Platform: website
Browser, if a website issue: any
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: any taxon page (ideally a taxon with few or no observations if testing this, for minimal chance of disrupting someone trying to add IDs)
Description of problem: There are safeguards in place to prevent the default scientific name of a taxon from being edited (to something other than the taxon name[1]) or deleted. However, there isn’t anything preventing the lexicon of the default scientific name from being changed. Modifying a default scientific name and then saving it under a different lexicon results in a taxon without a default scientific name, and the name that was once the default scientific name is now a common name, able to be changed or deleted like any other. Changing and/or removing the default scientific name in this way results in a taxon whose displayed taxon name isn’t searchable (since it’s technically not that name itself that’s used when, say, looking up a taxon when adding an ID, but rather any scientific and common names that appear under Names on the Taxonomy tab of the taxon page).
(For a taxon that doesn’t have any alternate names [common or unaccepted scientific], just the one accepted scientific name, deleting the common name that was formerly the default scientific name will result in a taxon without any searchable names. In addition, for a taxon with just one alternate unaccepted scientific name, removing the default scientific name [by changing it to a common name and then deleting it], and then editing the unaccepted scientific name, will make that unaccepted scientific name appear without a strikethrough in the list of names as though it’s the accepted scientific name, regardless of whether it matches the taxon name; it will continue to display without a strikethrough even if a scientific name matching the taxon name is re-added as an accepted scientific name, and it can’t be deleted [unless it’s changed to unaccepted and/or a different lexicon first] since it’s recognized by the system as an accepted scientific name. Adding any name to a taxon missing its default scientific name triggers automatic re-addition of the default scientific name [matching the taxon name], but until then that name isn’t searchable.)
(i was made aware of this problem by a recent flag indicating that Cecidoses eremita couldn’t be looked up to add an ID. Looking at its taxon history, a curator in 2022 had tried to add a common name, but had instead mistakenly changed the default and only scientific name to that common name. Testing on a different taxon [Trematooecia ligulata] revealed that it’s still possible to do this, and the other actions above)
Step 1: edit a taxon’s default scientific name, and change the lexicon to a common name lexicon before saving; the result will be a taxon with no default scientific name
Step 2: do anything else described above: delete the now-common name [which, if that was the only name, will result in a taxon with no searchable names]; if there was one unaccepted scientific name prior to the removal of the default scientific name, edit that name in any way and save it, and it should display as accepted; etc.
On a related note, every so often someone will stumble across a taxon with a mismatch between its displayed taxon name and its default scientific name (so searching for the taxon name won’t pull up that taxon), because prior to the recent update making it so that scientific names are now automatically updated after any changes to the taxon name, not all curators were aware that they needed to manually update the default scientific name separately after editing the name of a taxon they created. Is there a way to find all taxa where the taxon name and default scientific name don’t match (and/or that don’t have a default scientific name, and/or that have multiple scientific names marked as accepted) so they can be fixed all at once? ↩︎