Talk:Index Fungorum

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2006-01-18

Moving material from entry to Talk page. It is inapprporiate in the entry itself but may give valuable advise:

Note that a 'name' just corresponds to a scientific description of a species, genus, or other taxon which was published at some time - most of these names are no longer used.

If you look at the entries for some genus in Index Fungorum (example: search for genus Lactarius) you will see that just a few entries are green (valid names for currently accepted species), a few entries are blue with a green equivalent given (obsolete synonyms which may still be in use), and the great majority are just blue (generally long-forgotten descriptions which have minimal further interest).

Since fungus name changes bedevil the study of mycology, especially in the contexts of Wikipedia, Wikispecies, and Wikimedia Commons, the Index Fungorum is a very useful resource in order to know the correct current names.

Brya 18:53, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Species Fungorum

Index Fungorum is in two parts, the historical list of all well-defined fungus names "Index Fungorum" and the subset of these which is currently validly in use "Species Fungorum", which has a different search page. It is very important to understand the difference when using the two related sites and I added a paragraph to try to explain it. Sometimes Wikipedia editors are confused and refer to the old species names as being in Index Fungorum, but if they are not in the Species Fungorum part they are not sanctioned as current. My opinion is that fungi in Wikipedia should follow Index Fungorum. That means that they must also follow the Species Fungorum part; the main "Index Fungorum" part does not distinguish which names are currently valid. Strobilomyces (talk) 11:54, 25 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]