@tiwane : any news on that ?
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I assume this is a top-level change if implemented, so I’ll ask again after these 8 months by tagging @kueda – is there anything to report on this? I find this still to be a problem I encounter weekly if not more often.
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I just finished reviewing the unknown taxa in the taxonomic framework and found just over a thousand names that can be corrected by changing 1-2 letters. There are numerous hybrids that are only missing the “×,” while in other cases another character is missing.
It would be necessary to carefully check whether there are any false positives or whether there are cases where POWO needs to be corrected.
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Going to add my support for this - this feature sounds phenomenal
Added my vote. Five years now…
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I’m not a taxonomist. Is there a finite list of small changes that would be a good fit for this? A few I can think of:
- correcting a typo
- correcting a gender disagreement
- adding a hybrid symbol
Anything else?
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Strictly this would also include general orthographic corrections. These aren’t only typos or gender disagreements, but also other situations where the author did not follow the codes and their spelling must be corrected for various reasons. e.g. under ICN
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Those would be the main cases. Only one more comes to mind:
- add/remove hyphen
I would have to check more carefully to see if there are any other cases.
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Standardizing epithets that were based on names also generates corrections, like (I’m making these up) L. Rydbergi vs. L. rydbergi vs. L. rydbergii.
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Species with capital letters other than the first letter of the genus are already stripped to sentence case by the system.
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Are you able to provide an example of what that might look like?
There are many examples on the referenced pages in the ICN article (and related articles) for which I gave the link. Apart from the ones mentioned other common ones are missing or unnecessary hyphenation, the removal or changes where names have ligatures or diaresis ‘foreign to classical latin’
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One that comes to mind from the past - species names spelled like Castilleja linariaefolia are now to be corrected to linariifolia.
Also just an observation - gender corrections and adding or removing a × symbol would be pretty easy changes to regulate via coding, but allowing general orthographic changes would open things up to pretty much any name change a curator wants to consider a “correction.” Since people might still look up taxa using orthographic variants, it might be best to still require taxon changes for those, so that the incorrect orthography automatically ends up as a scientific name synonym.
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With the current model it would be preferable to change the spelling and add the variants as additional names rather than generating lots of confusing taxon change entries associated with every observation. That’s what we are trying to avoid.
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I agree. Hopefully we can also avoid rogue (or new) curators who think that the way to change any name is to just edit it.
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yeah that’s why I specify it would pertain only to manually selected “taxon curators” in the proposal
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I think it should be straightforward to intercept attempts at gross change, e.g. one taxon name to another, by comparing the original and the edited strings and using something like soundex to ensure the spellings are close. But I agree, perhaps best restricted to a subset of experienced curators.
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That’s an intriguing idea! Hopefully it could be tuned to distinguish differences in gender termination (basically ignoring the last 4 characters of each string) from taxon changes involving similar names, like the recent split of Psorodendron from Psorothamnus in plants.
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The way I used in the past - for matching taxon name strings from different lists - was to remove the standard set of gender terminations from both strings before applying soundex.
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