BUBO Listing flags up a species as being a rarity within the listing area chosen, so eBird should be able to do the same. If galeata appears as American Gallinule, and chloropus as Common Gallinule but with a rarity marker against it, I think that should sort it out, barring nigh-on wilful ignorance.
Since some of the discussion has turned to eBird's ability to flag sightings, I want to be perfectly clear that the system is quite capable of doing this at a broad or very fine scale (e.g., county, or sometimes even an individual island) anywhere in the world as long as we have regional experts helping with the data quality in that region. Those records are flagged and not displayed publicly until validated. (The ones Mysticete refers to probably went out on the Rare Bird Alert features with clear "Unconfirmed" flagging...i.e., use at your own risk!) At the broad scale, we have no issues whatsoever with data quality for the two moorhen species (just that we need more data on both to fully display their range!).
Eurasian Moorhen:
http://ebird.org/ebird/map/commoo3
Common Gallinule:
http://ebird.org/ebird/map/comgal1
Do let me know if anyone spots observations that are questionable! In fact, before sending this post, I had to invalidate two records of Common Gallinule that were appearing for Greece, because of a minor bug in the data quality system there (also now fixed). Those records now are invalidated (you cannot zoom in and find those points on the map), but they do illustrate that some people even select Common Gallinule when birding in Europe. Wilful ignorance or not, it does happen.
So eBird can certainly keep out-of-range gallinules from polluting Eurasia and moorhens away from the Americas, but the unseen data quality issue is that we are invalidating perfectly valid records of both simply because the person selected the wrong species. We don't change people's records in eBird (except when taxonomic updates occur), so if they want to affirm that they saw Common Gallinule in Sweden, they can do so. But we won't let that record appear in eBird without stellar documentation. And of course, a rarity flag (even if it keeps it form appearing in public data) still does not necessarily help people understand why Common Moorhen, which their field guide clearly has printed right in front of them, is not a valid option. This is part of why I DO care about common names. For better or worse, they are the currency of many (most!) birders, so to the extent that they can be stable, and understandable, it is a good thing for eBird, BirdTrack, and similar projects. With eBird being global, it magnifies those challenges (relative to BirdTrack, for example). For what it's worth, bird names in eBird are also customizable in 7+ versions of Spanish, Australian and U.K. English, 3 versions of French, as well as Haitian, Icelandic, Indonesian, and several other languages.
The foundation of any species in eBird is certainly a proper scientific name and citation, but it seems that many here are conflating a
name with a
taxonomic concept. Scientific names are not a sacrosanct identifier of a taxonomic concept; to the contrary, because of the rigid rules of nomenclature (which I am not fighting, but which do make some things confusing), they actually can be applied to multiple taxonomic concepts. A taxonomic concept refers to a distinct population of birds with shared traits. On the other hand, a name, like
G. chloropus, just refers to the individual first described, really. From there, it can be applied as representative of a species, or subspecies, from the population to which is was believed to belong. But since those populations are different whenever species limits are revised, it does not help you to know if
G. chloropus refers to the cosmopolitan species or the Eastern Hemisphere one.
Denis Lepage's Avibase does a superb job maintaining this distinction.
Consider for example the name that started this debate.
http://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/species.jsp?lang=EN&avibaseid=75F403386416287D&sec=summary&ssver=1
Gallinula chloropus has been applied to the population including just "present day"
chloropus,
chloropus and
nesiotis (Tristan Moorhen), or "present day"
chloropus and
galeata (i.e., New World and Old World; or Common Gallinule and Common Moorhen).
My main recommendation was that since
Gallinula chloropus must be the scientific name for what is now the Eastern Hemisphere bird, committees that decide on Common Names should begin to more carefully consider trying
not to apply the same common name to parent and daughter species. Using the combination of Common Moorhen/
Gallinula chloropus for the worldwide population AND for the one restricted to Eurasia, Africa, and Australasia is, I think, confusing. Changing the common names to be unique, would remedy this. I have much less interest in what those names are, as long as they can be (more or less) agreed upon. But I do like Laughing Moorhen for the American bird.
