We write our plant tags out by hand on discarded vinyl blinds with indelible markers, and there’s always the internal debate of whether it’s better to be informal and recognizable or technically correct (because writing both gets tiresome). Personally I lean towards accuracy rather than approachability because technically correct is the best kind of correct, but even my plant friends think I’m a nerd. Who’s with me?
When writing my PhD thesis I not only used the full latin name of the monkey species I studied, I even added the citation for the original, first description of it. It’s something that should be standard, because when a species gets renamed you otherwise might not longer know what older texts are referred to, but entirely fell out of fashion in many disciplines. My PI actually marked the citation with “What is this?” and when I explained he said it’s pretty old school but if I want, I can leave it…
I’d probably write both, but if I had to choose, latin, as it makes it more clear. And I’m not even thinking about “global”, some common names are different in different regions of the same country, where the same name can describe two different species.
I think you’ve raised a very salient point, especially in the age of reclassifying due to genomic testing. There are so many species undergoing these changes, and it’s daunting to think of the information that could be lost in those cases, or even just harder to track down.
We ran a small experiment at market the other day, having written out both; the plants with the common names showing forward had more interactions but the ones with binomials showing generated longer conversations. It’s an interesting dynamic.