Some taxa have multiple common names for a lexicon, but don’t have seem to have any places attached to them. For example, Adelphocoris lineolatus has “Alfalfa Plant Bug” and “Lucerne Bug” listed as English common names. The former is the North American name, whereas the latter is mainly used in the UK and other english-speaking countries. However, even though I have the UK prioritised in my account settings, I still see “Alfalfa Plant Bug” shown everywhere as the common name for this insect.
If “Lucerne Bug” wasn’t already listed, I could just add it as an ordinary user and specify the UK for the place. But when the name is already being squatted on in this fashion, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to fix it. If I try to add the name again with a specific place, it just produces the error “Name already exists for this taxon in this lexicon”.
Why is this? Does it it really require a curator to fix something so trivial? Note that I’m not trying to change the priority of the common names here. I’m just trying to assign an appropriate place to a name.
Changes to existing common names for cases where you are not the person who entered it or a curator were turned off because there were simply too many edit wars going on. In some cases, the regional use settings were being overwritten, more often those involved in the edit wars would simply delete the names they did not support.
I set Lucerne Bug to be used in GB and IE. The species is not found in AU, NZ, ZA or IN.
I think it is called Alfalfa Plant Bug in CA, at least that is what I know it as, but if other Canadians suggest that is wrong, please confirm.
Ah, okay - I guessed that might have something to do with it.
Thanks. I was just going to flag it, but then I wondered why that was really necessary.
I suppose the real problem is how the names get added in the first place. If several are added at once without specifying a place, it effectively squats on the non-default ones and prevents anyone else from using them.
I requested the reopening of this thread because I encountered the same problem today. Because I want to lear the local Dominican names for taxa, I have my settings set to show me Spanish names, with the place specified as Dominican Republic. I only noticed the problem when I came to an observation of Gliricidia sepium. It showed as Cacahuananche. Huh? Nobody I know in the Dominican Republic calls it that. Everybody calls it piñón. Well, I thought the solution was straighforward – just add the place Dominican Republic to the name piñón.
Turns out that because piñón is already added – without a place – I can’t do it.
The page for adding names says, “Please do not add names for EVERY place where the name is used, only for places that conflict with other places.” Well, in this case, the name used in a given place conflicts with the default name. This defeats my reason for setting my languages, which was, specifically, to learn the Dominican names. It’s not only useless for that purpose, it’s worse than useless, because it is showing me the wrong name, that is, a name that is not used in the selected place. Now I can’t trust any of the Spanish names I am shown, unless I go to each taxon page and see if it has been added for the Dominican Republic.
The problem is that this shouldn’t be the taxon curators’ job. Taxon curators are supposed to be experts on the taxon. It isn’t their job to know every regional name; that should be the job of people with experience in the respective regions. I am now wondering whether I should put in a feature request along the lines of creating a procedure for adjusting regional names (case-by-case, if we are worried about edit wars) without having to add a taxon-level flag.
