Hi!
I wish there were an option to change the place of use for local names already submitted. Currently, if the person who added the name of a species in some language didn’t add the place of use, the name will not show up when the page is used in that language. That deducts from the usefulness of adding local names.
Thanks!
@chalkberg I edited your title a bit to be more specific
Further clarification – current policy is that only curators can add a Place to a common name that already exists. Anyone else is supposed to flag the taxon and ask for a curator to do this for them.
Related topics:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/run-job-to-associate-translated-common-names-to-places/3964
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/select-language-for-common-names/5430
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/choose-common-names-language-and-place-in-the-app/2311
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-do-i-see-some-taxa-in-my-native-language-and-others-in-english/5428
Welcome to the forum!
Is there any way for non-curators to see who added a place to a common name (and why)?
No. Seeing it requires being able to get into it in edit mode which only curators can do. Even then there is no comment section or explanation, and all that can actually be seen is the last person to edit it, which may or may not be associating the place.
Do you know why this should be secret information?
I don’t think or perceive it is considered secret, that’s simply how the edit history of almost everything on the site works.
As an aside there are only really 2 cases for associating a common name with a place. One is regional differences in names / spelling within the same language. So for example Canadians can see Canadian spelling vs. US (grey squirrel vs gray squirrel etc), or the name is in a language the site is not translated into.
The original post indicates if it is not done then if you run site in that language you do not see the name. That is not the case, for example I run the site in Danish often, most Danish names are not set to use in Denmark, yet it works fine.
Thanks for the explanation. My issue was more just the abrupt change of a common name from a familiar to an unfamiliar name that affects everyone in that locale, and having no way to find out why. It’s not critical for me though. I’ll just switch back so I see scientific names only.
If a new name is not the most used, then it’s better to switch them back.
Thanks. One of the curators messaged me offering to look into it, which is fine now that I understand this topic is intended to be about language issues.
for what it’s worth, there is this: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_names.json?per_page=200&taxon_id=47062.
Unless this has changed recently, I seem to remember having issues with Estonian names not set to Estonia still showing as English (either on the site or the app, I forget which of the two). I expect, given the OP here, Estonian is the language in question for them too :)
The most likely cause of that is a common name set for Europe or some other large geography under which the location they have set to use common names from falls under and no name specifically set to use in Estonian.
In that case the (presumably) English name set to use in Europe would take precedence.
The problem is when a name is the only name used in a given place, but because that place was not added to the name, people running the site set to a specific place see the default name which is not used in that place.
For example: Gliricidia sepium. The default Spanish name is cacahuananche. Now, in the Dominican Republic, I never hear anyone call it that; everybody I know there calls it piñón. Yet, although I have my language setting set specifically to Dominican Republic, it still appears for me as cacahuananche. This means that I cannot use the language settings to learn the local Dominican names, which was the reason I set them in the first place.
This would be a solvable problem if I could add the place Dominican Republic to the name piñón, which is already present as a non-default Spanish name.
Is there any reason why a non-curator can add a new name but not an existing name as a regional name? Was there some motivation behind this and this is working as intended or is this actually a bug?
From the error message it seems like it’s just saying the name already exists so you don’t need to add it again. It seems to be checking the proposed ‘name’ against the name list for a ‘lexicon’ but should be checking against ‘lexicon+place’.
I think the primary reason for me that
is that regionalization is misunderstood and often misapplied (even by curators at times). There are lots of unnecessary/incorrect regionalizations for names already which can cause problems. @cmcheatle outlined the reasons for regionalizing above.
I would say that if someone wants to do a lot of work adding/changing regionalizations, they should apply to become a curator. If there’s only a few that they think need addressing, they can flag as is status quo.
OK, I can see wrong use being annoying and potentially causing confusion. It only takes one well-intentioned but misguided user to add dozens of names incorrectly.
I would prefer it to be consistent within regionalisation - either new names and existing names can be assigned by non-curators or none can be. Personally I’m in favour of the former but I do understand the latter position too.
Can any staff comment on what the intended implementation was? (I’m not sure if there’s anyone I should tag in particular?)
I think it’s mostly to maintain a clear separation between the abilty to edit a name you added vs editing a name that someone else added, which we feel requires someone to fill out an application for and at least go through some vetting. This is a pretty common separation of powers on iNat for things that aren’t directly involved with IDs and obseration data quality votes.
I’m actually going to set this request to be closed tomorrow, we’re going to keep editing of others’ names a curator-only power.
Thanks - that seems consistent and explains the behaviour. And thus feature request rather than bug was the right way to go with this.
OK, fair enough. Thank you for taking the time to explain.
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