This problem seems to go both ways too, with some curators seemingly ignoring respected compiled lists of actually used and accepted common names…
I’ve always noted that inat occasionally has some rather baffling common names that don’t at all appear to be commonly used, and wondered why that was, and I’m no clearer on that after this taxon swap that made a “grammatical correction” to the spelling of the binomial name, which doesn’t seem to have been universally accepted yet, and an apparently gratuitous change to the common name to something which is both not commonly used as a specific epithet for that species and woefully ambiguously applied to multiple species.
I don’t pretend there are easy answers to this, it’s a “what colour should the bikeshed be” problem, so it’s probably always going to be a Holy War between differently aligned factions.
I am the curator that made the taxon swap you’re mentioning.
As I explained on the swap page, this is to follow iNat’s policy of using the Catalog of Fishes taxonomy.
I agree that tiny “corrections” like that are annoying, especially because iNat forces us to do a taxon swap even though it’s just a one-letter change.
The change in common names is not “gratuitous”, it’s presumably that the order of common names got changed with the swap. When I do swap, I try to maintain consistency with regards of taxon pictures and common names, but obviously I can’t follow everything.
Please let curators know on the taxon or swap page if there are swaps like these where common names end up being non-optimal, as it is easier to track than here on the forum ;)
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Hi @donalddavesne yeah I understood the rationale backing the binomial name change here, even if the question of adding synonyms like that is a more broadly open one …
But I still don’t actually understand how the common name was also changed or where that new name was sourced from … several of us did query this in the comments on the taxon swap page but there was no response to that. Should we have “at’ed” you for you to see that? I’d assumed you’d see all comments there, and try not to be “fingerpointy” in those sort of cases. I’m not really familiar with the mechanics of that side of inat yet, sorry.
I have moved these posts to a new topic. @environ the best approach in these cases is to always raise a flag on the taxon if one doesn’t already exist, or to comment on the existing taxon swap as you did. If no response, don’t be afraid to leave another comment; it’s easy to miss notifications when you receive a lot. They will be notified whether you tag them or not. I’ll close this thread now since this particular case has been resolved, if there are other similar examples please raise them directly on iNat, or feel free to message me here or on iNat for clarification
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