User talk:Sminthopsis84/TPLSynonyms

Possible improvement - taxon name and authority

A change that I expect would not be difficult, is to add another data-entry field, optionally fillable, for a line of text that gives the taxon name. For example, at http://www.theplantlist.org/tpl1.1/record/rjp-4508 selecting the entire line with the species name yields:

L Rubus idaeus subsp. melanolasius Dieck ex Focke is an accepted name.

That is a low-confidence listing, which should perhaps be ignored, but apart from that problem, it would be fairly simple to parse the line to give a component for the cite template:

chapter=''Rubus idaeus'' subsp. ''melanolasius'' Dieck ex Focke

Some wikipedians might prefer to save some effort by not entering that line, in which case the chapter=parameter could be omitted, giving behaviour identical to the current situation.

Sminthopsis84 (talk) 15:45, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Possible improvement - generating template code

It has been mentioned at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants that some people are using special citation templates, either in their own space or in the template space. An apparently rare benefit is that User:CorenSearchBot either already doesn't, or might be asked to not complain about imagined copyright violations from pages that use such a template in the citation.

Perhaps it would be desirable for the program to generate a call to one of those templates.

For example, instead of:

|synonyms_ref = <ref>{{cite web

|url=http://www.theplantlist.org/tpl1.1/search?id=tro-27800177&q=Rubus+idaeus&ref=tpl1

|title=The Plant List: A Working List of All Plant Species

|accessdate=8 July 2014}}</ref>

something like:

{{ThePlantList |id=tro-27800177 |taxon=Rubus idaeus|authority=L. |accessdate=8 July 2014}}

The templates would need to be standardized first, because people are currently using their own favourite formats.

With the above example, the ThePlantList template currently italicizes the entire taxon string. This program could adjust to that limitation by dropping the outer paired single quotes, producing "taxon=Rubus idaeus'' subsp. ''melanolasius".

Sminthopsis84 (talk) 15:45, 13 July 2014 (UTC)