Just adding a backlink to a supportive post in the curator area
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/catalog-of-life-2012-importer/79345
I’m confident that having this updated would be a massive help to diverse users who continually are looking to expand and improve the taxonomy database, many of these folks are not curators. Those and other users are often left with the only option to raise a flag and ask a curator - which often is a simplistic taxa. Personally, i’d prefer to see the valuable skills and specialism of many curators being applied to addressing broader taxonomy changes and updates (like reflecting revisions) not straightforward basics!
Following from jdmore, I’m sure elsewhere on the forum we (various stakeholders) have had discussion(s) about whether the external name importer feature has any merit, or indeed should be deactivated. On this, I am absolutely adamant that at least for arthropods where i’ve likely added a few thousand taxon names myself (both by importer and manually) that the automated import feature still could have great utility - IF it gets updated.
As of 2026, there’s nearly a million more taxon names on the Catalog of Life database [i.e. on core COL26.5] beyond that absurdly outdated 2012 version. Many of us have regular interactions via taxon flags with enthusiastic users who are not curators but continually want to help efforts to build in or update taxon names. Even if just a curator responsibility to “add new taxa”, i find that it’s so much quicker and easier to use the importer to first pull in the core name information, rather than the cumbersome many clicks and box filling of the manual system.
As it stands, only a fraction of the taxon names now in the modern Catalog of Life database can be directly imported, and worse the ‘legacy’ nature of the 2012 database still freely allows many outdated combinations to be pulled in without checks, or old misspellings added that have since been purged, etc.