Talk:Strymon (butterfly)

List of species
In this edit, Meganmccarty added a list of species. No source was mentioned, but it can scarcely be anything else but Catalogue of Life (see here). This list is no more than a copy of the list in LepIndex. It includes numerous "names" like Strymon acaciaeformis, in LepIndex no more than a card with an epithet and an author. For the purpose of creating a database based on those cards, the name was placed in a genus, and a qualification was added: available or not, and if available: valid or not. That's madness of course. It's utterly impossible to determine whether a name that consistst of no more than an epithet and an author is an available name, or whether it is valid, let alone if it is an accepted name of a species. These are ghost names: they pop up in a database and get coppied when the database is used to feed other databases. No judgement of a specialist is involved here, nor any other specialsts knowledge: it's just the work of programmers reading data and exporting them as other data, with no actual knowledge of the data involved.

Wikipedia is about making available existing knowledge. As copying data from databases, without having any idea of the nature of these data, has nothing to do with knowledge, I feel free to remove any "name" from this list that appeared to be no more than a ghost name.  Wikiklaas 22:22, 18 February 2018 (UTC)


 * in the same edit as discussed above, a number of "species" was added, based on non-existing names. For example, Strymon albofusciata was added based on this record in NHM, marked as a name of an aberration (and also clearly labelled as an unavailable name), so not in any way available as the name of a species. These names of course had to go too. This still leaves a number of names published as, intended as, or now considered as subspecific names, which should not be in a list of species.  Wikiklaas 23:57, 20 February 2018 (UTC)