Taxonomy, Cladistics, and iNaturalist

[upupa-epops]

@charlie

Cos when i hear ‘blog’ in 2024 i don’t think a good faith suggestion at all.

Oh no I’m serious. I agree there are a lot of issues with academic settings; as a result a lot of the cool research these days is happening on anonymous blogs. This guy’s blog is mostly about them. This includes personal iNat journals too; a lot of novel research and exploration is being done there. Like we can write out taxonomy hypotheses and discuss them on iNat; I just mean we shouldn’t be implementing them on the whole website.

The way I’m imagining you’d do it in a blog is basically writing out academic proposals but in a more informal way and doing distributed peer review through other random interested people commenting on the blog, rather than the normal formal academic process. The same way we discuss and give feedback about how iNat functions here on the forum.

@charlie

Can we have this standard for taxonomic changes on the site too? like a hard requirement that a paper is peer reviewed and maybe has a year or something to account for any further issues before we ‘affect real records’?

Well there’s this from the Curator Guide:

Most of our classifications come from our external name providers, but for some groups we try to adhere to different taxonomic authorities. Note that this means when we are tracking a secondary taxonomic authority like this, we explicitly do not track the taxonomy from the primary literature. We have a couple reasons for this:

1. …
   While it may seem like the naming and classification of organisms is a formal process and all scientists agree on what names organisms should have, the truth is much messier. … [U]sing names and classifications just because someone published a paper declaring that they should be used (even a peer-reviewed paper) is not a great idea, because it doesn’t prove that the scientific community supports that paper’s assertions.
2. …
   Following taxonomic authorities helps us avoid having these arguments on iNat. We can argue about which authorities to follow, but following authorities allows us to skip arguments about each and every paper.
3. …
   Avoiding the primary literature in favor of secondary taxonomic authorities, most of which are freely available on the Web, allows all our users to inspect the sources of taxonomic changes, not just the users with privileged access to the scientific literature.
4. …
   Following authorities moderates the pace of taxonomic change in our data and increases the probability that people searching through it by name will find what they’re looking for.

…
Basically, we try to match parts of our taxonomy to global taxonomic authorities. When that’s not possible, we try stitching together regional taxonomic authorities (not recommended because of inevitable regional taxonomic conflicts …). And for everything else we cite the primary literature or use the names and classifications we import from name providers

Maybe we need a modification of the last sentence there? E.g. plants are supposed to follow POWO, but POWO doesn’t cover infrageneric taxonomy so curators end up following primary literature anyway to curate those aspects.