mentioned this exact species on that flesh fly thread?
Me and Charley brought this to question because we do know. Or at least, we have enough experience with leafminers to call this out as a problem. Charley is the author of many new leafminer species and publications on that subject, and the leading expert on this group at this time, involving the same region this species is from. I’ve seen a good proportion of the “aster” feeding species in my time similarly, in that genus and others. It’s not just speculation on our end that this name is a problem.
With my plant background, I can say that even seeing “Aster sp.” as a host name is fraught with problems. That was a former mega genus name which has since been split into a large number of subgroups such as Symphyotrichum, Erigeron, and so on. Almost all references to “Aster” are old references that now refer to new genera names.
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Yes I said it was slightly off-topic, but a made up common name is surely potential for misidentification (?) I didn’t mean that others don’t common names just that I think that no common name at all is better for avoiding misidentification rather than one that’s used only on iNat and no where else. Perhaps I didn’t explain myself well or this doesn’t belong in this topic at all (although I think it does). If my posts really don’t belong here then I can delete them and re-post somewhere else if you let me know :)
There’s no need to do it, but if you really want to discuss it you can ask moderators to open those old topics as they’re both long and I’m pretty sure closed.
People relying on common names is more of a problem than names themselves imo, if we teach them not to do it we could avoid it. Also from what I read why not add another word for this name to divide this from other miners?
The name in question is not a made-up one though but is used on ITIS. There are lots of common names that are misleading, especially for plants. Example: club mosses, reindeer mosses, Iris moss, Spanish moss etc., none of which are actually mosses, half of them not even plants. Does that mean iNat shouldn’t be using any of these either? Where is the line between a misleading common name being “established enough” to be used versus deleted? Misleading common names are a fact that we can’t get around, at least on the botany side, so it doesn’t really matter to have one more. It’s just another tiny drop in an already full bucket so to speak. We do use these clearly misleading examples as a way to teach our botany students why scientists don’t rely on common names but use scientific names instead.
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I originally read this to mean “a bad common name is the best possible kind of common name”!
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Well, it seems to be the most frequent kind, anyway. Most common names seem to come about much the same way cats’ given names do: if a cat has white paws, what are the odds that it has some other name than Socks or Boots? People just name things for whatever trait they first notice.
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I agree with everything you’ve said, @annkatrinrose I sometimes find vernacular names just weird. For example, in my area everyone calls Acacia melanoxylon “sally wattle”. I don’t know why. Is “sally” a proper noun needing capitalisation? I don’t know. 100km away from me, and for most of Australia, people call A. melanoxylon “black wattle” which at least makes some sense given the epithet :) In my writing I always use the scientific name but depending on the intended audience will give the vernacular name(s) in parenthesis. E.g. in a restoration plan meant to be read by a relatively wide audience I’ll give vernacular names even if they don’t make sense to me because I understand that these are the names many people use, even if they’re not specific and don’t make sense – but I’ll always give the botanical name as well. In something that’s meant to be read only by botanists/ecologists/legislators/etc I’ll just use the botanical name and not bother with vernacular names at all (there’s no point).
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Sally is a cultural(?) or at least specialized term derived from “sallow”, referring to trees with narrow and willow-like leaves. There’s some Eucalyptus that also utilize that term (as “sally”, “sallee”, or “sall”).
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I’m not sure if this is the right thread in which to bring this up, but here’s another example of a dispute over the use of a dubious English name on iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/487415
Summary: @raymie tracked down the origin of a common name which had previously been removed for being too generic and not being in use, and re-added it. It turns out the Canadian government put together a working group to make up English and French names for every species in Canada which didn’t already have one. https://www.wildspecies.ca/common-names
I’m not sure since no-one responded to the point, but I think no-one disagrees about this particular name being particularly imprecise, especially in a global rather than Canadian context. (Do correct me if I’m wrong.) The remaining dispute is over whether it makes sense for iNaturalist to record names created by this group but not used by anyone else.
Relevant comic: https://xkcd.com/978/
Quoting the “iNat rules” probably won’t resolve this one, they’re vague enough that both sides think they support their view. Maybe a vote?
- “Striped Orbweaver” should be a common name for Larinia borealis on iNaturalist
- “Striped Orbweaver” should not be a common name for Larinia borealis on iNaturalist
- I don’t care
0 voters
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There are lots of American orbweavers which are striped. The genus Singa is already known as the “Striped Orbweavers”.
Larinia borealis is less common than other near-identical species in its genus. E.g. Larinia directa, which occurs in the US but not Canada.
Please don’t make up names. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place.
Reading the explanation it sounds like a nice example of how ludicrous this sort of approach can be :
"experts are hired to provide suggestions of common names for the species in the taxonomic groups that they study. English experts provide suggestions for English common names, and French experts provide suggestions for French common names. The suggested common names are then reviewed by the Canadian Wildlife Service (Environment and Climate Change Canada), especially to ensure that the taxonomic logic of the common names is rigorous. This step warrants the standardization of the part of the common names that describes the group where the species is taxonomically classified, and ensures for example that all species of lady beetles are called “lady beetle” in their common names. The suggested common names are then reviewed by the Terminology Standardization Division of the Translation Bureau of the Government of Canada. This step warrants a linguistic review of the common names, both in English and French. If appropriate, it also provides an opportunity to align the English and French common names, so that they have a similar meaning. The common names are then reviewed by the National General Status Working Group. A special committee, the General Status Common Names Committee, has been created to support the working group in this task. "
Yikes.
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Your points would make sense if the new names were being compared to existing common names. But they aren’t. Mirroring your points, partly tongue in cheek: the only names these species had were scientific names, which is the more consistent system. The scientific names are easier to index and search than the proposed names, faster to know which taxon is being referred to than by the common names, etc. All in-use names were retained, because scientific names aren’t discarded when an English or French name is created, but they certainly made some surprising changes by making up English and French names for species most people have never heard of nor ever will.
Yes, every name was once made up, but most made-up names die out after a few dozen people learn them. We usually only record the ones which have been in wide use (at least a hundred people, I would think) for decades or centuries. Ones where you could actually observe two people in the field who hadn’t previously spoken to each other about the species and see one say to the other “Hey, there’s an X” and have the other one know what they were talking about. Names like that can be used to communicate. We don’t record names that aren’t already in wide use because having multiple names for the same species makes it harder to communicate, not easier. The same reason there are often movements to standardize names: not just to make the names more precise and more accurate, but to reduce the number of names for the same species, hopefully to a single one that everyone uses.
Recent examples of field guides where the authors made up English names for every species are a special exception due to the field guides selling thousands of copies and thus the names being very obviously likely to spread into common usage. (I’m specifically thinking of the “Peterson Field Guide to Moths” and the “Field Guide to the Flower Flies of Northeastern North America”.) Doing an internet search and finding a couple of websites which use the name is not sufficient because people make up new names for things and post them on the internet all the time.
If someone were asking me to make up a new name for Larinia borealis, I’d probably come back with options like “Boreal Pinstriped Orbweaver” or “Canadian Grass Orbweaver”. But there’s near zero chance any name I came up with would become widespread enough to be worth recording on iNaturalist. And that’s the case with “Striped Orbweaver” too. Nobody uses that name for this species, because it was made up by a government committee, put on the internet in 2015, and hasn’t been taken up by anyone since then. It’s unlikely their work will be used to teach the next generation of naturalists the names of any species, so there are good reasons to ignore the list even if you disregard that the particular name under discussion is ill-conceived - which one shouldn’t.
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One could argue that iNaturalist will disseminate even more widely.
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