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Taxon identifiers are identifiers assigned to biologicaltaxon bybiological andtaxonomic databases for purposes of establishing a point of reference for each catalogued taxon. Assigning a taxon with a permanent identifier such as a string of numbers allows for information such astaxonomic classification to be updated without affecting the ability to retrieve or reference the data of the respective taxon. A taxon identifier works in much the same way that abarcode is used to retrieve data about an item of interest. When used on Wikipedia, taxon identifiers can be found near the bottom of Wikipedia pages, linking to records ontaxonomic databases. In many cases, each taxon name in a taxonomic database has a unique identifier, although this is not always the case. (For example, theInternational Plant Names Index regularly has multiple identifiers for a taxon name, often but not always of the formN-1,N-2, etc.)
Taxon identifiers enable researchers to search more easily for pertinent information on the subject of an article, without needing to disambiguate the subject manually. For example, taxon identifiers are used in species articles so that the information in the article can be easily cross-referenced with the popularCatalogue of Life database.
More generally, taxon identifiers are a method of creating and maintaining index terms for bibliographical material. The links produced by the{{Taxonbar}} template on Wikipedia go to taxon information pages of online biological or taxonomic databases. As an example, the Wikipedia Taxonbar information forSequoiadendron giganteum looks like this:
The identifiers listed forSequoiadendron giganteum will link to entries found in the corresponding online databases:
This is a small subset of available databases, and these links will vary from taxon to taxon depending on its type and the availability of database entries.
A complete list of supported databases can be found atTemplate:Taxonbar/doc#Taxon identifiers