Hi, volunteer curator at the website end of things.
I asked this user to highlight this issue on the forum, from their flagged issue
https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/811863
My intention to ask them to post here was traceability, so it has a record at this end as an issue. To my mind this is absolutely is/was worth raising as forum worthy ‘bug’. Simply, the system behavour on the iPhone app differs from the website, linked to the limited past actions that other volunteer curators took.
Here then, let’s be clear, on enwik the term “Purex” is a disambiguation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purex
That’s interpretable as a set of homonyms if you will, where the taxon may be a not standard name, here on enwiki such as “Purex (earwig)”. There was no existing enwiki page for “Purex (earwig)” or equivalent when this issue raised here on forum or before then as a taxon flag.
In a past curator action at the web interface, the default system behavior to pull from wiki of “Purex” was disabled, i.e “show wikipedia” deselected (plus no input wikipedia title). That led to the website [english] About tab then displaying " Source: iNaturalist: Purex is a genus of insects with 239 observations".
In contrast, as shown by this user, with that setup, the iNat app then dislayed the wrong “Purex is a chemical method” etc.
When disambiguations exist on the wiki end, then a direct route available to volunteer curators on the web interface is to simply disable the system from automatically pulling from the default name (on enwiki). Yet, even if that’s disabled, then as shown it seems the iNaturalist iPhone app still pulls from that. I don’t know for other apps etc. To me view the different systems should not have different behaviors. There’s limited options for volunteer curators can to make the behaviors of those consistent .
Anyway, as far as i’m aware the practical “fix” at the curation end is to make an entirely new disambiguated wikipage then relink that on iNat backend on the web-interface, and to prevent errors likely ensure wikidata links are consistent.
This needs someone who’s capable and willing to make an enwiki page, and experienced enough in the context of the taxon to do so (sometimes needing multiple higher wikipages and backlinks via a functional taxobox etc). Then someone who’s a curator to link that to backend iNat, and also someone able to check and possibly format links on wikidata to prevent contradictions.
There’s likely thousands of such cases. I’ve now done these fixes/updates for this specific taxon here now. Next waiting for system to refresh. Let’s please see that if ‘fixed’ that way, it’s asking for a specific set of very specific actions that (i expect) can/will be only done effectively tiny subset of volunteers. To my view the better fix is something far more general and universal - make the system behavior of any interim solution on the website and apps consistent!
