In the fullness of time, Wikipedia or some fork of it will be properly semantic, with a nice query interface that will let you ask questions like "what are all the birds native to the Chicago area?". In the meantime, people interested in such categorization have little choice but to create these explicit categories and lists, silly and overspecific though they sometimes seem to be. I don't see much harm in this, other than the dreadful waste of time (compared to, say, the time that could be spent implementing a proper semantic scheme once and for all) and the inevitable incompleteness and inaccuracy of the explicit lists.