In article ,
Stewart Robert Hinsley writes:
|
| But I might be wrong. If you care enough you could drop a note to the
| editor of Taxon and see if they would entertain a proposal to conserve
| Viburnum fragrans Bunge against Viburnum farreri Loisel. (However as
| there are 18,500 hits in Google for "Viburnum farreri" and 1,110 for
| "Viburnum fragrans" it seems that the balance of usage has swung against
| you.)

Hmm. Not when I try it.

Results 1 - 10 of about 52,300 for Viburnum fragrans.
Results 1 - 10 of about 24,300 for Viburnum farreri.

Frankly, I doubt my ability to persuade anyone to open this can of
worms, irrespective of the merits of any proposal :-(


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

In message , Nick Maclaren
writes

In article ,
Stewart Robert Hinsley writes:
|
| But I might be wrong. If you care enough you could drop a note to the
| editor of Taxon and see if they would entertain a proposal to conserve
| Viburnum fragrans Bunge against Viburnum farreri Loisel. (However as
| there are 18,500 hits in Google for "Viburnum farreri" and 1,110 for
| "Viburnum fragrans" it seems that the balance of usage has swung against
| you.)

Hmm. Not when I try it.

Results 1 - 10 of about 52,300 for Viburnum fragrans.
Results 1 - 10 of about 24,300 for Viburnum farreri.

I put quotes round the species names so that only cases where the words
occur in sequence come up; you've looked for pages contain both words,
not necessarily in sequence, so would have found pages referring to
Viburnum species-X and Genus-Y fragrans.

Results can be distorted by keyword spammers, but I don't expect them to
be using pairs of words, rather than single words.

Frankly, I doubt my ability to persuade anyone to open this can of
worms, irrespective of the merits of any proposal :-(


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

--
Stewart Robert Hinsley

In article ,
Stewart Robert Hinsley writes:
|
| I put quotes round the species names so that only cases where the words
| occur in sequence come up; you've looked for pages contain both words,
| not necessarily in sequence, so would have found pages referring to
| Viburnum species-X and Genus-Y fragrans.

Oops. Yes. I am not sure that it proves what it seems to, from the
first few pages of hits. Web page counts are very biassed towards
organisations that produce Web pages, and there are far more hits of
an academic botanic nature than of a horticultural one. What was the
average number of readers of an academic paper again?[*] But I assert
that there are more horticultural references to that species than
strictly botanic ones.

But, even allowing for that, it does seem likely that the balance has
definitely shifted (and probably did about 20 years back), which is a
strong argument that changing back again now would do more harm than
good!

[*] To non-academics, one survey found it was 3. Including the
referees! I can't remember which field or where that was published.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.