A fact from Vachellia reficiens appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 17 February 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that the bark of Acacia reficiens is used to curdle milk, and its thorns used to pierce ears in the Kaokoveld region of Namibia?
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The genus ''Acacia'' in its old sense is polyphyletic, and with such a large genus the transfer of names to the new or re-surrected genera will take time. However, these transfers are not speculative! This species is part of the genus ''Vachellia'' and its scientific name will be Vachellia reficiens as soon as a taxonomist publishes the necessary transfer in accordance with the Code. 81.224.47.12 (talk) 09:11, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
As an Australian and reader of botanical material, I am aware of the prolonged discussion to conserve Acacia for the 800-odd mainly Australian group that Pedley had put forward the name Racosperma for. I wasn't sure if there was an appeal in the pipeline. Casliber (talk·contribs) 11:22, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The re-typification was ratified by the nomenclaturial session of the IBC 2005 in Vienna and published in the "Vienna Code" in 2006. As this issue was hugely debated and the "losing" side strived to overturn the re-typification on "legal" and "parlamentarian" grounds it has been extremely hard to do classificatory work in this group during the past 6 years. However, the re-typification was voted on once more at the IBC 2011 in Melbourne (again in favour of re-typification!) and the Vienna Code was ratified in its entirety. Thus the scientific name Acacia is restricted to those species that are related to the Australian Acacia penninervis, and the other groups should be placed in Vachellia, Senegalia, Acaciella and Mariosousa (and possibly other genera for a very small number of species). The name Racosperma is no longer in play with the typification of Acacia with Acacia penninervis - it simply becomes a synonym of Acacia (just as the situation was when the unrelated species groups were all treated as Acacia). There is no process of appeal as such, but anyone can publish and put forward a proposal to move the type to another species and such a proposal would be voted on by the next IBC in China 2017. The issue may be hard to comprehend without (quite extensive) taxonomic training - but I can't understand why the debate has been so aggresive. The fact that most species we call acacias (i.e. the thorny trees of African savannahs) no longer has the scientific name Acacia is a non-problem for most people. The parallell case that most things we call lilies are scientifically something completely different from Lilium ought to prove that scientific nomenclature without problem can be separate from what people actually call the plants under scrutiny. The reason for scientific names are to enable scholarly discussions, not to conserve societal or cultural aspects of plant use. 81.224.47.12 (talk) 10:16, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I can (understand), especially as a psychiatrist looking at botanists - other acrimonious debates include the split of Corymbia from Eucalyptus, while so far folks have been good-natured about the sinking of Dryandra into Banksia but some feelings have been hurt - fact is, folks get attached....haven't seen Vachellia reficiens much though. Casliber (talk·contribs) 12:45, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
