Create "Journals" Tab on Taxon Page for Quick Info on Taxon

Feature Requests
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1

Platform(s):
Website

Description of need:
Quickly gathering information about taxa, principally about determination, then about everything else.

Feature request details:
The other day I was thinking how to gather information about determination from all around iNat and created the project Observations With ID Tips. But there was another idea floating around for a while, and that was for keys to be crowdsourced and summarized on taxon pages.

Something like this has been requested before here, but I’m suggesting incorporating this with the journals and expanding it beyond just determination.

It seems workable to me. Here’s how it’d work:

  1. You’d have a simple “Journals” tab on the taxon page like so (red text above map):

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  1. Once clicking on the tab, you have an option to associate any journal post with the taxon. (You can also associate your journal posts with one or multiple taxa (so the association can be done in either direction), like you can currently associate observations, so journal post creation and editing pages would have to be changed as well.) On the Journals tab, you can order these journal posts by date of creation or faves, with faves being the default to filter for the best journals.

  2. This encourages people to create more journal posts and especially those that concern keys, since their journal post can be featured on the taxon page. Imagine journal posts like “Differences between Mantis religiosa and Tenodera sinensis” and that being one of the first things that shows up on the tab page of both species. People can currently search for journal posts, but it is demotivating to search for these things manually.

  3. In the beginning, and perhaps for a while, a lot of (even notable) taxa would have no journal posts associated with them. In cases like this, you perform a query of all journal posts by taxon name and display the top results. In fact, you may want to always do that in a separate section on the tab page. In a similar way that Wikipedia is being queried every time you open the “About” tab. There’s a section “Associated Journal Posts” and “Search for Journal Posts.” When there’s no associated journal posts, iNat notifies of that in the first section and then automatically offers top query results. When there’s some entries in the first section, you can click on “start query” or something to get the same thing. Or iNat can always automatically display queried results.

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  4. It is important to reiterate it’s not just a keys’ or determination tab. It is whatever is related to the species, and the faves will take care of filtering the good stuff.

Regarding step 4, there definitely needs to be better naming for the sections I described, but that can be worked out.

2

I like this idea. I find that some of the most functionally useful information I interact with on iNaturalist comes from journal posts. It can really let someone who has lots of personal experience with particular species share their knowledge in useful ways. It’s the reason I’ve started making some of my own, and I find them to be much more reader friendly than guides.

I’ve been making journal guides to the grass genus Dichanthelium via journal posts, and currently the only way someone would be able to find these guides is by intentionally searching for them in the journals section, or by seeing them linked on my iNat bio. I think by listing the journal posts linked to specific species on the species page, the journals feature itself would be better integrated into the iNaturalist sphere of knowledge.

3 Likes
3

I like this idea, but what would be the proposed implementation for all the taxon pages that aren’t for a species, supspecies, or species complex? I imagine a list of all the associated journal posts for an order, family, etc. would be overwhelming, especially if they included all the journal posts for individual species included within that broad taxonomic group.

4

It is a very good idea to add journal articles from projects or from users to the taxon page or about page.

There is very valuable Id aid in various projects and journals, but users just don’t find it or do not know that these marvels exists.
Time to make this expertise accessable for the users.

2 Likes
5

It would all follow the same format. You wouldn’t automatically fetch all journals about all species within a family, you’d just perform a keyword query. If a journal post contains some mention of the family, it would show up, with priority given to journal posts that contain these names in their titles presumably (that’s down to how their search function works.) And you’d still only show top results.

1 Like