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.