There's a slow-burning discussion on taxonomic concepts on Github that I am half participating in. As seems inevitable in any discussion of taxonomy, there's a lot of floundering about given that there's lots of jargon - much of it used in different ways by different people - and people are coming at the problem from different perspectives. In one sense, taxonomy is pretty straightforward.

It's a nice feeling when work that one did ages ago seems relevant again. Markus Döring has been working on a new backbone classification of all the species which occur in taxonomic checklists harvested by GBIF. After building a new classification the obvious question arises "how does this compare to the previous GBIF classification?" A simple question, answering it however is a little tricky.