In Australia the birding community (birdwatchers) at a national level (Sydney really) has gradually erased the local names of birds (usually some badly applied English term on well-foreign birds).
It was actually a similar process to the control of fish names after the Fish Marketing Board of NSW won a battle to uniform all names for fish so their customers in Sydney did not get confused, thus even the crayfishers trade group is now called The Tasmanian Rock Lobster Association. No one in Tasmania calls them lobsters except tourists. One goes out to sea in a crayboat, uses craypots and craybait.... This does not apply to the abalone industry because that came after the rebranding.
My point here is that the correlation between a science (of taxonomy) and the folk requirements are not as disjunctive as may be thought. While trying to fit some past folkways to science may be often misguided it bespeaks that worlding urge we have: to folk it my way or to science it along. Calls for consistent agreed conventional common language is a common worlding outcome. Science is type of investigative and recording worlding and so will share common features with anything we do, so the effort to link them up is not completely insane.
Some reflection on how we world might help.
[More on marketing…nowadays we also call alligator pears → avocadoes, muttonfish are called abalone, and Chinese Gooseberies are called kiwifruit, while the birder associations and actual taxonomists think they are worlding well by making common names align with scientific taxonomical one-name-to-one-species systems (multiple common names are frowned upon). I ask why do they feel this urge for common names? Why destroy the locality in the name of consistency (despite my comment about Sydney this consistency is quite defuse, and not located in any actual court or capital).
There is no reason why databases cannot handle multiple naming systems for common names, after all they can handle different languages.
In Australia the birding community (birdwatchers) at a national level (Sydney really) has gradually erased the local names of birds (usually some badly applied English term on well-foreign birds).
It was actually a similar process to the control of fish names after the Fish Marketing Board of NSW won a battle to uniform all names for fish so their customers in Sydney did not get confused, thus even the crayfishers trade group is now called The Tasmanian Rock Lobster Association. No one in Tasmania calls them lobsters except tourists. One goes out to sea in a crayboat, uses craypots and craybait.... This does not apply to the abalone industry because that came after the rebranding.
My point here is that the correlation between a science (of taxonomy) and the folk requirements are not as disjunctive as may be thought. While trying to fit some past folkways to science may be often misguided it bespeaks that worlding urge we have: to folk it my way or to science it along. Calls for consistent agreed conventional common language is a common worlding outcome. Science is type of investigative and recording worlding and so will share common features with anything we do, so the effort to link them up is not completely insane.
Some reflection on how we world might help.
[More on marketing…nowadays we also call alligator pears → avocadoes, muttonfish are called abalone, and Chinese Gooseberies are called kiwifruit, while the birder associations and actual taxonomists think they are worlding well by making common names align with scientific taxonomical one-name-to-one-species systems (multiple common names are frowned upon). I ask why do they feel this urge for common names? Why destroy the locality in the name of consistency (despite my comment about Sydney this consistency is quite defuse, and not located in any actual court or capital).
There is no reason why databases cannot handle multiple naming systems for common names, after all they can handle different languages.