Botany Blog Plants of the Northeastern U.S.

January 28, 2013

Don’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia

Filed under: Naturalized Plants — admin @ 22:24

So I was a little bored this evening and decided to do a little reading on the flora of Madagascar. One of the interesting things I learned is that the Didiereaceae is a family of spiny plants found in Madagascar. The family has been considered endemic to the island, but recent molecular evidence suggests that it should include the genus Portulacaria, which would expand the range of the family beyond the island of Madagascar.

That much seems to be accurate. What really caught my attention was a mysterious claim on Wikipedia that the common purslane (Portulaca oleracea L.) was now being called Portulacaria oleracea. Well that is significant since we would then have a new family represented in NY State. The problem is that the Wiki article does not give an authority for this name. It gives an authority for the other species of Portulacaria. This is important, because if there is no authority then one would conclude that there is no published rationale for giving this species a new name or placing it in a new family! You won’t find this name in Index Kewensis, but you can find references to the name on other web pages. I would suspect the authors of those web pages got their information from Wikipedia. And that’s why you shouldn’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia.

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