Emphasis on Scientific Names over Common Names

[Michelle C. Torres-Grant]

Is there some reason scientific names aren't emphasized over common names? Besides the fact that a common name can apply to more than one species it creates inconsistencies on one's lists, because if there isn't a common name the scientific name is used. Then one has a list of both scientific and common names. That bothers my brain. OK, I apologize if someone has already brought this up, but I did look down the list of topics and didn't see this, so maybe I overlooked it...? 

[Scott Loarie]

No real reason, iNat always shows the scientific name together with a common name if one is available for the lexicon/place preferred by the user

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 2:46 PM, Michelle C. Torres-Grant <mich...@mctgphotography.com> wrote:

Is there some reason scientific names aren't emphasized over common names? Besides the fact that a common name can apply to more than one species it creates inconsistencies on one's lists, because if there isn't a common name the scientific name is used. Then one has a list of both scientific and common names. That bothers my brain. OK, I apologize if someone has already brought this up, but I did look down the list of topics and didn't see this, so maybe I overlooked it...? 

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Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
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[Ken-ichi]

The reason (as I understand it) is that scientific names turn off
people who don't know what they're for, and on the whole, those are
the people we most need to convince that nature matters, because there
are way more of them than there are of us. We also don't want to
aggravate people who like and rely on scientific names, so we try to
show them as much as possible, but we give emphasis to common names so
potential users don't immediately run back to Facebook.

[Armand Turpel]

If i switch de local setting to "Francais" in my profile, french common names are show over scientific names. (Notice: In french names the first letter is always lower case)
I live in a multilanguage world. Some one prefer common names in one or more german, french, english  or what ever languages. Or prefer only scientific names. Even for people who just started in nature observations it is good to know that common names are not that consistent (i dare say: even less consistent than latin names). For one scientific name, depending of the species group, there could be many common names and may be not the name they looking for.
It should be possible to set the language(s) of common names independent of the user profile local setting. I live in a small country between Germany and France and growing up, beside my own country (language), in both worlds (languages). So profile local settings dosent help that much for common names.

[chiara catalano]

Hi there,

how is it possible to give priority to the latin names than to the common names? I am Italian, I recently work in german speaking countries and for me common german names are impossible to use; italian names are meaningless for my german friends...so scientific names would be preferred (beside being unambiguous) 

thanks for the feedback

KC

[James Bailey]

Maybe for those users who desire it, there could be a profile setting that completely removes common names from visibility, or at least switches it so scientific names are always shown larger.