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Invasive

For the "conservation status" what about allowing the option to tag a species as invasive? I was thinking that this would be worth mentioning, among many others, on cat. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 23:53, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

There is no widely agreed upon definition of "invasive" (as you can see from the lead of the article). Plus, what would be the context for marking a taxon as invasive? Kudzu is invasive in the US, but native in eastern Asia. And if kudzu is invasive, does that mean that its genus Pueraria is also invasive? Kaldari (talk) 02:08, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, everything is native somewhere, so it's meaningless to say it's not invasive because it's native somewhere. And invasive would be by species like endangered usually is. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 03:02, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I do not support an invasive species tag in the taxobox. Wikipedia is international in scope, not a guide to "Species of Country X". Furthermore, invasive status is not a property of any species but rather of populations of species in certain regions. Smilarly, we use international or national conservation statuses (e.g. IUCN or ESA status) rather than state or provincial listings because a species could be globally common but locally endangered). The unbiased, globally neutral options would be to either all invasive ranges (countries? states? counties??) in a taxobox, which would be excessive, pedantic, and silly, or to simply omit the info from the taxobox. Invasive status does not belong in a taxobox but could and should be discussed in the body of the article. --Animalparty-- (talk) 03:19, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

There technically is no such thing as an invasive species. A species can be invasive under certain conditions (even in it's native range), but there is nothing that inherently makes a whole species invasive. A similar equivalent would be incorrectly calling a species as a whole a weed. Kingofaces43 (talk) 01:30, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Guidelines for writing taxonomic sections in articles with a taxobox?

I've never really looked into Wikipedia guidelines for species articles, but could someone point me to where they might be? This set of edits (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Black_bean_aphid&diff=625148719&oldid=625141779) piqued my interest. One user claims that information in the taxobox should also be written as prose in the article as well. This seems awfully redundant in addition to seeming like too much information about the various taxonomic levels for a species article anyways. I'm just wondering if there is a good set of guidelines written somewhere that I could lead the user to and also keep as future reference when dealing with insect taxonomy related info. Kingofaces43 (talk) 01:41, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

At first glance, I'd say the the information that was removed is a bit much for an article on a species and may be redundant to the articles on higher taxa, but it did provide some context and info on morphology with a citation, so I'd probably let it stay. Very little of the info was redundant to the taxobox. Do remember that infoboxes are meant to summarize relevant text, not replace it. In biography articles, we still include birth and death dates and locations, alma mater, etc. even though this is also provided in the text. That's not to say that everything in the infobox needs to be reiterated in the text; we don't normally repeat the entire classification up to kingdom as it's understood linking to the next highest taxon will normally take care of that (", a species in the genus ..."). For plants, you can turn to Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Template#Taxonomy as a starting point for a guide on taxonomy sections. I imagine the advice may be similar for other taxa, but I'm not sure where to point you for taxa that don't have chloroplasts... Rkitko ^(talk) 02:54, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

By way of example, here are two articles with comprehensive taxonomy sections that reached Featured Article status: Rainbow trout and Cutthroat trout. --Mike Cline (talk) 13:38, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

And a couple of plant examples: Ailanthus altissima and Aiphanes. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:15, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

FYI there are some general guidelines at the Infobox Manual of Style, as the Taxobox is a special sort of Infobox. In my view, the taxobox should be as concise and easy to navigate as common sense dictates, and certainly not every inclusive taxon need mention in text (e.g. stating a Zebra is a mammal obviates the need to also call it an animal and a eukaryote and to discuss the defining traits of each).--Animalparty-- (talk) 02:26, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Dates

I keep coming accross instances of this template with, for example, |binomial_authority=(Linnaeus, 1758). This is harmful, and such values should be entered into two separate parameters, with the year in |binomial_date=, for improved data granularity. However, contrary to the template's documentation, this appears not to work. Have I misunderstood something, or is there a bug? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:47, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't see how it would work as two parameters, because of the parentheses. Some zoological authorities need to be "NAME, DATE", some "(NAME, DATE)" or even "(NAME1, DATE1) NAME2, DATE2" (the last is allowed by the ICodeZN, although the transferrer is usually omitted in zoology). Also there are well over 100 "RANK_authority" parameters in the template, not just the one you mentioned. Every one would need several more parameters to make the approach you suggest work. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:32, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

I disagree that the inclusion of date with authority is harmful. Possibly a slight inconvence to certain bots or data retrieval systems, bu , as the saying goes, if it aint broke, don't fix it. --Animalparty-- (talk) 20:18, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Taxobox caption glitch- left alignment

Possibly due to this change by @Peter coxhead:, many (most?) taxobox image captions seem to have been automatically shifted to left alignment (see for instance Garter snake or Rose or Crocodilia, although Reptile appears to still be centered). This issue, while not crucial, should be addressed ASAP to ensure stylistic congruity and aesthetics, i.e. captions should be centered by default unless explicitly coded for alternate alignment. --Animalparty-- (talk) 19:07, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

 Done Fixed – apologies, my error (not enough testing). (You may need to reload/purge the page to see the change.) Peter coxhead (talk) 19:32, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Taxobox breaks at te.wikipedia.org

At the article te:నల్ల_బెండ, Taxobox breaks. Why is it so? I have copied the temmplate as is, and also, it works for all fields in English, once i start adding Telugu, it breaks. --Rahmanuddin Shaik (talk) 19:40, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

The template code examines the content of the regnum parameter to set the colour of the taxobox. In your example, changing regnum from "వృక్ష సామ్రాజ్యం" to "Plantae" fixes the problem. You will need to adjust the template code (in the Telugu version of {{taxobox colour}}) to recognise "వృక్ష సామ్రాజ్యం" and other kingdoms instead of "Plantae", "Animalia", etc. --Stemonitis (talk) 20:11, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Piped links to taxon names

I've noticed many taxoboxes use piped links or link suffixes to link to the common names of taxa, for example [[Animal]]ia or [[Fly|Diptera]]. In my experience this becomes problematic at lower levels because article organization sometimes changes, resulting in a difference between the linked article and the intended taxon. What is the rationale for using piped links are used in this way? Augurar (talk) 08:11, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

There is no good rationale; it's much better to link to the precise target – in a taxobox the scientific name – and allow the redirect system to find the currently correct article. I used to revert editors who insisted on replacing links to redirects by piped links; MOS:NOPIPE is quite clear, and as noted in MOS:LINK2SECT in a slightly different context, linking through redirects "costs little and makes improvements easier." However, this message seems lost on a sufficiently large number of editors to make this something of a lost cause, and I've more-or-less given up. Whether the message can be put more strongly, I'm not sure. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:20, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

I've been adding these piped links occasionally for some time, but you're both right – it's stupid. I have tended only to do it where the common name is inherently linked to the scientific name (if something were no longer in "Mammalia", we would no longer call it a "mammal"), so the harm should be minimal, but it is also clear that the benefit is also minimal and such links could easily make life difficult later. --Stemonitis (talk) 11:13, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Dagger Usage?

In some taxoboxes, such as the one at Tyrannosaurus, there's a dagger (†) next to a few of the classification names. As someone who isn't familiar with paleontology, I had no idea what this meant, and it took me awhile to figure out that it designated an extinct taxon. It's useful information that non-specialist users would find valuable, so I think we should try to make it more accessible. I can think of two ways to do this:

1. Dejargonize and simply say "Tyrannosaurus Rex (extinct)"
2. Link the dagger to something extinction-related, like List of extinct species or Extinction.

Perhaps some more experienced editors could weigh in on which might be a better option? And once a decision is made, maybe we could attract the attention of someone with a bot? Origamidesigner (talk) 01:26, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Linking to "Extinction" is probably the best option. Abyssal (talk) 02:41, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Linking it is by far the preferable, and more professional of the options--Kevmin § 03:42, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

There was a recent discussion on this topic at WT:TOL#Extinction daggers in taxoboxes. Several people (including myself) argued that it would be better not to include daggers in the main part of the taxobox at all, but only in lists that include both and extinct and extant taxa, and then only after the symbol has been explained. Linking to anything except † is rather easter-egg-y, and will be impenetrable in print, and this particular meaning of that symbol is not widely understood. --Stemonitis (talk) 18:24, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Cacopinae and others

The template: {{Taxonomy/Cacopinae}} is deprecated, and yet a few other taxonomy templates transclude it. [1]I have no idea where to fix this, since the toolserver link [2] doesn't work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Debresser (talk • contribs) 11 January 2014

This can be fixed by amending the "child taxa" template like this, and then making a null edit on each of the pages that still appears to transclude the deprecated taxon template. --Stemonitis (talk) 08:21, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Foraminifera taxonomy boxes

I am trying to edit some Foraminifera orders to add the class and make the taxonomy consistent across Wikipedia and tied in to a source. I am trying to add this text to the Order Rotaliida's taxobox, to replace the current taxonomy scheme:

| domain = [[Eukarya]] | regnum = [[SAR supergroup|SAR]] | supergroup = [[Rhizaria]] | phylum = [[Foraminifera]] | classis = [[Globothalamea]]

However, every time I preview I get some weird column spans instead of a taxonomy box. What is going on here?

I also wanted to use a set of code for inserting the citation for this taxonomy, WoRMS use of the Foram DB, but the code does not generate a citation. Maybe this is tied in with the prior error? Can I place this code in the taxonomy box? It should go after the class, as it is specifically a citation for the placement of the order in a Foram class.

{{cite WoRMS |author= Pawlowski, Holzmann, Tyszka|year= 2013|title= Globothalamea|id= 744104|accessdate= January 18, 2015|db=forams}}

Any help would be appreciated.

MicroPaLeo (talk) 21:31, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Hello, MicroPaLeo. The taxobox is an example of a Wikipedia Template, {{taxobox}}, which has a large range of possible parameters, but that does not contain 'supergroup'. If the taxon rank you want is not in that template, you can either argue (on the template talk page Template Talk:Taxobox) for adding it to the template, or you can just use 'unranked'. I don't know about the WoRMS: my reading of the template documentation suggests that the 'authority' fields just take text, but I may be wrong. --ColinFine (talk) 22:26, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi Colin, I am using "supergroup" rather than "infrakingdom" because that is what Wikipedia uses for Rhizaria, so I don't think that can be the problem. Unranked would probably work, and I will try that.

I don't understand what you are saying about WoRMS. There is no authority field. MicroPaLeo (talk) 22:31, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

"unranked" does not work, either. MicroPaLeo (talk) 22:38, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, MicroPaLeo, this is a complicated area. {{taxobox}} doesn't have parameters 'supergroup', 'infrakingdom', or 'unranked' (my mistake), but it does have 'subregnum', and 'unranked_regnum', 'unranked_phylum' etc. On the other hand, Rhizaria doesn't use that template, but a different one {{automatic taxobox}}, which appears to work very differently. I have not looked into this, but my guess is that this is a more flexible approach that somebody has been working on, but it has not been put in many articles yet. I'm afraid this is an example of the general lack of consistency across Wiipedia. --ColinFine (talk) 00:13, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

@MicroPaLeo: The taxobox, as a tpye of infobox, should succinctly summarize the article and place the taxon into context. Not all higher taxonomic ranks need listing in the taxobox, and in general only the focal taxon should have an authority listed. If there are taxonomic disagreements or conflicting schools of thought, those should be discussed in text, even it means arbitrarily choosing one classification scheme for the Taxobox. If you wish to place a footnote after an authority for taxa that do have fields (e.g. "subregnum_authority), those can be added with a simple <ref> after the Author and Year., e.g. Pawlowski et al. 2013<ref>{{cite WoRMS |author= Pawlowski, Holzmann, Tyszka|year= 2013|title= Globothalamea|id= 744104|accessdate= January 18, 2015|db=forams}}</ref> Hope this helps! --Animalparty-- (talk) 01:19, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I did not use the ref tags, just the brackets. MicroPaLeo (talk) 18:55, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Discussion from Teahouse, can someone here help?

Thanks, MicroPaLeo (talk) 00:18, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi MicroPaLeo, does this work (and did I get the ranks right)? I had to switch usage to {{Automatic taxobox}} since {{Taxobox}} doesn't seem to support custom ranks as mentioned above. Usage instructions for {{Automatic taxobox}} is in the link, if you are unfamiliar with it. -- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 01:06, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that is correct. I would have left out Retaria, but it works both ways. Now I need to add WoRMS as the citation for the class, preferably in the taxobox. Do you know how to do this? Thanks. MicroPaLeo (talk) 03:44, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

The problem is that every bit of the classification really needs sourcing. Who says that SAR is a Kingdom? There simply is no current consensus as to such "classifications". It would be much better to treat all of these higher levels as unranked clades and then discuss alternatives, with sources, in the text. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:37, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

In every order article? Why? There is no consensus for anything in the forams, but WoRMS is as good as any for a citation of classes. The forams article is the place to discuss, in depth, the current state of forams classification, with the classes versus systems without classes with citations and depth, the class articles can have a moderate discussion of the classes and classification at that level, and something in the orders, but to cite every clade in the order articles and discuss every one when foram orders on Wikipedia have almost no descriptive information is not what a general encyclopedia is about Although a cladist at heart with my own research, my understanding in writing for Wikipedia is that I need sources. I picked WoRMS, as a secondary database compilation used frequently on Wikipedia. But if you have a good source for the unranked clades, I will use that instead of WoRMS. But, no, I am not going to cite every clade in the orders articles. MicroPaLeo (talk) 13:58, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

So am I correct in assuming that you're adding these ranks (Bikonta, Corticata, SAR, and Rhizaria) only to foraminiferan articles to make it consistent with higher classifications? Or are you also revising the articles on other "chromalveolates" to make them all consistent? If the case is the former (i.e. you're only working on Foraminifera), I would agree with Peter. It's better to treat all these higher groups as unranked clades for the moment, since there is far from anything resembling consistency in the articles dealing with "chromalveolates" in Wikipedia and outside sources. The ranks can always be defined later on when it stabilizes. That shouldn't affect anything else on the lower levels (class, order, etc.)-- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 14:38, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Same as to Peter, just provide a source. It does not matter that you or I prefer unranked clades, it matters that general knowledge encyclopedias and floras and faunas cite sources for their taxonomies, and not primary sources. MicroPaLeo (talk) 15:23, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

The question is which source to follow. And that can not be easily answered for higher ranks. If you are only revising articles on foraminiferans (which is relatively stable), the higher ranks should accurately reflect the current lack of consensus. SAR for example, can also be treated as Harosa, as the article states. And majority of the articles on protists and higher ranks actually use the Chromalveolata as kingdom scheme (Adl et al., 2005), albeit with significant discussions on other schemes, not SAR as kingdom (Adl et al., 2012). For example Heterokonta, Haptophyta, and Alveolata, and even the article on Eukaryota. Just worried that only partially revising these articles can lead to even more confusion, though {{Automatic taxobox}} itself was created specifically to avoid that kind of thing. Ideally, as Animalparty stated above, articles on lower ranks should only discuss their relationship to their immediate parent taxon, leaving the discussion on higher classifications on their respective articles. So e.g., the discussion on the taxonomy of Rotaliida should really only concern itself with its placement within Globothalamea and so on.

As for your second request "Now I need to add WoRMS as the citation for the class, preferably in the taxobox." - you can't do that, AFAIK, for automatic taxoboxes. And I don't think you should. The citation should be added to text in the body of the article, not the taxobox (because of the limited space).-- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 15:59, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

No one is working on foram articles on Wikipedia. WoRMS is used on Wikipedia, it is a legitimate secondary source as a citation for the classes. Peter is the one who wants all higher ranks discussed in the classes article, please re-read my first response to him in which I advocate what you say. Taxoboxes on Wikipedia do have the authorities with a citation for it, the automoatic taxobox even offers an argument for it. I just want to use the WoRMS template for it, not rewrite Wikipedia policy. MicroPaLeo (talk) 16:28, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

@MicroPaLeo: that's not what I meant. If you insist on using SAR as a Kingdom, then you should source it. Much better, however, is to stick to unranked clades, which have better consensus at present. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:17, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

I do not insist on anything. Wikipedia uses kingdom and SAR. I did not find a secondary source with unranked clades. If you have one, I am happy to use it. "The problem is that every bit of the classification really needs sourcing." This is where you seem to be saying what you said." (Emphasis in original.) MicroPaLeo (talk) 21:07, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

That's actually the problem. Wikipedia doesn't. Some articles use SAR as the regnum. Some use Chromalveolata. And still others use Rhizaria. The only thing they seem to generally agree on is the order of the ranks, which is what's more or less truly important in phylogeny anyway. Then again, protists are some of the least worked on articles on here. Since I don't usually delve into them, I won't presume to recommend what classification to use. But whatever it is, the important thing is that they be consistent across all related articles.

If you do use WoRMS exclusively for the taxoboxes, all articles of related taxa should also use them. And of course where necessary, taxonomical disputes should be discussed (though that seems to be more or less covered already in articles on the higher taxa).

This is to avoid problems introduced like how Rotaliida currently has SAR as kingdom. But Foraminifera identifies its kingdom as Rhizaria. Same with Retaria. Corticata on the other hand, lists Archaeplastida and Chromalveolata as its supergroups. Despite the Chromalveolata article identifying itself also as a kingdom.

I think what Peter meant was that since there is no consensus as to how to treat these groups, it might be better to leave off naming the ranks in the meantime, same as how plants currently use (unranked) for higher groups to minimize the number of times those articles have to revised while Angiosperm Phylogeny Group is still busy rearranging them. It wouldn't affect the quality of the articles, the order would still be preserved, and it prevents contradictions across articles.-- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 22:33, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

I am not going to call things unranked without a source that calls them unranked. It is not appropriate for a general resource to use my or your original research for any reason. I can only use an established source, and for taxoboxes it cannot be primary research. Wikipedia calls SAR a kingdom in its taxobox, and attaches a source to this, the automatic taxobox uses kingdom, also. If this is wrong, it can be fixed. MicroPaLeo (talk) 00:26, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

The automatic taxobox calls it a kingdom because I inputted it that way, heh.

Anyway, looking at sources, it is actually just referred to as "clade", "group", or "supergroup" not kingdom (including the sources of the SAR supergroup article, e.g. Burki et al., 2007; Hampl et al., 2009; and Archibald, 2009). The name SAR supergroup itself implies that it is informal, as SAR is an acronym (which can be alternatively spelled RAS in some sources), and of course, the "supergroup" part of the name.

Here are all the sources I can scrounge in 20 minutes. All of them call SAR just "clade", "supergroup", "group", "monophyletic megagroup", "assemblage", etc.: Manson's Tropical Diseases, Immunity to Parasitic Infection, Campbell Biology, Genomic Insights into the Biology of Algae, Evolutionary Biology

A more formal treatment under Cavalier-Smith, 2010 names it the subkingdom Harosa. Which incidentally, is the system used by WoRMS (though WoRMS mixes it with older systems). The more comprehensive and newer Adl et al., 2012, on the other hand, formalizes the name to "Sar" (not an acronym), but does not use formal ranks (Sar is a "supergroup").

Note that I am not advocating that it be called one way or another, just that it be consistent across articles. Because again, Wikipedia is actually far more confused when it comes to handling ongoing taxonomic revisions, and what one article uses shouldn't be the sole basis for how we treat it on all subsequent cases. I would actually recommend following Adl et al., 2012 as that seems to be at least semi-official and was created specifically to temporarily stabilize eukaryote higher taxonomy.

The hierarchy of Adl et al., 2012 is identical to your earlier request (Eukarya > Sar > Rhizaria > Retaria > Foraminifera > Globothalamea > Rotaliida). Except that it does not use formal ranks. If you agree to this, I can easily change the automatic taxobox pages in question, and all subsequent automatic taxoboxes will also use the same system. -- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 02:31, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Let's see if I got this, use a primary source, discuss every breath I take with you before I take it until you say "breathe," and as long as I agree to do what you demand without your, of course, advocating anything, and also agree to edit 10,000 articles that have been ignored forever, or consider myself denied of you permission to improve foram decriptions on Wikipedia and not one of the anyones allowed to edit your foram articles? MicroPaLeo (talk) 03:38, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

I didn't realize you were perceiving this as hostile and/or personal. It's not. Calm down. Nor am I denying you anything, I already filled your request above. This is an attempt to "finalize" how we treat these taxa, since automatic taxoboxes are automatic. Everything inputted in it will display the same way in different articles. The question is simple: should Sars/SARS be treated as a kingdom (given that sources don't)? And if so, what do we do with other articles that contradict that approach (including multiple foraminiferan articles that use Rhizaria as the kingdom in their taxoboxes)?

As a side note: Adl et al., 2012 is a review/synthesis of previous papers, it's mostly a secondary source. WP:PRIMARY sources are also not forbidden. For taxonomic articles, they are usually preferred to aggregating databases (which are oftentimes out of date). For the purposes of this discussion, all the sources I gave above are secondary, with the exception of the original paper (Burki et al., 2007).

Again, set aside any preconceptions about the discussion above. None of this is hostile. If you don't want to deal with this and just work on foraminiferans (which I have never touched an article of, and know very little about), I can take this to WP:TOL instead and let them hash it over. If anyone cares enough that is. Also note that I'm asking you because you work on these taxa. I don't. I merely came here because you needed help with the taxobox. If that came off as pestering or possessive, that wasn't the intent and I apologize.-- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 04:47, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

I did not note that I was emotionally uncalm, but as you have moved onto my emotional stability, I stopped reading--a little passive-aggressive and off topic for my tastes. MicroPaLeo (talk) 04:58, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Sigh. -- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 05:08, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

IUCN Red List missing

I'd like to add a hidden cleanup category to this template, but I'd like to get consensus here first. The category would be placed if the taxobox doesn't have anything whatsoever about the IUCN Red List status: any of the normal options, even Data Deficient, would prevent the category from appearing, and we could also have a parameter (e.g. omitiucn=yes) to prevent the category from appearing if we had a good reason to omit the Red List. Basically, the category would be used just to find pages where we haven't addressed Red List status yet. Nyttend (talk) 18:17, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure that it will produce the kind of maintenance category you're hoping it would be. The vast majority of species haven't been (and probably never will be) addressed by the IUCN. Other taxoboxes have more specific statuses, such as Western Australia's Declared Rare and Priority Flora List. Unless you can weed these out in a way easier than adding another parameter, the category won't help in the goal of adding the IUCN status to pages that have been assessed but don't have the info yet. It's probably simpler to go through the IUCN list and compare it to articles we have. Rkitko ^(talk) 18:26, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

If they're not addressed, wouldn't they be Data Deficient? Or even if they're not Data Deficient, couldn't we add a feature that, if activated, would say that the IUCN hasn't addressed the species? If we've chosen to use other lists, e.g. the Declared Rare etc. list, couldn't we add a feature whereby the template doesn't add the cleanup category when another list is used instead? Again, I'm only attempting to ensure that a human has checked the species' conservation status, that Red List status isn't simply forgotten. I'm satisfied as long as a taxobox reflects the IUCN's statements, as long as it notes that they haven't made a statement, or as long as its status is intentionally omitted. Not all of the WA list's potential entries mention their list status in their taxoboxes, either; Eremophila youngii has Priority Four – Rare Taxa status according to the article text, but no mention in the infobox. Nyttend (talk) 19:17, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

There is status = NE (not evaluated), but I've never felt that it's a useful distinction as most species are not evaluated and it would just add unnecessary information to the taxobox. The same would be true for species not evaluated under any of the other systems -- the point is to highlight species of conservation concern. Instead of a category that couldn't distinguish between those articles that shouldn't have a conservation status box because they're not evaluated and those that should but don't yet, a simpler solution is to get someone to scrape the data from IUCN for the species they have evaluated and compare it to the articles we have; if our article has a conservation status that agrees with the current IUCN list, it's removed from the list and the remainder are left for humans to check over. As for Eremophila youngii, WP:SOFIXIT. I just don't see the need or utility of a category for this purpose. Rkitko ^(talk) 20:01, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Taxoboxes are often cluttered enough already, and cause layout problems in short articles, so I'm strongly against adding unnecessary information, which "NE" or "data deficient" would be. So I agree with with Rkitko: I don't see the point of such a category. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:10, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

We're already supplying "data deficient" in many articles; click my link for an example. If it's not evaluated, we could replace "Conservation status" with "Conservation status not evaluated", or something to that effect. Your suggestion of scraping their website is good for one-time work, but it won't be enough for articles that get the taxobox added after we use the scrape. Perhaps we could dump such a list on a wikipage, mark each line, have a bot make all the edits once the list's all marked up (it does all the editing work after we humans make the actual decisions; comparable to "Tons of links go to the wrong page" at Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 48), and after all those pages are marked with status or not-evaluated, we add the ability to include the category so that future uses are detected and fixed. Final note, I'd be happy to help with evaluating pages from a website scrape, but as I'm not a regular participant here, I don't know how best to implement the WA list. Nyttend (talk) 20:31, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

If I have time, I'm looking at reviving Beastie Bot and doing a full audit of taxobox categories vs IUCN's. (It's been eons since it ran.) A category for articles without status info would not be particularly helpful for that though. —Pengo 21:08, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Nyttend, for your initiative on this. But I agree with Pengo that using sensible bots is a more functional and effective way to go than creating categories. --Epipelagic (talk) 08:50, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Modules

How might we add a |module= parameter to this template, so that, for example, on Enterobacter aerogenes, the {{Bacterial labs}} template may be embedded? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:30, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure embedding such an infobox is in line with what a Taxobox is for: the content seems more descriptive than taxonomic, more akin to {{Mycomorphbox}} (see e.g. Agaricus bisporus for use). There is a large number of conceivable data we could include in Taxobox for any given taxon (number of chromosomes, genome size, mating system, number of limbs, leaf shape, color, etc), but that we don't for the sake of brevity. --Animalparty-- (talk) 04:40, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Animalparty here. Although {{bacterial labs}} is clearly an informative template, I'm doubtful that the taxobox is the place to put it. Taxoboxes are already cluttered. Andy, is there a good reason why it cannot stand alone in an article? Peter coxhead (talk) 09:41, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Italicization

Curious what's the rationale behind italicization of taxa in the taxobox. Some Wikipedias, like the Spanish and French, italicize all taxa, such as family names (see es:Dicentra and fr:Dicentra), while the English, German, and Portuguese Wikipedias italicize only the genus and species names (see Dicentra, pt:Dicentra and de:Herzblumen). Is there a reason for this, or is it just random formatting choices made by editors early in the history of these Wikipedias? — Eru·tuon 02:24, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

In contemporary English, it is conventional to italicize only the genus, species, and subspecies. Older works and informal uses sometimes italice families or other ranks, but this is no longer recognized as correct. --Animalparty-- (talk) 03:40, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

I Apologize for the inadvertent rollback last night. Completely unintended. --Mike Cline (talk) 12:49, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

I think it's misleading to say that "this is no longer recognized as correct". Different publications in English have different styles. One approach is to italicize all Latin names, at whatever level. The International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants itself adopts this approach. Another is to italicize at genus level and below but not above. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature isn't entirely consistent (at least in the online version) but generally italicizes the full names of species but not names of higher ranks. It seems to me that the majority of English sources now italicize genus and below but not above. I'm most familiar with plant names; the genus and below approach will be found at APweb, IPNI, WCSP, and entries for individual taxa at Tropicos, but not at The Plant List or GRIN Taxonomy for Plants, both of which italicize family names. As a single example of animal names, see Higher Mammal Classification, which uses the genus and below approach.

So it's not a random formatting choice, as a good case can be made that it's more common in English, but equally it can't be said to be "correct" or "required". Peter coxhead (talk) 20:16, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough, I recognize there are variations in style, and admit I am biased towards the animal kingdom and what I've personally read and seen. "Correct" is not necessarily the the right word. But I think it not a stretch to say that in many (most?) cases, in contemporary formal English publications, it is convention to italicize only the genus and below, just as we no longer capitalize the specific name for honorary epithets, even though older publications might write "Foogenus Smithi". Just FYI, the ICZN explicitly recommends (but does not require) only italicizing genus and below: "The scientific names of genus- or species-group taxa should be printed in a type-face (font) different from that used in the text; such names are usually printed in italics, which should not be used for names of higher taxa." (Appendix B), while the ICN states "As in all recent editions, scientific names under the jurisdiction of the Code, irrespective of rank, are consistently printed in italic type. The Code sets no binding standard in this respect, as typography is a matter of editorial style and tradition, not of nomenclature." So for the ICN, all scientific names printed in the text of the code or italicized, but that's their own editorial discretion. I think also it's likely that international codes transcend regional and linguistic variation, and so wisely defer the issue. I think we're in agreement that there is no compelling need to change the existing italicization scheme we have on English Wikipedia, at least in regards to eukaryotes (viral people apparently italicize everything but strains!). Cheers. --Animalparty-- (talk) 22:41, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

FWIW, even though the ICBN recommends that, IIRC Taxa (the IAPT official publication) is the only one that requires it.

Generally this comes out to a simple thing: the taxoboxes should use the same conventions as the rest of the articles on these issues, and by and large en.wiki italicizes taxon names only at the generic or lower level. Circéus (talk) 02:15, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Hmm. I didn't know viruses took italics at all ranks. Looking at some virus articles, all ranks in the taxobox are pretty consistently italicized. However, virus article titles are rarely italicized (whether via taxobox or {{italic title}}), and the viral taxon that is the subject of the article isn't usually italicized in running text (although lists of subordinate taxa to the article subject often take italics).

And bacteria on Wikipedia are pretty consistent in italicizing genus and lower ranks in the taxobox, title, and running text, but higher ranks for bacteria aren't in italics. The ICNB seems to suggest that all ranks should be italicized (see [3]). Plantdrew (talk) 06:10, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

What all this shows, I think, is that there isn't absolute consistency "out there", so that here we are free to make a choice and then be consistent. Personally, I see no reason not to use the "italicize genus and below but not above" rule for all groups of organisms. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:37, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for all the comments on this. Helps me understand what's going on. The reason I asked was that higher taxa are usually botanical Latin just like genus and species names. It would make more sense to me if all botanical Latin was italicized, as all non-English languages in the Latin alphabet are on Wikipedia. Not italicizing higher taxa seems to imply that they are fully assimilated English words and less Latin than the genus and species names, which isn't true. All of it is botanical Latin, and higher taxa aren't any more assimilated to English than genus and species.

So, from a layman's perspective (I probably count as one, despite my practical plant knowledge), not italicizing higher taxa doesn't make sense: what's the difference between higher taxa and the genus and species that means one should be italicized and the other not? The question of what current practice is doesn't answer the question of why it is. Perhaps there's no answer, except "just because". — Eru·tuon 17:09, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

"Just because" is valid enough for me. Conventions by no means need to have rational justification, they just have to be used and understood. Why do Americans write "color" while Britons write "colour"? Why do some countries use commas where others use periods for decimals? Why (¿por que?) does Spanish invert punctuation marks at the beginning of sentences? Purely hypothetically, regarding italicization, perhaps some editors long ago felt that too much italicization disrupted the visual flow of text. Perhaps it goes back even further to issues with physical typesetting (some lazy printer didn't want to change types so much?). Maybe there was so much rampant variation in italicization that arbitrary standards were imposed (it would be neat to read a history of this issue). I think the bottom line should be that our italicization schemes reflect the predominant conventions in English usage, arbitrary though they may be, to avoid the confusion that arises from inconsistency between sources. --Animalparty-- (talk) 17:45, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It's tradition, which I guess amounts to "just because". It doesn't really make a lot of sense. That's probably why the plant code recently added a recommendation to italicize at all ranks (which doesn't seem to be widely followed). And the bacterial and viral codes that recommend italicization at all ranks are also pretty recent (even though in the case of viruses, scientific names may be fully English; e.g. Tobacco mosaic virus). When scientific names are actually assimilated into English, they aren't italicized and the genus isn't usually capitalized (e.g. aloe vera, boa constrictor, hippopotamus, rhododendron). Plantdrew (talk) 17:51, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Conservation status alignment

Why is the Conservation status header left aligned while the others (Scientific classification, Binomial name) centered? See any species page, Etheostoma duryi for example. Was this a recent change? I had thought that it was centered as well, but maybe I'm not remembering correctly. Anyways, it seems odd to me that it wouldn't be centered. Fredlyfish4 (talk) 15:57, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

@Fredlyfish4: Fixed. Thanks for catching that. I hadn't noticed it a few days ago when I used the status = parameter for an extinct species, but then again I'm not the most observant person. Not sure what broke it, as Template:Taxobox/species, which produces the conservation status link, had not been edited since 2013. Anyway, the change may take some time to propagate. If you're anxious to check if it's working on any particular article, just add ?action=purge to the end of any article URL in your browser. Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 19:22, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Taxobox colors and accessibility

Please see this discussion about modifying the contrast ratio of the colors in the taxobox. Thanks! Opabinia regalis (talk) 03:41, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Binomial name

Is it just me, or is "binomial name" as displayed in the taxobox redundant? I'm thinking it should just be "binomial". Plantdrew (talk) 20:37, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Well, the ideal term in the ICN is "binary combination" as per Article 23.1: "The name of a species is a binary combination consisting of the name of the genus followed by a single specific epithet...", but the glossary does have "binary combination (binomial)" as an entry, which would sanction just "binomial" for plants. The ICZN Code does not use "binomial" at all, instead using binomen or binominal name.

So I think that "binomial name" is something of a compromise between the codes, and is thus suitable for taxoboxes used in different kinds of article. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:11, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

clearly wrong/ambiguous taxonomic classification?

Hi there, I am not sure where is the best place to ask this question, but anyway, maybe you can advice me. I found that the classification of the taxon "Cryptosporidium" in the Coccidiasina is probably not correct. I am not an expert on them, but I found several articles claiming that the Cryptosporidium used to be placed in the coccidians, but phylogenies based on, e.g. 18SrRNA contradict this (see Morrison, D. A. (2009). Evolution of the Apicomplexa: where are we now? Trends in Parasitology, 25(8), 375–382. doi:10.1016/j.pt.2009.05.010). Hence, my question: How should those cases be handled?

I mean, it is quite often the case that the classification of a species is ambiguous, but something like this doesn't seem to be reflected in the Taxobox. This can be quite misleading. In the case of Cryptosporidium, for example, medication against coccidians are apparently not working. So, knowing the taxonomic group to which these guys belong is important!

Thanks for your comments. Ilikelifesciences (talk) 12:48, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Ilikelifesciences: The best place to ask is probably at the article Talk:Cryptosporidium or at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Microbiology (or both); those who watch this page are mainly interested in the mechanics of the template. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:16, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Nesting the template:taxobox

Can taxobox be nested within other infoboxes or can other infoboxes be nested in taxobox? Most other boxes have parameters like: embedded, embed, module, child, or other parameter to make the box a parent or child of a nest. Also, what about coordinate parameters? Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk}

Why would you want to nest a taxobox? It's intended to summarize the classification of a taxon; I can't see why that needs any kind of nesting. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:56, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Pitch

Should we add a section on the vocal range of animals e.g. roaring and calling in first octaves. --114.32.8.228 (talk) 09:59, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

No, because the Taxobox is a means of providing a summary of the taxonomy of organisms, with a couple extra options for general aspects such as geologic era and geographic distribution, which can apply to any taxon. Behavior, size, color, and myriad other biological facts belong in the body of the article, but not the Taxobox. In addition, the fact that vocal range is a trait only applicable to a subset of animals cobtradicts the purpose of having a standardized, somewhat uniform infobox template that spans the tree of life. --Animalparty! (talk) 17:26, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

White space

Someone did something that makes white space between the taxobox and the article text. Doesn't look good. FunkMonk (talk) 19:42, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

This happened last week too. There's a thread at WP:Village_pump_(technical). Sasata (talk) 19:58, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Audio

At a recent editathon, the British Library donated one hundred audio files of wildlife sounds (mostly bird songs and calls), and volunteers added them to articles. As can be see at Common raven, some editors chose to place the audio file in the taxobox, using the |image= parameter. It would be better if we added a separate |audio= parameter. Please can somebody add the necessary code to {{Taxobox/core}}? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:51, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

In my view Animalparty gave a good answer to a related question immediately above, which is I think why we shouldn't add |audio= to the taxobox. Also taxoboxes are already over-complicated and frequently too long to fit well in short articles. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

That argument is easily refuted by the presence parameters for images. Why should sighted people be able to see what an animal typically looks like, but blind people not hear what it typically sounds like? Articles on most other topics can have audio in their infobox, and the template would be no more complicated than it is already. Bedsides, as my example shows, the audio is already in the taxobox; we simply need a separate parameter for better data granularity. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:36, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

The issue isn't whether sounds should be made available, but whether they belong in the taxobox, which isn't meant to be a general information box, but a summary of the taxonomic information in the article. How do sounds contribute to this? As for audio already being in the taxobox, the solution is to move it elsewhere in the article, either to a section which deals with behaviour or to External links. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:09, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

isn't meant to be a general information box Why not? Virtually every other topic on Wikipedia has a box which is a summary of the most important "general information" about the subject. And again, if no audio, why images? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:05, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Why not? Because it's a taxobox, not a general infobox. An image can convey taxonomically relevant information; audio in general does not. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:31, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Text wrapping for taxon names

Up to now, the taxobox code (for both manual and automated taxoboxes) prevented the name of the taxon from wrapping around in the rows in the taxobox which are of the form "Rank: Taxon_name".

This meant that a taxobox in an article like Dactylorhiza majalis subsp. traunsteinerioides had a row like this:

Subspecies:

D. m. subsp. traunsteinerioides

making the taxobox wider than normal.

Taxon names in the title box and in the "Binomial name", "Trinomial name", divisions and "Synonyms" boxes have always line wrapped.

There seems no good reason not to allow line wrapping in the taxonomy rows of the taxobox except between an abbreviated genus name and the following specific name/epithet. I've altered Template:Taxonomy to produce this behaviour.

All the taxoboxes I've checked seem ok, but if there are any problems, please explain here and revert my edit. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:08, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Informal/non-monophyletic groups

Perhaps an additional option for an "informal group"/"non-monophyletic group" could be useful, e.g. Opisthobranchia and Heterocera. There are a few of these pages about and it'd be useful to have an option for formatting them. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 22:32, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Add pronunciation

We have added pronunciation to the Template:Drugbox. An example of this is here at Metoprolol. Wondering if anyone would oppose me doing this here? It is an effort to simplify the first sentences of our articles. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:25, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

If you mean the pronunciation of Latin names, I think it needs quite a bit of discussion, involving many Tree of Life WikiProjects. Pronunciation has proved difficult to source reliably. In many cases the pronunciations added to articles rely on a single source and don't reflect the variation found in reality, both within and across different English-speaking countries. (As noted in the discussion here, there are at least four pronunciations of the ending of plant family names ("-aceae") in use, only one of which is at present easy to source.) So I'm not enthusiastic about adding pronunciations to taxoboxes, since if done properly there would usually be several pronunciations, each with a reference, and taxoboxes are complex enough already. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:22, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Bacteria and archaea

Whenever I make a page about a bacterium, whenever I or someone else puts Template:Taxonomy onto my page, it always treats bacteria as a kingdom and not a superkingdom. But Wikispecies treats bacteria (and archaea) as superkingdoms. Can somebody explain this? Here's the link to Wikispecies. [4] Charizardmewtwo (talk) 13:21, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Edit request: parameter name

Could a template editor change | range_map2 = {{{range_map2|}}} to | range_map2 = {{{range_map2|{{{range map2|}}}}}} I would like to be able to use the template name with a space instead of an underscore, as I can with other range map parameters. — Eru·tuon 00:17, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Done — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 02:16, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Capitalisation and IUCN

Mostly the capitalisation in the infobox is a redirect, because its inappropriately capitalised. E.g. "Least Concern" should be "Least concern". Can we tweak the template to stop this odd over-capitalisation from happening across Wikipedia please? The Rambling Man (talk) 19:51, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Invalid color category

To deter taxobox-color format errors, the core templates should link the taxobox-color category in taxobox infoboxes, and show the invalid-color header, as    Taxon    . I am planning to shift the link for invalid taxobox-color category from {{taxobox_colour}} into {{Taxobox/core}} and {{Taxonomy_key}}, to link "Category:Taxoboxes with an invalid color" and thereby fix the error in taxobox column headers (which showed: colspan=2 style="text-align: center; background-color: transparent; text-align:center; border: 1px solid red"). An infobox column style format cannot contain a wikilinked page or category, as of September 2016, because it shows the style text and disrupts the infobox format. -Wikid77 (talk) 21:06, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Automatic link to authority

It is dumb to automatically link this. For instance, the link in the Platyceratidae article only links to Hall (surname) which has a huge number of entries. It could easily be that the authority is not listed at all, although in this case I think it is meant to be the author of this book who has an article at James Hall (paleontologist). SpinningSpark 15:20, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Capitalisation

This has probably been debated before, but "Least Concern" isn't capitalised correctly. I noted it about three weeks ago. Our own article commences "A least concern (LC) species..." so we should fix the infobox to reduce the over-capitalisation. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:52, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

Well, I for one don't agree that in the taxobox this is over-capitalization. What evidence do you have that there's a consensus for this? Peter coxhead (talk) 01:12, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

It looks like, in the list of Least Concern species on the website (you have to click a a few buttons in the ultra-fancy interface to get there), the term is capitalized, so the article may have the wrong capitalization rather than {{taxobox}} and {{conservation status}}. — Eru·tuon 02:09, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

That's my view. It's a specialized term with a precise meaning as defined in the Red List, and should be formatted as they do. Peter coxhead (talk) 02:25, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

Underscore or space in parameter names

@Erutuon: recently replaced underscores with hyphens in the template documentation for parameters composed of multiple words (e.g. "range_map_caption"->"range map caption"). There's a new report that finds instances of invalid parameter names. Many of the invalid parameters are typos (e.g. classid), capitalization variants (Classis), or English rather than Latin terms (class), and won't be displayed in the taxobox until changed to a valid parameter name (classis). Spaces and underscores are functionally equivalent; the parameter displays with either character. However, the new report doesn't treat space and parameters equally; the current report is treating underscored parameters as invalid, with spaces as valid. But underscores are far more frequently used in the articles where Taxobox is deployed ("binomial authority" appears 268 times, "binomial_authority" 221,667 times). And from what I'm seeing, underscored parameters usually presented in the documention of templates, even if spaced parameters are supported.

Any objections to changing the documentation back to presenting underscored parameters as the default (and making any other changes necessary to treat underscores rather than space as valid in the new report)? Spaces are functional, and I'm not suggesting formally deprecating them now, but they are not the parameters that are usually used. Plantdrew (talk) 02:31, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

My replacing underscores with spaces was based on a misunderstanding: I thought that spaces were automatically converted to underscores in template syntax as they are in article names. Since that isn't the case (the parameters with underscores have to be entered separately in the source code), I wouldn't oppose it if you changed it back, Plantdrew (though I really do prefer using spaces). — Eru·tuon 02:34, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

As far as I'm concerned, you can continue to use spaces if you wish. I'm not going to bother to make any special effort to convert spaces to underscores (though I might change them if I come across an article with other invalid and nonfunctional parameter names). Thanks for being understanding. Plantdrew (talk)

Image sizes

Asian golden cat
Test; image_upright=0.5 applied by default to 2nd image & range map
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Carnivora
Family:	Felidae
Genus:	Catopuma
Species:	C. temminckii
Binomial name
Catopuma temminckii (Vigors & Horsfield, 1827)
Distribution of the Asian golden cat

Could this template be modified to give image sizes as upright= values? A similar thing was suggested at {{Infobox Chinese}}. Perhaps a new parameter could be added, so that the existing image size parameters still work. — Eru·tuon 19:37, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

I think it shouldn't be the default; I for one always try to choose taxobox images that are wide relative to their height, and |upright= would then be wrong. The set of templates (including {{Automatic taxobox}}, {{Speciesbox}}, etc.) could be modified to allow |upright=, I guess, if there really is a need for this. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:34, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Well, the problem with the current method of specifying pixel sizes is that it is discouraged by MOS:IMGSIZE. The equivalent value of upright= is recommended instead. I don't quite understand what you mean about |upright= being wrong; could you explain? — Eru·tuon 21:08, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I think I misunderstood. You meant use |upright=1.2 or |upright=0.75 to change the size of the image, rather than pixel sizes, right? I was thinking of straight upright without a value. It would be better to use a more sensible parameter name rather than the historical use of |upright= – |scale= perhaps. Peter coxhead (talk) 00:48, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

As a test, I've added |image upright=, alias |image_upright=, and |image2 upright=, alias |image2_upright=, to {{Taxobox}} (but none of the other taxobox templates yet). The taxobox to the left has |image upright=0.5. I'd prefer to call the parameters something like image scale. Peter coxhead (talk) 01:08, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Oh yes, that's what I meant. It's a pretty misleading name. I also think scale would make a lot more sense, not only in the template but in the MediaWiki image syntax. — Eru·tuon 01:12, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

I guess upright is so widely used that it's a fixture now; thus the explanation at MOS:IMGSIZE is all in terms of this name. I need to fix all the other taxobox templates before adding it to the documentation. Peter coxhead (talk) 01:25, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

@Erutuon: ok, I think I got them all. I've updated Template:Automatic taxobox/doc; please have a look at my changes. If they seem ok, the documentation of some of the other taxobox templates also needs updating. I've been bold and said that |image width= is deprecated; as you rightly pointed out above, MOS:IMGSIZE is quite clear about absolute image sizes, so I think this is defensible, but we'll see what the reaction is. Peter coxhead (talk) 02:00, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Well, I support marking |image width= as deprecated. I think it looks good. However, the range map parameters should also have associated |range map upright= parameters. I should've mentioned that. — Eru·tuon 02:18, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed that. Festina lente! Peter coxhead (talk) 12:54, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Hmm, are you going to add the |range map upright= parameters too? — Eru·tuon 23:25, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

@Erutuon: I've started work on the |range map upright= parameters, but as there are four allowed range maps (which I hadn't at first noticed), it will take a bit longer to edit them in, test the results, and document. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:59, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

@Erutuon: ok, I think the code is all there and it seems to work. I have implemented (wrongly initially) something that hasn't been discussed, namely if |image upright= is specified and any of the other 4 "upright" parameters (2nd image, 4 range maps) isn't, it defaults to the value of |image upright=, since it seems to me that the default in an infobox should be that the width of all the subsequent images is the same as the first one. I assume you agree (I saw your thanks for my first attempt at this), but I'd welcome confirmation before trying to document this change. (The test taxobox to the right now shows this working.)

An alternative is to have another parameter, just called |upright= perhaps, which is the default for all images unless overridden by |image upright= to |range map4 upright=. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:36, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

Request for Taxobox colour

Alerting anybody with Template editor privileges (@Peter coxhead:) to a edit request at Template_talk:Taxobox_colour#Colour_request_for_SAR_supergroup. Plantdrew (talk) 17:32, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Varietas?

Is there any reason why the parameter "variety" is used rather than "varietas", as would be consistent with all the other ranks that use Latin for their parameter names? Plantdrew (talk) 16:06, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

File in TemplateData

Can the image parameter in TemplateData be defined as a File type?

It probably should be, but I don't want to touch it myself before verifying that it isn't going to break something. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:30, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

I've been working with TemplateData recently, but I don't understand it very well. I don't think defining images as File type will break anything. Worst case scenario might be that editors using Visual Editor add an unnecessary "File:" to the parameter value and the monthly error report flags everything that doesn't have "File:" as an error. I recently added TemplateData to {{Automatic taxobox}}, with image defined as File type. Results with Visual Editor could be tested now, but it might be a couple days before the new error report comes out. I'm going to wait for the error report and will see how things look at that point. Plantdrew (talk) 16:03, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

I tested with Visual Editor, there doesn't seem to be any problem there. Plantdrew (talk) 17:25, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Mmmm, so I decided to be bold and just did it.

If I missed anything and something did get broken, please revert me and accept my apologies, but as far as I can see, pages are rendered correctly, and editing them in VisualEditor works as well.

However, I don't see any change either ;)

At least it is probably more correct semantically. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:37, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Infraregnum

Is infraregnum equivalent to superdivisio? I guess no, but infraregnum is then missing. --Obsuser (talk) 21:29, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

@Obsuser: Infraregnum is not equivalent to superdivisio. But there isn't much need for it. Is there somewhere you are wanting to use that rank? Keep in mind that taxoboxes generally shouldn't display minor ranks with prefixes (sub, super, infra, etc.) unless those ranks are immediately above the rank that corresponds to the subject of an article and the next highest major rank. In other words, infraregnum should only be displayed on articles for phyla/divisions or other minor rank articles above phylum but at/below infraregnum. And while there certainly may be notable groups between phylum and kingdom that are worth displaying in the taxobox (of phylum articles), they usually don't have firmly established ranks. Automatic taxoboxes allow these groups to be displayed as unranked clades and many of the articles on phyla/divisions already use automatic taxoboxes. Plantdrew (talk) 22:03, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Sound recording

We need a field for a sound recording in the taxobox, right below the picture, or pictures. At the moment I'm using image2 for this, but it is not ideal. JMK (talk) 12:47, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

I see an audio field has been discussed before, and it was deemed general information that does not belong in an infobox. I feel a representative audio file does exactly what the representative photo does for a species. I have no doubt that the users of wikipedia would want it, and different users have inserted it anyway. Its swimming against the stream not to allow it. JMK (talk) 12:52, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

If fungi made sounds, Template:Mycomorphbox would probably be the best place for a sound file. Would there any point to making a mycomorphbox-like template for birds (key characters for identification, sound files, etc.)?

Update to taxobox colour setting

In the previous version, taxobox colours were set by taxa at different ranks/levels in a very ad hoc fashion – basically through "fixes" being successively added to the system (which was originally designed so that only kingdom/regnum set the taxobox colour, but this didn't work as modern clade-based classifications came to predominate higher levels of taxonomic hierarchies).

The current version sets the taxobox colour by looking up the hierarchy, i.e. in the reverse order that the levels/parameters would be shown in a taxobox, if all present:

• phylum
• unranked_phylum
• divisio
• unranked_divisio
• superphylum
• unranked_superphylum
• superdivisio
• unranked_superdivisio
• subregnum
• unranked_subregnum
• regnum
• unranked_regnum
• superregnum
• unranked_superregnum
• domain
• unranked_domain
• virus_group

The first of these parameters whose value (a taxon) has an entry in {{Taxobox colour}} sets the colour of the taxobox. All levels are checked, unlike the unsystematic subset previously, and the lowest over-rides any higher up, again unlike the previous system.

Coupled with changes to the automated taxobox system (see Template talk:Automatic taxobox/Archive 13#Major rewrite of the colour setting system), manual and automatic taxoboxes should now show taxobox colour in a more consistent fashion.

Incertae sedis taxa

Incertae sedis taxa present a slight problem once multiple levels can be used to set the taxobox colour. The incertae sedis colour should only be used if the only colour setting taxa found are incertae sedis ones – if there's a colour setting taxon above an incertae sedis taxon, its colour should be used instead. Although this could be coded, it would distract from the clarity of the rest of the coding, so now the incertae sedis colour must always be added to a manual taxobox via |color_as=incertae sedis. This is not too much of a problem, as there aren't many articles with this colour at present.

Peter coxhead (talk) 10:37, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Varietas

Plantdrew asked in November 2016 why "varietas" wasn't allowed as a parameter. This has been on my "to-do" list since then; as no-one else has fixed it, I have just done so. Both |varietas= and |varietas_authority= are now accepted (as well as |variety= and |variety_authority=). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:58, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Species

Species are not (no longer?) rendered in italics. Z440Xeon (talk) 18:27, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

@Z440Xeon: Yes, the taxobox doesn't automatically italicize. For a species article, the genus, species and binomial parameters need to be manually italicized. The binomial parameter is automatically bolded, but not species. Formatting these consistently with the majority of species articles on Wikipedia require two ' on either side of the genus and binomial and five ' around the species. Plantdrew (talk) 19:52, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

This seems to have been a design decision from the beginning (i.e. around 2010). This template, {{Taxobox}}, calls {{Taxobox/core}}, which then uses {{Taxonomy}} to output a line for each taxon in the taxobox. If {{Taxonomy}} is called as you would expect for a species, namely with |rank=species, {{Taxonomy}} does italicize the wikilinked taxon passed to it. However, for a species it's actually called with |rank=Species/noitalics – the "noitalics" could be anything, it just stops {{Taxonomy}} treating it as a species and italicizing it.

Since manual taxoboxes with species in them now all have '' around the species name, it's too late to change. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:53, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

@Z440Xeon and Plantdrew: (plus @Smith609 and Bob the Wikipedian: as you wrote most of the code originally) it's been on my "to do" list for some time to look at this again. The code is completely illogical. Each line in a manual taxobox is output by {{Taxonomy}}, which looks at the rank for that line and adds italics if it's one of these: genus, ichnogenus, oogenus, subgenus, ichnosubgenus, oosubgenus, sectio, subsectio, series, subseries, species, ichnospecies, oospecies, subspecies, ichnosubspecies, or oosubspecies. But {{Taxobox/core}} deliberately adds the string "/noitalics" to "genus", "subgenus", "sectio", "subsectio", "series", "subseries", "species" and "subspecies" before passing it to {{Taxonomy}} so that the rank never actually matches one of those that is italicized. The "oo" and "ichno" ranks aren't handled by manual taxoboxes, so they are never passed to {{Taxonomy}}. Since {{Taxonomy}} is only called from {{Taxobox/core}}, the effect is to render the check for an italicized rank pointless, since it's never passed one. See below; now changed.

One possibility would be to change the code to pass the actual rank to {{Taxonomy}} which would then add italics to taxon names at appropriate ranks if and only if ' were not already present in the name. This would mean that existing manual taxoboxes where genus names, species names, etc. are italicized would still work, but that italics would be added if no manual formatting were already present. Would this be worth doing? Peter coxhead (talk) 10:21, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead:, apologies for my recent lack of response. It's too bad italics weren't automatically applied from the beginning. However, I'm not sure it would be worth doing them automatically now. It's fairly rare to see taxoboxes that haven't been manually italicized. I think it will be confusing if ranks are italicized whether or not any 's are present, and may lead to people inadvertently finding novel ways to break things if there isn't a bot that removes all the manual italics. For instance, I understand that having the taxobox sense whether to italicize the title is a newer feature (and which incidentally relies on manual italics), but people regularly screw it up because there's the bad example of thousands of articles with a useless repetition of the scientific name in the taxobox's name parameter, which overrides the title italics sensing. I don't know, maybe my worries are overblown. Plantdrew (talk) 02:12, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: don't apologize; I know how much good work you do on taxoboxes – I've plenty of other things to do! Sorry for the length of the reply below.

The more taxoboxes I look at, the more I see creative and innovative ways to screw them up! I think the deep issue is the philosophy with which the automated taxobox system started, namely minimizing editor input at all costs, so that parameters can be omitted and the system will attempt to determine things like the taxon name and the taxobox name from the page title, as well as whether each of the three should be italicized or not. This seems a good idea, but in practice it leads to editors assuming that the code selects the right default values, and then when it doesn't, either not checking or not knowing how to correct the wrong default.

I made some fixes to the code that sets the taxobox name in the absence of |name= recently, which I think is what you are alluding to above, but only because I discovered the previous logic was muddled: in some cases the taxobox name defaulted to the taxon and in others to the page name, when these were different. I doubt that my code covers all cases properly either, given the variety of page title possible (scientific name of the target taxon, with or without disambiguation; English name, with or without disambiguation; scientific name of a higher monotypic rank, etc.) and the variety of values of |taxon=, which can include disambiguation or a qualifier (like "/displayed" or "/?"). Again at some time we need to have a wider discussion, if enough interested editors can be found, on whether the default taxobox name should be the page title or the taxon when these are different. At present the intention of the code is to select the (undisambiguated) page title.

I have some sandbox code that will italicize in manual taxoboxes in the absence of existing quote marks, but I too have reservations on whether it is worth deploying. On the other hand, I have implemented, successfully as far as I can tell, code that does something similar for italics in taxonomy templates. This means that for the first time, the botanical section in a autotaxobox like that at Levenhookia sect. Coleostylis is displayed in accordance with the ICN, because italics in Template:Taxonomy/Levenhookia sect. Coleostylis don't get over-ridden, and hence messed up, by autotaxobox system's normal automatic italicization of ranks at genus level and below. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:50, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

I have now tidied up the illogical code explained above. It should not change the behaviour of any taxoboxes, but please revert and/or leave a message here if you notice any problems. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:01, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Add trend parameter

IUCN and NatureServe often provide the information of population trends and since it's always good to document everything, I guess we can accommodate one additional parameter. --QEDK (愛) 14:47, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't think this data is important enough to be in the Taxobox. We simply can't and shouldn't shoehorn every fact into the infobox. Also, populations are different from species: a widespread least concern species could be declining in parts of its range, and different populations of the same species may be experiencing opposite trends. The body of the article is the place to discuss the conservation status mentioned in the Taxobox. --Animalparty! (talk) 22:31, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

IUCN pages do contain that information though, in a generalized format and I don't see a real harm in including that information. That's all. --QEDK (愛) 04:56, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

The issue is whether it's worth including in the taxobox. They are already rather cluttered in some articles. I agree with Animalparty that this is best discussed in the text. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:53, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm against including trend in the taxobox as well. There are about 800 of articles that have a (nonfunctional) |trend=. Including trend seems to be a practice that originated with PolBot and has been copied by a small number of editors in a small number of articles. I should note that I've been removing trend parameters as part of my taxobox cleanup efforts over the last 6 months; I'd estimate there were around 1200 instances of |trend= when I began with a variety of non-standardized values (e.g., decreasing, down, downward), and I've mostly focused on removing the less used variants (only "down" present now). Plantdrew (talk) 18:10, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

I have set up the directly-used templates to send the "trend" parameter to {{taxobox/core}}; if/when we decide to use it, just ecdit that one template. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 05:26, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Renaming proposal for the automatic taxonomy box templates

Fel free to participate in Template talk:Automatic taxobox/Archive 14#Requested move 4 May 2017. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 17:02, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Why are we suppressing the bullets in taxon lists?

Currently when species or other taxons are listed in the subdivision section using either the {{Taxon list}} or {{Species list}} templates, the HTML includes custom styles to suppress the list bullets (although the lists are still indented as if they had bullets). This makes it hard to see where one species listing ends and another begins when they wrap over multiple lines. We should either not suppress the bullets or we should remove the indenting so the lines are less likely to wrap. Any opinions on which is the better option? (The talk pages for both of those templates redirect here.) Kaldari (talk) 07:07, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

I too prefer the bullets, for the reason you give, but like the convenience of the "taxon list" family of templates. They all appear to use {{Species list/line}} to produce the "no bullets" effect. The edit that removed bullets was (as far as I can see) made in December 2011. Changing such a long-established style seems to me to require wide input via a well advertised RfC. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:02, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

A well advertised RfC??? Is there some MoS issue here or a broader family of templates that produce lists of subordinate topics without bullets? I don't understand why this would need more input than what we'd usually see here. Peter, I'm sure you're very tired of being on the hook for actually making edits to protected templates based on discussions involving 3-5 editors on this talk page (with you and I being two of them), but I'm not sure why an RfC would be needed for this. Plantdrew (talk) 03:48, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Most subordinate taxa lists in taxoboxes don't use these templates, but the non-templated lists usually have bullets; likely because typing * is an easier way to get new lines in a list than typing out an HTML line break. I'm leaning towards including bullets. @Kaldari:, do you have some examples of wrapping over multiple lines? I know I've seen this behavior before, but I'm not quite sure how it plays out in whether to bullet or indent. Plantdrew (talk) 03:48, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: yes, I'm reluctant to agree with changing a style in existence for more than five years unless I can see there's more support than the "usual suspects", although when I've tried to get more input on changes to taxoboxes, there hasn't been much response, as you know.

One possibility is to introduce |bullets= with the initial default no. Assuming this works, we could then try to get a wider discussion on changing the default to yes. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:42, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

It looks like Smith609 originally changed the style. Perhaps they could offer an opinion. Kaldari (talk) 23:26, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

• @Kaldari and Plantdrew: an alternative way of laying out such lists is shown by the synonym list in the taxobox at Blossfeldia. By outdenting the first line of each synonym and then indenting any wrapped text it makes the layout clearer and also uses the space in the taxobox more effectively, reducing the need for wrapping. I wonder about making this the default style in all the templates like {{Species list}}. It's a less dramatic change than introducing bullets, I think. Views? Peter coxhead (talk) 15:06, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
  • @Peter coxhead: That looks like a big improvement to me. I would support making that the default styling for all the species list templates. Kaldari (talk) 17:03, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

• • @Peter coxhead: Yes, Blossfeldia looks good. So in essence, we are talking about adopting some formatting code from {{Plainlist}} into {{Species list}} (and deprecating Plainlist for taxa lists once that formatting is adopted)? Plantdrew (talk) 04:01, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

• • @Plantdrew: yes, that's my idea. Smith609 was (?is) a master of tricky template coding, so modifying the "taxon list" family of templates isn't trivial. Also, when written in the template language, templates can only cope with a fixed number of parameters. So ideally I would start again and write the underlying code in Lua, which is then driven by the top level templates. I'll think about creating some draft versions first. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:31, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I went ahead and implemented the changes suggested by Peter (without migrating to Lua). Hope that's OK. It seems to be working well. Kaldari (talk) 07:00, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: excellent. It will be interesting to see if anyone notices! (The Lua issue actually only relates to the 'outer' templates, like {{Specieslist}}, that have a large fixed number of parameters. In principle it would be better to code these in Lua which allows an arbitrary number of parameters to be handled. But, hey, it's been working the way it is for a long time!) Peter coxhead (talk) 07:47, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Something seems to have been broken; the indentation in the Template:Nested taxon list in Tubiluchidae is not appearing as it should. Neither are the genera in the taxobox indented; my view is that the left-padding that existed previously (unless I imagined it) gave a more pleasant layout. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 09:25, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Conservation status

Is there a good reason that the IUCN conservation status is over-capitalised in the Taxobox? E.g. I see "Least Concern" when the LC parameter is used, yet IUCN and Wikipedia itself does not capitalise "Concern", i.e. "species of "least concern"..." Shouldn't the taxobox render e.g. LC as "Least concern"? The Rambling Man (talk) 08:11, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

That's bothered me for a while too.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  15:50, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

I suspect it's a trivial change, one that I could even implement myself, but I was hoping for some input from those who regularly maintain the template to ascertain if there's a good reason for the over-capitalisation before making the change. The Rambling Man (talk) 18:44, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Personally I prefer the capitals, since "Least Concern" does not mean just "least concern" – it's a status rating. However, I agree that changing to sentence case in place of title case is in line with the English Wikipedia's general avoidance of capitals at all costs. To change it, you need to edit Template:Taxobox/species. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:38, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

But it's wikilinked to IUCN's status levels, so there's no ambiguity, it's not going to be misconstrued. What is a problem is the inconsistency in the taxobox and the text in the articles (the thousands and thousands of them) which use the terminology correctly. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:42, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

IUCN capitalizes the status ratings in running text, see e.g. the justification section here, where it says "the species is evaluated as Least Concern". That level of capitalization is at odds with general Wikipedia practice, but at least it is consistent with the source. Plantdrew (talk) 20:46, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

If you write "this species does not reach the thresholds for vulnerable" or "the species is evaluated as least concern" in line with the link Plantdrew gave above, it's both unclear and ungrammatical ("vulnerable" is an adjective where a noun is expected; it should be "of least concern" to be correct without the capitals). It does not mean, for example, that the species isn't vulnerable to various threats, rather that it doesn't reach the thresholds to be classified as having the IUCN status Vulnerable. It's a poor argument to say that because articles have de-capitalized in running text contrary to the source and potentially causing a lack of clarity, therefore the taxobox must too. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:21, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

No, it's not a "poor argument", it won't cause a lack of clarity because it's wikilinked (but, as in the case with every single Taxobox on Wikipedia, it's a redirect, another piece of poor template coding). It's a shame that there seems to be such inconsistency within Wikipedia. Maybe we need to change all the "least concern" to "Least Concern" then, because one way or another the previous arguments should apply. The Rambling Man (talk) 08:53, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Well, I would, as I think is clear, be happy with capitalizing in running text.

Why is it poor template coding to link to a redirect? See WP:NOTBROKEN. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:58, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Holotype parameter?

Hey, just throwing out a possibly crazy idea, but would it be useful for the box to have holotype as a parameter? Like for Luzon broad-toothed rat (Abditomys latidens (Sanborn, 1952)), one could write its holotype is at the Field Museum of Natural History, specimen FMNH 62347. Would this be useful? Umimmak (talk) 03:37, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

That's data better left to Wikispecies, in my opinion. But taxobox does already support |type_species= and |type_genus=. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to support types that are names based on specimens (for ranks above species), but not support types that are actually specimens (for species). However, I'm more inclined to resolve this inconsistency by removing support for higher rank types than by adding support for species types. Plantdrew (talk) 05:34, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

I think we have to keep returning to the purpose of any infobox in a Wikipedia article: "to summarize (and not supplant) key facts that appear in the article (an article should remain complete with its summary infobox ignored). The less information it contains, the more effectively it serves that purpose, allowing readers to identify key facts at a glance." A secondary purpose for taxa is navigation: to allow readers to easily move up the taxonomic hierarchy. I too am doubtful as the value of putting the type species or type genus in a taxobox, and I see no added value in adding the type (which for plants in particular is a complex issue in itself – Type (biology) doesn't cover the ICN very well). Peter coxhead (talk) 06:30, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

I agree with the previous dissenting opinions, and want to remind editors that Wikipedia is by and large for the general public, not for taxonomists. Arcane facts of interest only to specialists do not warrant highlighting in a prominent infobox. Leave it to Wikispecies. Do we need a "taxonomy-cruft" essay? --Animalparty! (talk) 18:50, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

I think it would be useful, though it might be difficult to get a wider consensus. Trying to display more and more minor ranks and clades is another issue I think needs discouraging. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:36, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Why are we wrapping the infobox inside a div?

It seems this template and Template:Automatic taxobox wrap the infobox element inside a div. This is inconsistent with how other infoboxes behave and makes it harder to locate infoboxes in a page with user scripts and in MediaWiki's code. Is this intentional or can these be removed? Jdlrobson (talk) 21:16, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

It looks like the div tag was added in 2010 by Smith609.[5] Edit summary was "Enclose in <div> tags to avoid unnecessary whitespace". Should be safe to remove. The whitespace around Infoboxes is normally controlled by the .infobox CSS class on the table. Kaldari (talk) 21:45, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson: I went ahead and removed the div tags. Kaldari (talk) 21:26, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: There's {{Speciesbox}}, {{Subspeciesbox}}, {{Infraspeciesbox}}, {{Ichnobox}} and {{Oobox}} that are also part of the taxobox system, and may need to have a div remhttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk:Taxobox&action=edit&section=4oved as well (Speciesbox is the only one of these that is used on more than a couple hundred pages). Plantdrew (talk) 21:47, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

I've undone these changes for now. My tests suggest they cause extra blank lines to appear above a taxobox under some circumstances. For example

{{italic title}}
{{taxobox
...
}}

has a blank line above it in the cases I looked at with the change in place. Please test the changes in a sandbox, checking for cases with templates added above a taxobox. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:52, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Sorry I jumped the gun. I'll try it out in the sandbox and report back. Kaldari (talk) 23:12, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: I can't see why the sensible change you made would cause the problem I noted; all I know is that on a couple of pages the extra blank line disappeared after my reversion. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:41, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: It looks like this may be uncovering a bug in the MediaWiki Parser: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164121. Kaldari (talk) 22:05, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: interesting, and puzzling. If you look at the generated HTML for your two test pages, the immediate cause is clear: User:Kaldari/sandbox2 produces HTML with <p><br /></p> just before the infobox table tag. If you remove the line break in the wikitext to give {{italictitle}}{{User:Kaldari/Taxobox|name = ''Aculepeira carbonarioides''}} the generated <p><br /></p>in the HTML goes away.

On reflection, plus some more tests, the issue for me is why User:Kaldari/sandbox3 doesn't produce a blank line rather than why User:Kaldari/sandbox2 does. For example, if you put two occurrences of {{italictitle}} on separate lines in User:Kaldari/sandbox3, then the extra blank line appears. Weird!

On the basis of Smith609's 2010 edit summary ("Enclose in <div> tags to avoid unnecessary whitespace"), it seems likely that this behaviour goes back a long way. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:16, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, see also this discussion (doesn't explain why the code behaves the way it does, but does explain why div was added). Plantdrew (talk) 15:44, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: I think there may be other places where this bug shows up. For example, {{Clade}} now works by invoking a Lua module which generates wikitext for a table, so it's a two-step process. An extra blank line appears above the generated cladogram, and the resulting HTML shows the same odd <p><br /></p>. {{Cladex}} still works by directly generating wikitext, so it's a one-step process. No extra blank line appears above the generated cladogram. I hope you get some response to your bug report. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:35, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Update: wrapping {{Clade}}'s generated table in a div (as at {{Clade/sandbox}}) has precisely the same effect, namely it stops the extra blank line above being created, since <p><br /></p> is not generated. This does seem to be some strange bug: when a transcluded template directly produces the wikitext for a table, all is ok. But if it transcludes another template to produce the wikitext for a table, an empty paragraph is produced above the table, unless it's wrapped in a div. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:05, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: It looks like this has been an issue since at least 2008, so I'm not going to hold my breathe on a fix. See T18700. All the other infoboxes seem to work around this bug by using actual table HTML tags rather than Wikitext table markup. Perhaps we should do the same for the Taxobox templates. Kaldari (talk) 17:21, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: rewriting to use HTML would be a huge task, since many of the rows in the generated table are produced by subtemplates of {{Taxobox/core}} and use wikitext, including the code that generates automated taxoboxes, both in the template language and in Module:Autotaxobox. So I think that sticking with div's is the best solution unless and until someone has time to tackle this task. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:57, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: I think I have a work-around solution in the sandbox. Let me know if that works for you. Kaldari (talk) 18:26, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: yes, the work-around works in all the tests I've tried. It should presumably also be applied to all the automated taxobox templates that use {{taxobox/core}}. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:08, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson: It looks like we can't remove the div tags due to a 9 year old parser bug. We may be able to re-write the templates to work around the bug, however. Kaldari (talk) 17:23, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: Can we document the template using a HTML comment to point to this bug? This would have been very helpful to know from the start. Jdlrobson (talk) 22:31, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson: That's the plan. Kaldari (talk) 22:54, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

@Kaldari: This problem seems to be making it difficult for us to identify problematic articles (it accounts for over 70% of all the problematic pages we log). All pages that use it on mobile are being sub-optimally rendered. Is there no other way we could fix this? Maybe adding 'infobox-container' class to the container would help us handle it better? Jdlrobson (talk) 21:30, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

Alternative work-around applied to automated taxoboxes

I've applied the "nowiki" work-around in place of the "div" work-around to all 7 automated taxoboxes. See Wikipedia talk:Automated taxobox system#Fix for extra blank line before a taxobox. If any problems are noticed, please comment there. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:22, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson and Peter coxhead: Since there were no complaints about the change to the automated taxoboxes, I made the change to the main taxobox templates as well. If there are any problems, feel free to revert. Kaldari (talk) 22:27, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

virus taxobox

Hello. The virus taxobox uses "virus_group =". That apparently follows the Baltimore classification scheme, yet his scheme labels them CLASSES, not groups. I recognize that I'm a newbie, but can somebody please change the template to "Baltimore_class =" rather than "virus_group ="? It's a no-brainer, and I'm astonished that it hasn't been changed before now. Thanks, Viroguy (talk) 03:40, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, but it's far from a "no-brainer". Many if not most sources that use this approach call them "Groups" – see also Baltimore classification and the sources therein. "Class" is a bad word to use because it has a precise rank-based meaning in other nomenclature codes. The virus nomenclature code doesn't recognize ranks above Order. Such a major change would require a wide consensus. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:51, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead:I beg to differ, but I have another possible solution. Reading further into the template description, I may have a different suggestion to remove this confusion. In the "Complete blank template" section, immediately below "virus_group" there is "unranked_superdomain". Immediately below that is "unranked_superdomain_authority" and then there are many dozens of such pairs of "whatever" and "whatever_authority". Why is there no "virus_group_authority"? Can that be added? If that were added, could Baltimore classification be the value for "virus_group_authority"? Thanks, Viroguy (talk) 14:31, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

@Viroguy: well, this parameter could certainly be added. However, see Template:Taxobox#Authorities – the authority would only be expected when the virus group is the target of the taxobox, i.e. in articles about the groups.

One way of connecting the term "group" to the Baltimore classification, which seems a very good idea to me, would be to wikilink the "Group" label in every virus taxobox to Baltimore classification. What do you think?

Unfortunately it seems that WP:WikiProject Viruses is mainly inactive at present, but I'll flag up this discussion on its talk page. I should stress that I have no particular interest in viruses; I'm replying here because of the work I do to maintain the code that generates taxoboxes. Peter coxhead (talk) 05:24, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Making the word "group" into a wikilink to the Baltimore clasification page would be a great solution, IMHO. Can that be done automatically by changing the template, which I am clearly not experiencd enough to do, or can I do it somehow manually at each article I'm interested in? i'm going to try to do it on an article I'm working on. Thanks, Viroguy (talk) 18:56, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm sorry for making newbie mistakes. I've been editing Marseilleviridae. I've seen in the taxobox a link to dsDNA. Since I know what double-stranded DNA is, i never bothered to follow the link. When I tried to look at the Marseilleviridae page markup to find the taxobox code, I discovered that the dsDNA link is added magically by the template. So, I decided to go back to the Marseilleviridae page and follow the dsDNA link, and found that it dosn't link to a discussion of double stranded DNA but rather the appropriate section of DNA virus. So, now, the suggestion I have is to change the template so that instead of an entry of "i" in "virus_group =" producing "Group I (dsDNA)" in the box, with a link from dsDNA to the DNA virus page, the entire "Group I (dsDNA)" text should be a link to the appropriate section of the DNA virus page. If this was confusing to a newbie (although admitedly ageing) former virologist, I have to believe it is confusing to general readers. Thanks, Viroguy (talk) 19:19, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

@Viroguy: well, virus taxonomy certainly confuses me (but admittedly I'm ageing too). I do think it makes sense to wikilink the whole of the value of the "Group:" line in a virus taxobox. I'm also unconvinced of the need to put the parenthesized text in a smaller font. At present, the values that appear in response to setting |virus_group= to i through vii are:

• Group I (dsDNA)
• Group II (ssDNA)
• Group III (dsRNA)
• Group IV ((+)ssRNA)
• Group V ((−)ssRNA)
• Group VI (ssRNA-RT)
• Group VII (dsDNA-RT)

So how about the possible values being:

• Group I (dsDNA)
• Group II (ssDNA)
• Group III (dsRNA)
• Group IV ((+)ssRNA)
• Group V ((−)ssRNA)
• Group VI (ssRNA-RT)
• Group VII (dsDNA-RT)

Do we really need the extra parentheses around + and − for Groups IV and V? I won't make any changes until there's been time for comment by others. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:23, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

I'll start anew at the left side. If I was going to remove parenthess it would be ALL of them EXCEPT those around the (+) and (-). However, in a small sample size, 2/3 of the medline references with ssRNA in the title and either + or - before that lacked parentheses. (2/3 really is misleading. It was literally 2 of the 3 didn't have parentheses!) Since both Negative-sense single-stranded RNA virus and Positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus use parentheses, I think we should use (+) and (-), but eliminate all other parentheses. And, i hope to never again nead to spel parentheses. I also agree with not having the smaller font size. Thanks, Viroguy (talk) 20:49, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

After my beauty nap (which doesn't work, as my wife would attest) I wonder if replacing the () with i.e. would work? That is, Group III i.e. dsRNA, Group IV i.e. (+)ssRNA etc. Viroguy (talk) 00:09, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 20 July 2017

Should we add a parameter “infraregnum”? 66.82.144.144 (talk) 15:27, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Not unless there's a need for it. Are there any groups of organisms that should display an infrakingdom? Plantdrew (talk) 16:32, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Infraregnum is accepted as a rank in taxonomy templates (see the list of ranks at Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system/taxonomy templates#rank), so could be shown in an automated taxobox. However, there don't seem to be any taxonomy templates that actually use this rank. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:23, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

U.S. government has H. sapiens in infrakingdom Deuterostomia.¹ Wikipedia, however, has Deuterostomia as a superphylum. That being said, there are a number of ranks between subkingdom Eumetazoa and superphylum Deuterostomia; for example, Bilateria and Nephrozoa, all of which might be considered “infrakingdoms.”

66.82.144.144 (talk) 11:16, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

¹Report Page, retrieved 07/25/2017 from the Integrated Taxonomic Information System

Notice of ongoing discussion

Contributors to this template may wish to cast an eye over the ongoing discussion at WikiProject Tree of Life. nagualdesign 00:30, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

List articles

Does a taxobox belong in list articles (like List of parrots or List of cetacean species)?   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  04:54, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

No. A taxobox summarizes information about a taxon, and so only belongs in an article concerned with a currently accepted taxon. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:11, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Nested list style

An edit to Template:Species_list/core that changed the style of taxon lists broke Template:Nested taxon list, so I undid it. Please note that this does not reflect any underlying opinion about style – please feel free to enact this change in a way that does not break other templates. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 08:33, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Collapsable taxobox?

Is it possible to collapse by default the taxobox in a species infobox? We have a lot of stuff (templates, images, an infobox) at the top of the Neanderthal article and the taxobox is taking up an unreasonable amount of it with its ten taxonomic levels. The result is that, at certain display resolutions, all images in the article are shifted. Nicolas Perrault (talk) 21:21, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

I would suggest removing one of the images; there's no need for two images in this taxobox. Peter coxhead (talk) 02:01, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Images for extinct species

I'm working on Sea mink and I'm wondering whether it'd be better for the taxobox to use the drawing of the jaw fragment (as it does right now) or the animal-restoration drawing   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  20:07, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Not sure that this is a general question for this page; probably should be at Talk:Sea mink. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:48, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

I'd say in general, a restoration drawing is preferable to a photo of a fossil or bone(s). But that's not an absolute; a high quality image of a fossil holotype might be better than a highly speculative restoration. Plantdrew (talk) 21:11, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

I lean the other way. I prefer images or illustrations of the known fossil elements in the taxobox, and leave restorations for the body of the text where their hypothetical nature can be discussed.--Kevmin § 11:18, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

I think there should be no firm rule one way or the other, but rather, the best available image should be used on a case by case basis. Wikipedia is not a technical journal, and we need not be be slaves to bones and holotypes. A jumble of bones, albeit more accurate than a restoration, need not automatically have priority to an aesthetically superior, scientifically sound restoration. --Animalparty! (talk) 01:02, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

And in the particular case of Sea mink, 99.9999 % of people reading the article won't care about the dental morphology, and the full-body illustration is a much better image for a popular reference. But I guess some people can't see the mink for the teeth :) --Animalparty! (talk)

@Animalparty: I have not problem with accurate vetted restorations, however that is NOT what the majority of restorations uploaded to commons and wiki are, they are inaccurate restorations that have never been vetted. We are an encyclopedia, and so we shouldn't present wrong impressions simply because "they are pretty".--Kevmin § 15:07, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

• I think this should be determined on a case by case basis; I have personally advocated for showing good images of skeletons/taxidermy skins in the taxobox over speculative life restorations as a general rule, but sometimes, such images don't really exist. For example, at Massospondylus, there are not really any good photos of full skeletons available, so I personally wouldn't replace the current taxobox restoration. Likewise, at broad-billed parrot, there are no good modern restorations of the bird, or full skeletons to show, but the taxobox image is a pretty high quality drawing by someone who actually saw the bird, so it seems appropriate. At Steller's sea cow, the contemporary drawing seems a bit too crude to be taxobox material, though, so the good photo of a skeleton is probably more appropriate. As for this mink, I personally don't think the jaw drawing is informative enough to place in the infobox, but the restoration is probably very accurate, since it wouldn't have differed externally from its extant relative. FunkMonk (talk) 23:20, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Special:LintErrors/stripped-tag

It appears this template is responsible for a ton of errors in the above linter error category. Do any peanuts know where to go to find the random stripped span? It doesn't look like it's directly in Taxobox or Taxobox/core, so it's in another sub-template. --Izno (talk) 18:10, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm not absolutely sure what "stripped tag" means. If it means an opening tag without a closing tag or vice versa, I seem to remember that there are templates in the taxobox system that deliberately and necessarily split such tags between templates. Can you point more specifically to a page which raises the error? Peter coxhead (talk) 21:53, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: This should be a few, though at best it will help you isolate to certain templates, as Tidy current cleans up the stripped tags (and so you won't see a difference in the HTML or in the rendering). Here's the documentation--though written ambiguously, I believe it refers exclusively to missing beginning tags, as missing end tags is a separate error. (This is confirmed by my anecdotal experience working through these errors.) --Izno (talk) 15:52, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Odd, because the cases in the list you linked to all seem to be bacteria. Um... I'll take a look. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:54, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

There are more if you page through around 5 more pages. --Izno (talk) 17:56, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I paged through, but they all seem to be about similar taxa, but studying the template code (which is actually quite simple for these manual taxoboxes), I can't see why these pages should throw errors and others not. Sigh... Peter coxhead (talk) 19:03, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

The only templates with spans in them are Template:Anglicise rank, Template:Taxobox/core, and Template:Taxonomy, and all of these appear well-formed to me. I would be shocked if one of our modules has is emitting the bad span, but that's where I guess I'll go look next. --Izno (talk) 22:47, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

And all of the modules look fine. Color me stumped. --Izno (talk) 22:58, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

@Izno: another thing they all appear to have in common is that they were created by Daniel-Brown, which suggests that he copied and pasted something that causes the error into every page. A lot of them also appear in Category:CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list. Hidden control characters came to mind (they can sometimes mess up HTML/XML parsing) but I can't find any. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:39, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

I've filed phab:T175452 to see if the dev can help pick out what's wrong. That does look like the common thread, and hidden characters were what I was starting to consider, but that you can't find any means that's less likely. --Izno (talk) 14:23, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Please see phab:T175452#3593807. :) SSastry (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

The new pages (like Lentzea guizhouensis) he's creating don't have the issue, but ComparePages doesn't show anything obviously different. --Izno (talk) 14:27, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Add pronunciation

Would someone be so kind as to do this? A number of use are moving pronunciation to the infoboxes to simplify the first sentence. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:57, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

@Doc James: I understand the desire to simplify the first sentence. However, among Wikipedia's 350,000+ articles on biological taxa, very few include pronunciation. The consensus (at least among plant editors) is generally against adding pronunciation (and certainly never adding it without a source).

The problem is, there isn't a single school of thought regarding the pronunciation of scientific names. Some advocate following classical Latin, but in practice, there are names that are never pronounced as an ancient Roman would say them. In classical Latin, C is always hard; in English, C is conventionally soft when followed by E or I. Practically nobody pronounces cedar/Cedrus or cinnamon/Cinnamomum with a hard C. Taxon names incorporating surnames from various languages are another wrinkle. Should we pronounce Michauxia as a French person would, or Willdenowia as a German person would? Or should we adopt a Latinate pronunciation? If so, how do we Latinize Willdenowia? W doesn't even exist in classical Latin, but Romans pronounced V the way we pronounce W in English (and Germans pronounce W the way we pronounce V). Plantdrew (talk) 17:14, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

@Doc James: can you give an example of an article with pronunciation in an infobox? And are there any Taxoboxes with pronunciations? --Animalparty! (talk) 17:26, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

There’s no way WP:NPOV would allow adding a single pronunciation. There are at least three regularly used pronunciations of the plant family ending "-aceae", for example, plus an older more "classical" one less used today. There are ENGVAR issues as well; e.g any word with a short "o" sound has a different pronunciation in North American and British English. This simply isn't a practical idea. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:25, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

I agree, I'm just curious to see if and how it's being implemented elsewhere. --Animalparty! (talk) 18:30, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

You can see pronunciation in an infobox here Pneumonia. It can definitely be referenced. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:31, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

@Doc James: your example beautifully illustrates my points. It "can" be referenced, but isn't – far too often the case with pronunciations. It's only one possible pronunciation in English, and a minority one at that (southern British) – more common pronunciations worldwide will begin either /nə/ (see US pronunciation here) or /nuː/. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:01, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

It was unreferenced were it was before. I guess we could just start removing these. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:09, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

I think the concern is that in most cases it can't be so people would put their own preference in there and editwar about it, or just insert unsourceable material and not editwar. Any time there's a parameter available in an infobox, there's a perceived pressure in many editors' (especially newer editors') minds to fill every parameter that can possibly be filled.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  11:04, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Taxa list templates limited

It seems that the various templates that produce lists of taxa ({{Species list}}, {{Taxon list}}, {{Linked species list}}, etc.) are limited to displaying 20-30 taxa. I'm guessing this limitation might be due to expansion depth issues and could be solved via Lua? Peter coxhead, my apologies for bringing this up. Plantdrew (talk) 03:01, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

On further thought...is there a switch to collapse the taxa list templates? I don't think there is, and if that is indeed the case, 30 seems like a good limit for an uncollapsible list of synonyms. 03:33, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

I think it's just how far Smith609 decided to go – in the template language every parameter has to be taken care of individually. There's a separate template {{Collapsible taxon list}}, although I don't think I've ever used it.

It seems to me that it would be a good idea to re-implement the core coding for the whole set of taxon list templates in Lua, thus potentially allowing any number of taxa, but with a default collapsing at somewhere around 20 taxa. (Given that the majority of organism articles are stubs or at best start class, long taxoboxes cause problems; I'm also doubtful of the value of long lists of obscure synonyms that may have only ever been used once.) It's probably a fairly simple task (although template coding, whether in the template language or Lua, always seems to turn out to be more tricky than I expected).

Something to put on my to-do list! Peter coxhead (talk) 09:42, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Yep, I had to stop somewhere. Template:Nested taxon list might come in handy for some longer lists. Migrating all these templates to Lua would be a great idea! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:18, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

To do when I get finished with things in the queue/stack ahead of this – unless someone else does it first. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:45, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

 Done See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#Taxon list templates updated. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:08, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

"incomplete" option in taxon lists

Alas, I fail to see how the "|incomplete=" works in the taxon lists... My failed attempt is in Hyperolius marginatus. Micromesistius (talk) 22:16, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

You need to put |incomplete=yes. I've updated the documentation for this set of templates; it wasn't clear before. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:21, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, so obvious in the hindsight! Micromesistius (talk) 15:13, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

Images from Wikidata

Can we update Taxobox, so that it calls the image from Wikidata, if none is specified locally? This seems to work well on other Wikipedias, such as Swedish. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:38, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing:, I don't think that's gonna happen, and I'm more trusting of Wikidata than most of the other people who might comment here. It might be useful to have a tracking category for articles without images where Wikidata has an image (or where the commons category exists and isn't empty), thus alerting editors that a potentially useful image exists. But simply displaying an image directly from Wikidata with no vetting isn't going to fly. For Phenakospermum, Wikidata has one of a set of photos by a single photographer that were twice removed (in November 2015 and March 2014) from the en.Wiki article as being a misidentified Ravenala. Granted, Wikidata picked up the photo at some point when it was on en.Wiki, so we're certainly not blameless here (and neither is Commons). Plantdrew (talk) 17:34, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not a fan of handing every human task over to bots and scripts. I've run into cases where changing the "default "image (i.e. Wikidata image) to a well-chosen custom image triggers another bot to freak out and automatically change it back. It would be useful to run a script that identifies taxoboxes missing images and corresponding Commons categories, as Plantdrew said above. --Animalparty! (talk) 17:46, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting anything like that - you'll note that I said "if none is specified locally". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:11, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Since {{taxobox}} has so many transclusions, setting up a maintenance category for missing images would be the best option I think.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  13:44, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

In that case, Wikdiata should be fixed. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:11, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

...as I have now done. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:17, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

So let me get this straight, before I start wasting my time sandboxing a demo: in articles without an image, you would prefer no image to an image taken from Wikidata? --RexxS (talk) 12:43, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

@RexxS: if the image hasn't been vetted here before being added, I can only say that I prefer no image, since unfortunately there are large numbers of mis-identified images around. A tracking category that would list taxoboxes with no image where there are images in the corresponding Commons category would be useful (although Commons is often well behind with taxonomy so there may be an image at a synonym). It all comes down to the number of active editors: although numbers have dropped, there are clearly more here than at Wikidata, Wikispecies or Commons. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:17, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

"if the image hasn't been vetted here before being added" This condition can never apply, because images are vetted before being added to Wikkidata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:38, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: Andy, I think you missed the crucial "here". I see far too many problems with taxonomy on Wikidata to rely solely on images being vetted there. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:44, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

I assumed "here" was "in the Wikimedia movement". I'm delighted, though, that there are no problems with taxonomy on this project. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:18, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

There are certainly problems with taxonomy here. My point is that keeping taxonomic information up to date is not a trivial task and depends on continuous editor input. As far as I can tell, Wikidata (and Wikispecies) have significantly fewer active editors working on organisms than there are here. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:55, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Andy, are you really positive that image are vetted before being added to Wikidata? I see that the Cebuano article ceb:Phenakospermum guyannense pulls the taxobox image from Wikidata, but Lsjbot has also added an image gallery that pulls images from Commons. I don't know the details of Lsjbot's behavior, but I wouldn't want to bet that there are no Wikipedias that have bots adding taxobox images from Commons without human vetting. Plantdrew (talk) 18:34, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I am. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:18, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Deeper problem

A deeper problem is created by the radical incompatibility between our and Wikidata's approaches to taxonomy. (Wikidata's seems from discussions at d:Wikidata talk:WikiProject Taxonomy to be heavily influenced by an editor banned here for actions including insisting that articles be about names not taxa.) Wikidata regularly has separate items for scientific names that are synonyms and so refer to the same taxon, although claiming that each item is an instance of "taxon". It's then quite arbitrary as to which name the article links, images, etc. get attached. As far as I know, all the Wikipedias have articles about taxa, not names (although they differ in how they handle monotypic taxa). These two approaches are not readily compatible. Where in Wikidata should any images of Aristaloe aristata be placed? At Aristaloe aristata (Q39719918) or at Aloe aristata (Q133923)? Or even at Aristaloe (Q39150176) given that the genus is currently monospecific? Why is the commons category Aristaloe aristata attached to the Wikidata item named "Aloe aristata" and not the item named "Aristaloe aristata"?

See Rusty-throated parrotbill (Q28641950), Sinosuthora przewalskii (Q27075562) and Paradoxornis przewalskii (Q3316824) for another example. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:52, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm not someone that works on taxonomy, but I am a scientist and a wikimedian so I understand some of the concerns here, particularly with the importance of getting things right. However, there's one thing I really don't understand: why does it make a difference if you're working on taxonomy here, or on other language Wikipedias, or on Wikidata, or on Wikispecies, or on Commons, particularly given how much the different projects interlink with each other? You use the same login everywhere, and the interface is the same (even if it's in another language) or at least similar. I've been trying to synchronise information about telescopes across the different projects recently, and Wikidata has been a great resource to do that (it's a central place you can fetch information from across the different projects, and you get to combine all of the different information across projects in one place). And where mistakes have been made in a different language, you can still correct them using your native language - why wouldn't you want to fix things? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 00:21, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: I would love to fix this issue on Wikidata, but the problem is in the design, not the implementation, and the design can't be fixed by one non-admin editor. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:01, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

Over-capitalisation

The conservation status stuff should not be treating things like "least concern" as proper names, just given in sentence case like other infobox parameter output. This has been RfCed before. The examples shown in the table in the docs aren't even consistent, with several shown in sentence case already, but many in "Title Case". IUCN may do this stuff in their own house style but it's not WP's house style, and IUCN is not the only issuer of conservation status assessments; several of the ones this template supports directly are not even IUCN-recognized anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  13:44, 12 December 2017 (UTC)