Community Forum/Archive 1

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Taxonomic categories

I am about to upload many images of useful plants, for the site Pl@ntUse. I discovered that the use of categories is not widespread in Openmedia : most categories are in red, and they are rarely included in higher categories. I already tried to clean up for some families (Brassicaceae and Poaceae). My feeling is that categories are a very powerful tool to find images. But they need to be better organised.

I made some comments in Help:Classification in categories. I think we should adopt some guidelines for categorisation.

Gregor Hagedorn just told me that he had asked ThePlantList and IPNI to provide lists of genera and species. Why not asking GRIN too ? The interest of such links with big taxonomic databases would be to devise an automatic update. If it is not possible, I am sure it is quite easy to find extensive lists. I personally have this for families covered by APG III. Michel Chauvet 16:33, 20 January 2012 (CET)

I fully agree. We have some data from Catalogue of Life already prepared for a bio-taxonomic categorization system. We need to work on this! Michel: do you have some data ready to use to add for a first version of this taxonomy-backbone to openmedia? Gregor Hagedorn 00:48, 21 January 2012 (CET)

I compiled three files indexing Kubitzki's series, and linking the classifications used by APG, Heywood and Kubitzki. Look in particular at Index comparé. The list of families is that of APG III, and ca be extracted easily.

One tricky aspect is : how will we manage past changes in families ? I am in favor of using APG III, but we could with redirects deal with previous names. For example, Chenopodiaceae could be redirected to Amaranthaceae, or Sterculiaceae to Malvaceae. Many people are still not aware of such changes. Michel Chauvet 11:49, 23 January 2012 (CET)

This is a general question. Will this forum be dedicated only to the use of Openmedia, or to other aspects of the wikis on Mediawiki ? How can we organise it (with distinct pages ?). I propose here an alternative; within Pl@ntNet, we created a platform called Pl@ntNet-Community, which is much more flexible, and is open to any botanist (but nobody will worry if colleagues from other disciplines come). Can you look at it? Michel Chauvet 11:55, 23 January 2012 (CET)

It seems that one oy your edit form directly uses scientific names as categories. This is confusing, because if somebody writes e.g. Brassica oleracea, or Brassica oleracea L., it creates categories distinct from Brassica oleracea. Can you correct that ? Michel Chauvet 21:46, 25 September 2012 (CEST)

Importing images from Wikimedia Commons

When trying to upload images taken from Wikimedia Commons, I discovered that they were quite all already in Openmedia. It seems that somebody did a massive import (with a bot ?). But the only way I see to find such an image is to paste its name and ask Openmedia. It seems that no attempt has been made to organize them in categories. It is not easy to find them by querying with the scientific name. Has somebody any comment ? Michel Chauvet 21:02, 4 March 2012 (CET)

Gregor told me that a bot works to import media automatically from Wikimedia Commons. That's fine. In consequence, I decided to upload all my images of public interest directly to Wikimedia Commons. An advantage is that categories follow automatically, and don't have to be duplicated. A tricky thing is that there are two ways to upload media to Wikimedia Commons. The default way is through the Upload Wizard. But it is intended to US citizens, and doesn't allow to put the right licence. It is much better to use the classical way, where you can edit the page as you like. Other arguments are that the user's name doesn't follow correctly with the Upload Wizard; it does with the classical upload form. In addition, the page where the media is used is not indicated. With the classical form, texts can be duplicated easily as previous texts for all the fields are displayed, and you don't have to type them again and again. Michel Chauvet 18:32, 8 September 2012 (CEST)