Platform(s): website, mobile(?)
URLs:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_links/5995 (example)
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/57905-Lomatium-mohavense#articles-tab (example)
Description of need:
While this may seem like a “niche” curation request, it will actually help to preserve the “More Info” links on many thousands of (sometimes literally all) taxon pages on the site.
Curators have the ability to add web links to external information sources on the “About” tab of taxon pages using https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_links/new
If an external site has information for a large group of taxa (or all taxa, like GBIF.org), and can be searched using taxon names, there are template elements (described on the Taxon Link editing page) that can be used to make a single Taxon Link work on multiple taxon pages, up to and including every single taxon page on the site (like the GBIF link).
Sometimes these templated “generic” Taxon Links don’t work perfectly for one or more taxa included in the template, and a curator will try to “fix” the link for a specific taxon by pointing directly to its page on the external site. Unfortunately this then removes the link from all other taxon pages on which the original templated link previously appeared.
Sometimes a templated Taxon Link needs to be edited to reflect changes or improvements to search functionality on the external website it queries. But it should never be edited to remove the template elements so that it only points to a single taxon on the external site. Instead, if necessary, a new, additional single-taxon Taxon Link can be created for that specific taxon page, although such redundancy should be avoided if at all possible.
Feature request details:
Detect when an existing Taxon Link uses a templated (generic) format, and do not allow edits to that Taxon Link to be saved if the changes would result in a non-templated (single-taxon) format. Instead, display an educational message about possibly improving the existing template or, as a last resort, adding a new/redundant link for the single taxon of interest.
Edits to a templated link would still be allowed, as long as the resulting link would remain in templated format.
Deletion of a templated link altogether would still be allowed too, since sometimes external sites change their search functionality in ways that are no longer compatible with iNat’s template formatting options. But there should be a warning message that deleting the link will remove it from X number of taxon pages throughout the site, and asking the curator if the link can possibly be edited to improve it instead.
Existing non-templated Taxon Links should retain their current functionality.