Most articles about species (animals, plants, etc.) are reachable from their scientific (binomial) names. However, many species have more than one scientific name, for example, because they were independently discovered by two biologists, or because they were moved from one genus to another. Eubot creates redirects for all obsolete synonyms, to help navigation. (I've come across many obsolete synonyms in older books and on internet.)
This run uses the information from taxoboxes in Wikipedia itself. I have parsed the species taxoboxes in the August 2007 database dump, and created a list of all of the synonyms mentioned. 5555 of them are redlinks (as of last August).
This is a small sample of that list:
- Rheosporangium aphanidermatum => Pythium aphanidermatum
- Epeira amictoria => Argiope argentata
- Agaricus undulatus => Gloeophyllum sepiarium
- Puffinus puffinus mauretanicus => Balearic Shearwater
- Linocarpon cariceti => Gaeumannomyces graminis var. graminis
- Tremella fusca => Gymnosporangium sabinae
- Sorubim jandia => Firewood catfish
One complication is that some binomials have been used for several different species. Eubot only creates redirects if the synonym occurs in just a single taxobox; if there is not yet an article with that name; and if the synonym is not followed by the word "non". There will still be a few remaining cases in which the bot would make an inappropriate redirect, but that would happen as well if someone would create the redirs manually. See for example this correction.
See also:
Comments please to User talk:Eugene van der Pijll