Tannin wrote:

The Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles The American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and The Herpetologists League ..... Oh, and they capitalise species names as a matter of policy.

I'll take your word for it but a cite or a link would help your case significantly. None of the above societies, BTW, deal with mammals.

Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales

One cite that does include mammals (but not specifically). This helps. Any other general societies out there that are advocating for capitalization? I have nothing wrong with trying to anticipate where the trends in Biology are going but I do need to see some evidence for this before we make policy (for example I helped to successfully advocate for us to move from the 5-Kingdom system to the more correct 6-Kingdom system even though the 5-Kingdom system is still more widely taught -- BUT it is obviously beginning to loose out to the 6-Kingdom system).

.... Finally, there is flora. The common names of plants are a horrible mess. Within any one geographic area they seem to be consistent enough, certainly for the larger species (trees, shrubs, wildflowers), but *between* areas they often conflict with one another. Australian plant common names, for example, do not conflict with one another, but *do* conflict with the names of other, completely different, plants in Europe and America.

I agree - plants are a mess and give me a major headache anytime I try to properly name a plant article. Cultivars are not nearly as bad but trying to make a taxbox for a hybrid is an exercise in futility (and should /not/ be done - the results are gibberish). Plants just don't think it is necessary to follow our definition of what a species is! So for plants I see no reason to pretend that common names are anything particularly specific so the downstyle rules until the botanical societies come together and form international conventions. We can disambiguate parenthetically for ambiguous names or even use the botanical names when needed. Of course if a botanical name is in wide use we should use that over a common name whenever there is an ambiguity. All that matters is usage and overcoming ambiguity problems in naming so that people can find what they are looking for. But if somebody else has already worked out much of the ambiguity problem then we should follow that if and when it makes sense with the other naming criteria.

Indeed, I am wondering if, as time goes by and the flora sections start to fill up, it might be sensible to consider using botanical names for plants more. (I'm not convinced that that is the best way to go, but it's certainly something that ought to be considered.)

Perhaps - there does seem to be a big enough ambiguity problem to warrent preemptive disambiguation based on botanical names (which isn't a panacea BTW - genus and species names /will/ sometimes conflict with the scientific names of organisms in other kingdoms).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)