Web-based taxonomy is the effort by taxonomists to use the World Wide Web to create unified, consensus taxonomies.
In his 2002 paper on the subject[1], H. Charles J. Godfray called for the creation of Web-based organisations to collect all the accumulated literature on a taxonomic group into a centralized knowledge base and make this data available through the Web as a unified taxonomy, so that it can be examined and revised. Such a platform would be owned and maintained by a taxonomic working group, governed by an editor or an editorial board. An example of such a platform is FishBase.
The notion of Web-based consensus taxonomies remains controversial because, as two Australian researchers pointed out[2], taxonomic names are not fixed but hypotheses, and therefore constantly changing.