Proper way to store and organize hints about identification of taxa

Yes, this keeps getting suggested, over and over again. See here for one previous discussion, and links to more: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/adding-useful-id-info-to-taxon-pages/657/8

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Thanks Jeremy, the ‘similar posts’ list did not show it. It is indeed a very good post.
@tiwane this might seem silly but isn’t there a way to make one of these discussion sticky so that it’s not re-posted in different form? just a suggestion

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A revamp of Journals in iNat that would make formatting easier as well as allowing some images to be uploaded has been discussed, but probably won’t be happening soon, alas. We’ve also done some exploration of how existing “Helpful” comments can be consolidated on a taxon’s page, but again that would be pretty complicated. I think using Discourse is fine as a workaround for now.

It’s possible. I’m wondering if it might be better to link to some of these in the About sections of categories, though? I wouldn’t want many too many topics to be pinned.

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It may be possible to pin one wiki post which has links to each taxon-specific thread.

I do not know Journals, but please notice how important is that different users can alter the same page and changes are trackable.
Otherwise you end up with a dead thing no longer valid once the creator cannot/no longer cares of editing it

Is there some tutorial around? Is it supporting collaboration?

I understand the layout concern.
You might add a sticky “Frequently discussed topic” post to be used as a bridge to those links. “About” would not be one of the places I’d scan for this kind of discussions.

another 2pence coming from my small experience. Here’s the way I’d do this.

  1. Ask tutorial editor to include tags to the taxa number (such as @48670)
  2. have a job to scan tutorials and populate a link in the taxa page.
  3. Solve one-to-many with autogenerated bridge page
  4. up to you whether have curators validate or simply monitor links
additional notes / drilldown for geeks
  1. a. Nice to have: javascript showing popup/side hint on actual taxa name while editing to avoid typos on code or support code retrieval. Not fundamental for start, performed using some js asynch call.
    b. define some rules how to propagate downwards reference to the hint along the taxa tree? this can be discussed.
  2. a. (“tutorial” identified using some convention? tag? hidden markup in case a template is feasible) b. link to taxa number meant for links to be confined to a section if markup allows? such as code?). This to avoid catching taxa codes possibly discussed for inclusion in comments
    c. The job can also rescan and fix broken links or link to content that a bot has filtered as not compliant minimum quality requirements
    d. to run the job efficiently, given the low number of tutorials at least in the beginning, have it launched scanning the Tutorial pages of course, not viceversa. This should keep the job exec time really short, maybe just flagging the taxa sheet for reprocessing by a subsection of the main taxa maintenance jobs
    e. Nice to have: have javascript/page code which is populating the suggestions dropdown id=“ui-id-2” add a class to style to the “View” text to show an icon suggesting a ID hint is available (talking about *< div class=“ac-view” >View< /div > *, neatly and easily done without burdening using, in the added class, CSS pseudo style ::before for instance
  3. bridge page helping user to navigate using some text tagged from the tutorial page

Other nice-to-have:
have Discourse propose a template to be filled to ensure consistency and possibly hide some markup to help job to identify the tutorials

The developement burden lies basically on 2 and 3, I think this should not be too hard and impacting. Frills later.

tried out of desperation but at least for me does not seem to work…
this is what I see


I probably do not have permission, but I am afraid this does not help participation.

Oh! @tiwane can only curators add links? I just checked the page and I definitely see an “Add Link” button (I am a curator).

Well, I think this is sensible - I can imagine that is to avoid seeing in taxa page links not related or allow junk in.
That’s what I had in mind writing my suggestion above… :slightly_smiling_face:

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