In cases where there is a Wikipedia article that shares the name of a taxa but does not cover it, trying to remove the content seems problematic.
You can of course check to not auto-populate the content, which should leave it blank, or default to the EOL content, but in practice, removing the check mark seems to have no effect, or at least a very delayed impact.
See for instance https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/577712-Maira I turned off the auto Wikipedia population on this taxa, but no amount of refreshing the page, resaving the taxa page etc seems to be able to make the content disappear.
Every taxon on iNaturalist should have a corresponding Wikipedia article or redirect, so I wouldnāt consider that a āhackā per se. Relying on iNat curators to know what the future Wikipedia article title would be is problematic though.
Yes, it should also not be assumed that iNat contributors know how to or are willing to create Wikipedia content.
That being said, this was more about the iNat site, if you choose the show nothing configuration option, then the resulting behaviour should be to show nothing. Right now, that is not always the case.
For context, I added the Auto description checkbox to handle situations where we wanted to quickly hide totally irrelevant content, but it was only ever meant as a stopgap measure to be used until someone updates Wikipedia, so
If weāre going to show the Auto description checkbox then it should work, and by āworkā I mean unchecking it should just show nothing from the description and remove the cached description we have in our database.
I agree with Cassi that the best way to address issues like this is to add a disambiguated Wikipedia title and to add to or update Wikipedia. I donāt think itās too much to expect of iNat curators that they do this. iNat reaps huge benefits from Wikipedia by showing their content on our pages, so we should give back by providing more / better content. I donāt do it as much as I should, but I do do it sometimes. EOL content is, in general, a less-organized, less-edited, and much patchier substitute.
FWIW, Iām an en.Wikipedia user of (too) many yearsā experience, and Iām happy to provide help if anyoneās having trouble getting new taxon descriptions into the site. Validly published taxa are āpresumed notableā in Wikipedia, so they shouldnāt get deleted.
Ok, I just made it so unchecking the āauto descriptionā box will simply not show any content. What it will show is a message saying that site curators have temporarily blocked Wikipedia content for this page, and that the remedy is to fix wikipedia or to bug the curators some more.
When I remove the checkbox and add Elater(beetle) to the title:ĀØ
if I try to refresh the content via the refresh link I get an error saying āCouldāt retrieve the Wikipedia summary for Elater. Make sure there is actually a corresponding article on Wikipedia.ā
If I just try and save the change, on the page the error message about bugging curators is shown, even though Iāve put a valid Wikipedia link in the appropriate place.
As far as I can tell itās working as intended, though perhaps youāre misunderstanding the difference between the cached Wikipedia summary that you can refresh at https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/173661/edit and the Wikipedia content you see at https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/173661-Elater. The cached summary is just that, a cached bit of text from the Wikipedia article that we keep in our database for situations where we donāt want to load dynamic content from Wikipedia (e.g. showing lots of taxa at once, small pieces of text to show to search engines, etc). On the taxon page, it shows the cached summary at first then quickly replaces it with dynamically loaded content from Wikipedia.
So if you uncheck āauto descriptionā thereās really no need to refresh the cached summary. When you save the taxon after having unchecked that box, it will wipe out the cached summary, b/c it presumes you wanted iNat not to show Wikipedia content at all.