The Terrorchid wiki software has undergone adaptations to satisfy the needs which are specific for platforms that operate in the subject of Biology. One of the biggest tasks for keeping a place like this running on the web is not speed but reliability. As lists grow in size, errors are more difficult to spot and updates require a large amount of time.
One of the aspects which is a bit of a pickle is plant name referencing. Genera and species, forms, variations, subspecies, … change from time to time as plants get tackled by dedicated researchers. Staying up to date with a few hundred genera and a speciescount in the thousands is not a job which is best resolved manually. For this we use automatic updates from external databases, with IPNI, Kew Royal Botanical Gardens and GBIF at its roots.
International Plant Name Index (IPNI) is a collaboration in which the ANH, Harvard University Herbaria, the Australian Plant Name Index and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew bring together four large plant nomenclatural databases to provide plant names for the world. This project is partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.