Australasian plants' taxonomies in iNat, often out of date, not volunteer criticism, based on out of date source(s): old WCVP->POWO, old CoL, etc. .
Same physical indigenous plant species here across Au currently named: Leea novoguineensis, [src]
in the RFK 8 :
(iNat often out of date and based on out of date sources) :
https://apps.lucidcentral.org/rainforest/text/entities/Leea_novoguineensis.htm
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Weasel naive (demagoguery) words.
WCVP –> POWO in substantial parts has become woefully out of date .
I have plenty of research of the fact and conferring with many herbaria botanists across Au as well as field botanists like me across Au, about iNat's Australasian plants' taxonomies woeful out of dateness.
Professional, highly esteemed botanists I know have privately shared with me that they have written asking the federal Govt authorities eg. ALA staff, CHAH, Au national herbarium botanists including APNI and APC curators and CSIRO staff botanists, asking for ALA, APC and APNI sources of taxonomy to take over the iNat Au plants names.
Dispensing with anachronistic, redundant, POWO, and it belatedly gets its sourcing from APNI–APC anyway (and mostly much older printed Flora of Au volumes).
And also sometimes directly repetitively taking up the time of the Au botanists, plants' taxonomic groups specialists, who already keep very up to date the APNI & APC, anyway .
Double and triple handling this taxonomy knowledge from primary written taxonomy sources by working systematists,
is a woeful waste of their time for fallacious, colonialist, unrealistic ambitions of old England, long ago collapsed empire,
and a disgusting to me (at least) waste of the time of the lately decreasing numbers of professional, senior, long time highly skilled, taxonomic botanists' specialists.
When all that the global–wide plants tertiary source information compilation systems, including POWO, iNat, more important GBIF, IPNI, etc., need to do,
is import copies regularly of the APNI–APC whole database (in Darwin Core format);
and give this whole APNI–APC excellent, so up to date, database the great esteem credit it deserves,
without vainly trying to take credit from it nor from its primary people sources.
Please read my many, earlier years' comments, here in iNat,
providing chapter and verse evidences' details from the global botanists' professional sources world,
stating the pre-eminence of APNI and APC as taxonomically the most up to date compiled global example, —global best standard— Australasian region source.
Way beyond all USA and British and any other fully global sources, for the purposes of Australasian region plants' taxonomies.
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No offence. Not my mode of thinking. I'm a practical, shalom peace of mind person, strong to deal with many difficulties of the global world, a global philosophically thinking person, rejecting all demagoguery.
But iNat is only up to date in as far as it is capable as you said and I agree with that point. Meaning yes it is not globally, practically, capable in its current ways of plant taxonomy from POWO as a source and by volunteers curating.
Continuing private next information in private message(s).
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A few, plain English synopsis, public articles' links
(confer, compare and contrast with:
the many scholarly, excellent writings about proper decolonisation processes;
including in research, the western European ethnocentric sciences' solidarity with first peoples,
even Eurocentric feminisms per se,
compelling critiques of Jared Diamond's influential many many lying deceptions of global readers of his demagoguery–populist, pseudo-science, pretend–environmental–determinism, colonialist ecocides' – genocides' denialism, books,
etcetera. ):
→https://theconversation.com/director-of-science-at-kew-its-time-to-decolonise-botanical-collections-141070
.
→https://theconversation.com/european-colonialism-has-had-a-lasting-legacy-on-how-plants-are-distributed-around-the-world-192660
.
→https://theconversation.com/decolonise-science-time-to-end-another-imperial-era-89189
.
Etcetera.
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Quotation from the International Plant Name Index (IPNI), "about" web page:
→https://www.ipni.org/about [IK means the Index Kewensis, precursor to WCVP–>POWO)
Over 63,000 records have come from APNI which has been compiled since 1973 and includes all scientific names used in the literature for Australian vascular plants. Levels of detail and validation are higher for this index than for IK or GCI. Most names have been checked back to their original place of publication and type information is included for each name. APNI includes many names not included in IK, especially of Australian infraspecific taxa, and, as in the case of GCI, the overlap in coverage between IK and APNI offers scope for checking data and eliminating errors.
My emphasis here on clearly stating and evidencing that the Australian Plant Name Index ( APNI) names have higher levels of validation than the English production of the original Index Kewensis and the USA production of the original Gray Card Index.
The Australian Plant Census (APC, with APNI) provides the currency status of the name;
and current Au state by state presence or absence coarse distribution.
If not a current name, (then) APNI shows whether it is a synonym of the current name, a misapplied name, an invalid name, an orthographic variant of the current name, combinations of the preceding, etc. .
