Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: all
Description of need:
I love learning new languages and I use iNaturalist as part of this to learn common names of organisms.
Feature request details:
I am aware of the current Common Name Lexicons feature, but it is currently limited to 3 languages only. I assume that there’s a reason why you shipped the feature with the limit of 3, rather than unlimited. If the limit is hard, I kindly ask to raise it to 5 languages, but if there is not much penalty to your infrastructure, then 7, or maybe 10 languages would be super.
I also suspect some of the pages formatting may break if the common names are too long (due to many languages). However, I wouldn’t worry about it as part of this request since it’s a more niche scenario to begin with
I wonder how many iNatters use the maximum of 3 ? I use 2.
But definitely support making more languages available - for the people and places with multiple languages. Which are MANY, but would be relatively few iNatters who would choose to display a lot of languages. 4 or 5 would help.
I had no Idea that I could show more than one language. I’ve got got trips to Spain and France coming up soon, so I think it would be fun to try and set my display to show Spanish and French, though probably not at the same time.
I use two (English and Spanish; my second native language is French, but it’s out of practice), but I can imagine an Indian or South African using more than three, and New Guinea has more than three language families.
I just found out about this feature, and it does seem really fun, and maybe useful, although so far it mostly has caused me to get stuck with scientific names on the Observation page for no apparent reason.
It seems like this could be really helpful for planning a trip, or for, say, planning a Bioblitz in an area where people speak more than one language.
Another reason it might be helpful to be able to add more lexicons is that it’s not always immediately obvious which lexicon you ought to choose, and in practice, you might need to choose all of the above. For example, if I want to know the French names to prepare for a trip to Quebec, should I choose French or Français Du Canada? In fact, it seems like I would probably need to choose both, and there go my two extra slots.
In my village there are at least 6 languages spoken ! INat is a great tool for contributing to language learning. However if there are 6 names listed, the language name also needs to be included with the 6 names.
I’m having trouble imagining a situation where it would be both desirable and functional to display 6 or more names for every taxon simultaneously.
This isn’t denying the reality of people who live in multi-lingual contexts or who are learning multiple languages and would find it useful to be able to easily access taxon names in more than 3 languages.
But it seems to me that “be able to quickly and easily access” isn’t necessarily the same is “display all these languages at the same time” – perhaps what is needed is a way to switch between display lexica at any time (the way one can switch between default locations on the taxon pages and in explore) rather than having to change this in one’s profile settings.
Maybe this is different for people who use multiple languages on a regular basis, but I find personally that 3 languages is about the maximum I can usefully process at any given moment while still maintaining some hope of keeping them sorted in my head. These needn’t always be the same three languages; the limiting factor is how many I have to juggle at the same time – i.e., how many are active.
And there is also the question of how much space on the page it would require to include 6 or more names for every taxon/observation – in particular in those areas of the website where iNat relies on thumbnails to present content. The screen would quickly become quite visually cluttered. And even if each of those six languages included a language code after them, I think it could quickly become confusing to try to mentally connect the name and the taxon it refers to in the correct language, particularly if some of the languages one has selected are closely related.
