Back in the beginning, the focus of MolluscaBase editors was on quickly populating the database to make it widely usable.
At the time, many specialized scientists and citizen scientists were consulted, and many were able to deliver lists of accepted species names for their groups. All these lists together formed a not-to-be-neglected basis for what is MolluscaBase today. They were added to the literature lists as “Checklist, pers. comm.” or likewise annotations.

Over time, our editor community has been working on both quantitative and qualitative improvements, duly adding fossil taxa, original names and their descriptions, recent literature sources, and so on. This means that the original “Checklists” have now become obsolete as “basis of record”. Moreover, they can today no longer be considered in line with our policy of using published systematics only.

Whilst we remain grateful to all those who contributed to the startup, we are now replacing these checklist-sources with published references (where not already done so) – a task which needs quite a bit of manual one-by-one labour and will take quite some time to complete.
 
On behalf of the MolluscaBase editor community,

Chris Vos, F. L. S.