User talk:Snoteleks/Databases

@Snoteleks:, thanks for starting this. For the purposes of the discussion this was spun off from (on notability of species), I was listing sources followed by Wikipedia that provide accepted/synonym status for species. I intentionally didn't mention Goffinet & Buck for mosses because it doesn't go down to species. And I wasn't intending to list sources followed by Wikipedia that haven't been publicly discussed (on TOL or a subproject), although I think it is important to establish some guidance for sources for groups of organisms that haven't had any previous public discussion.

What iNaturalist does is worth looking at, since they are also trying have a TOL-wide set of accepted species stiched together from a variety of different databases. There is a chart here which shows some of the sources they are using (which are largely the same ones used by Wikipedia). I had thought I had seen a page that listed all the sources used for taxon frameworks by iNaturalist, but I haven't been able to find it just now. There's also a list of sources for insects on their forum (at the time of writing those hadn't been adopted for taxon frameworks, but that may have changed).

LepIndex is widely used on Wikipedia. I'm not sure that it is something we want to highlight as a good source for an accepted species. Apparently the database was last updated in 2018, and I'm not sure that it is comprehensive for recently described species. But I don't think there's really any better source for Lepidoptera. It's probably worth listing certain sources as "best available" and noting what problems they may have. Plantdrew (talk) 21:19, 20 August 2023 (UTC)