Introduce a description icon or filter for missing taxa descriptions on iNaturalist

Feature Requests
1

I am part of a group of volunteers who get joy in writing missing Wikipedia articles from iNaturalist observations. These articles are being used on iNaturalist to populate the Description tab on the taxa pages. It keeps being exciting to witness when within minutes that article appears on that description page.

Currently, I notice a missing article only by seeing the following text under the description tab:

image
image1278×1036 73.4 KB

However, I would like to be able to notice when one of my observation is lacking a description and by extension a Wikipedia article. Similarly to the little icon’s showing if an observed species is introduced.

Likewise, would it be possible to add a filter to the observations panel that allows checking for missing description pages?

The Wikipedia template provided in the description ta is already a great help. Having the means to explicitly notice where descriptions are needed, would be a great help in writing Wikipedia articles as a naturalist.

4

i think it would be confusing to have an indicator at an observation level to note something absent at a taxon level. having an indicator at an observation level to note that a description is present, i think, would be less confusing, and you could click on it to take you directly to the description. on the other hand, a description present indicator would add extra clutter, since clicking on the name of the taxon already takes you to the taxon page.

if you just want a way to see en masse whether a bunch of taxa have Wikipedia articles (at the least for English), you can sort of get this information from the iNaturalist Taxon Search API endpoint.

so for example, if you want to look for taxa in family Ardeidae (Herons, Egrets, etc.) that are missing Wikipedia articles, you could search for items returned from https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/taxa?taxon_id=4929&is_active=any&per_page=500 where you find "wikipedia_url":null.

to see those results in a more human-readable format, you could use https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_taxa.html?taxon_id=4929&is_active=any&per_page=500, and look for taxa where the name isn’t a link (to a Wikipedia article).

3 Likes