All corrections
Wikipedia August 14, 2026 at 04:50 AM

la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Latina_botanica

1 correction found

1
Claim
et praecipue ad nova taxa describenda usque adhuc obligata est.
Correction

This is outdated. Under the current International Code of Nomenclature, names of new taxa published on or after January 1, 2012 may be accompanied by a Latin or English description or diagnosis, so Latin is no longer obligatory for that purpose.

Full reasoning

The page says botanical Latin is still obligatory for describing new taxa. That was true under older botanical nomenclature rules, but it is no longer true today.

The current official International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants states in Article 39.2 that, for a new taxon name published on or after 1 January 2012, valid publication requires "a Latin or English description or diagnosis". In other words, English is now accepted as an alternative, so Latin is not still mandatory.

This is also confirmed by the official summary of the Melbourne Congress changes, which explains that the former requirement for a Latin description/diagnosis was modified so that for names published on or after 1 January 2012, the description/diagnosis must be in either English or Latin.

So the article's wording is outdated: botanical Latin remains important and widely used, but it is not still obligatory for new-taxon descriptions in the way this sentence claims.

2 sources
Model: OPENAI_GPT_5 Prompt: v1.16.0