[Taxacom] Is "deprecation" a taxonomic term or informatics jargon has crept into taxonomic literature?

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

From: "Dan Lahr" <daniel.lahr at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, August 19, 2011 7:40 PM

> Hi all,
>
> Out of curiosity, I've incidentally noticed the use of this term in
> wikipedia as a description for names that are not anymore in use (one
> example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoptera another is
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannanosaurus and check out the search
> result for deprecated+genus
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=deprecated+genus).
>
> I do not believe having ever read this term in "off-line" taxonomic
> literature.  Intriguingly, the definition of the term in wikipedia
> itself is centered around obsolescence of software.
>
> My question is could it be that informatics jargon is already creeping
> into the taxonomic thinking and literature (yes I do consider online
> material literature) or is this an isolated incident?  If this is not
> an accident, how prepared are we to deal with the merging of
> jargon/meanings/semantics from both worlds?

***
A quick Google search suggests that the use of "deprecated" in a taxonomic
context is strongly tied to Wikipedia. I suppose this ties in with two
phenomena that are natural to the 'Wikipedian', namely
1) to treat everything that is not nailed down otherwise as a software
project and
2) to express an opinion ('This is the Truth') wherever there is room to do
so.

If this will remain limited to Wikipedia, well, who can say? The first
question is whether it will spread online.

Paul