Platform: website
Browser, if a website issue: Firefox, Chrome
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem: I’m trying to add a genus of fish (I noticed for other genera, but can’t remember any specifics currently) to a list. When the genus is present in other taxa or the name appears for more common(?) taxa, sometimes the genus does not show. I have been able to get around this when there are names for the genus/family/etc in other languages. But I came across this one with only one name and I can’t get around it. The genus I’m trying to add is Oman (Blennies)
Step 1: In a list, click add to your list
Step 2: Type “Oman” in the search and press find
Perhaps there should be a way to scroll or load more taxa in this find box?
echnically, there is a German name listed on Wikipedia that could be added to the name list. I’m not sure about other languages. Aside from Wikipedia and a few scattered sources, the name doesn’t seem to be widely used. However, if you come across a language where the genus has a commonly recognized name, it might be a good time to include it in the list.
Also (Hey staff o/ ), it would be lovely if the search field accepted Taxon ID numbers. That would make things much easier.
I didn’t think about the ID to search with. That would be a good workaround and hopefully easy to implement
Just realized there’s this other related topic. I couldn’t find it in search when I was making the report. Pisum’s advice there should work. But I feel like there should definitely be a better way to do this
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-can-i-add-a-less-common-taxon-to-my-list/68484
On that more recent topic, I show an approach that could work (but maybe shouldn’t work?) https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-can-i-add-a-less-common-taxon-to-my-list/68484/5
It seems that the “common” names win over the scientific name in this search. Oman is an old Slavic name for the composite plants that do show up there.
Perhaps there should be some way how to prioritise the scientific names?
I had a look at the code and found that the API endpoint that “Add to list” uses* does not support a different sort order such as you propose.
I did find, though, that one particular result is prioritized: if a taxon name exactly matches what the user typed, that result is placed at the top of the list. However, that only works if the matching taxon is included in the first “page” of results and that’s not the case here. So far as I can see, that limitation would affect your proposed solution as well and would be non-trivial to overcome.
I suspect that since the code responsible for adding to lists is a part of the site that is still using legacy API endpoints, staff would be reluctant to make non-trivial changes to it, especially if those changes stand a chance of breaking other parts of the site, as I think this one would.
* For the curious about the technical details, “Add to list” uses a legacy v0 API endpoint: /taxa/search.jsonwhich is undocumented. Newer parts of the site now use the faster and more consistent v1 API.
