Update osmSpecies.txt

[davidpnewton]

Alphabetise, modernise taxonomy and remove duplicates

[Helium314]

osmSpecies is data coming from OSM via taginfo. I think it's misleading to add e.g. Acer × freemanii Autumn Blaze to osmSpecies when on OSM it's actually not used at all (according to taginfo).
You can update is with more recent data, but it should reflect current tagging (also when removing duplicates).

[davidpnewton]

There is still some room for improvement here. I only included the Autumn Blaze cultivar because it was already in the file. Personally speaking I really don't like putting cultivars into the species tag. Nothing wrong with putting them into taxon, or indeed cultivar itself as a key (although that way of doing things seems somewhat unusual).

When it comes to remove duplicates a lot of it is simply moving to have only correct names in there and not synonyms. There are instances where synonyms are extremely popular tags and yet are utterly wrong. For example the correct species name of Platanus × hispanica has 17,334 instances, whereas the combined total of all the incorrect variants stands at somewhere around 87,000 with two of those incorrect variants having more entries than 17,334. Still doesn't make them any more correct as entries. It simply means there's a VERY big job to fix the tagging needed!

Very similar story with Tilia × europaea, except more dramatic. The correctly tagged name has only 1,267 instances and the vast majority of entries are tagged Tilia x europaea (59,057). Again it simply means a big job to fix the tagging rather than the popular tagging being correct.

There were also quite a few instances of species names having their botanist abbreviation tacked on the end. For example Prunus dulcis D.A.Webb. Although technically correct in taxonomic circles, in normal usage it's extremely rare to see the botanist abbreviation used, hence getting rid of duplicates with the abbreviations at the end and removing the abbreviations at the end even if it were not a duplicate.

The single weirdest one in there was Ciconia ciconia, That's the Latin binomial for the White Stork!!!! Quite how the Latin name for a bird ended up in a tree data file is anyone's guess.

[mnalis]

Also, see comment in #675 (comment) and below for situations when such modernizing and other changes diverges from common OSM uses of tags (according to e.g. taginfo).

OSM community discussion in tagging category which shows support for such change would be needed in such cases. Please do link here if you open such discussion, or if you think it is already achieved. Thanks for understanding. ❤️