Not to beat this particular dead horse of a spinoff thread, but...

Jim Croft wrote:

First, the original discussion (and title of the thread) uses the word "validation", which - I was assuming - meant that the issue was "What kind of resource would tell us whether a name is valid or not?"

Under the ICZN, the term "valid" is defined as "...the correct name of a taxon in an author's taxonomic judgment". That is, quite explicitly, subjective. The point in the list of 5 criteria that deals with that subjective element of validity is point #4.

Second, if one has a master list of all published names, simply annotating that name X was, in year N, synonymized with name Y by author Z does NOT tell you whether name X is *presently* treated as valid. All it would tell you is that author Z did not believe the name was valid, and that - in and of itself - is not likely to be the definitive answer that people using such a master list for taxonomic/nomenclatural research would want. In particular, bear in mind that thousands of names that were once treated as synonyms have both formally and informally been removed from synonymy by subsequent workers - and if one's master database lists all acts of synonymy, then how does one list an act of de-synonymization, especially if it is by informal means (e.g., some crackpot publishes a paper that every genuine taxonomist in the field simply chooses to pretend does not exist)?

Third (and final); even some names that have never been synonyms (or do not have synonyms) might - over historical time - have been applied to multiple different taxa, due to things like mixed type series or misidentifications. Taxonomy and nomenclature are riddled with quirks and idiosyncrasies that make it hard to give tidy, simple explanations for what surrounds a given name (both objectively and subjectively). I'm sure the people directly involved in this discussion are painfully aware of such quirks, but for those who wonder why we don't already have an all-purpose resource already at our disposal, those complications - which certainly affect the task of building such a resource - might not be immediately obvious.

Peace,

--

Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's) http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

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