If you go to the Content & Display page in your Account Settings, you’ll now see the option to select up to three common name lexicons to view at once!
Here’s how to do it.
Go to your Account Settings page, then click on Content & Display on the left-hand side.
You’ll see the Common Name Lexicons section on the right. Note that you can choose up to three common names to display.
If you have already chosen a place preference for your common names, prior to the release of multiple common names functionality, you’ll see it listed below. For example here’s what I saw as I had already chosen United States as my place preference for common names. You can keep that or delete it if you want. I’ll just delete it to make rest of this tutorial cleaner.
Pick a lexicon for your first common name preference. Optionally, you can choose a place for that lexicon. The “place” choice is mostly for languages that are widely spoken, where common names for the same taxon differ by region. I’ve chosen English for my lexicon and United States for my place because I want to see English names used in the United States (which is where I live).
If you don’t want to add any other lexicons, scroll up and click Save Settings. If you want to add more common name lexicons, select a new lexicon (and, optionally, a place for it). Then click on Add a common name lexicon.
Once you have chosen more than one common name lexicons, you can drag and drop them to determine their display order (left to right). You can also delete one or more. For example, I’ve chosen three lexicons, and when they’re displayed on other pages I’ll see them in the order of English (United States), Hawaiian, and Japanese.
If there is no common name in a certain lexicon in iNat’s database, no name will be displayed.
While you cannot choose and order common name lexicons in the iNaturalist mobile apps, your choices here will affect common name display in the mobile apps. Android is able to display two lines of names, but in the iOS/iPadOS app the names may be truncated if they’re too long.
This functionality also works if you’ve opted to see scientific names first.
The place preference for common names chooser has now been rolled into the Common Name Lexicons functionality.
There may be some bugs, please report them in Bug Reports if you find any.
Oh this is just so delightful to have! Now I can learn Dutch common names in combination with English ones and scientific even more prominent as a third if I want. Or add a local third language like Indonesian and still have the scientific names in parenthesis behind it. This is terrific! Thank you!
Whoops, you’re totally right. I read it as English and Spanish being separate clauses, not both contained within the same parentheses…in which case my correction was wrong too
Carry on (but given how infrequent you see nesting parentheses in non-mathematical contexts, maybe the sentence should be rewritten to be a bit clearer)?
I have no idea how to pronounce those Squiggles. I guess I have to learn the Cherokee alphabet first…
On a related note, when I look at my observations on my Edit Observations list, these non-standard letters do not display correctly. It appears only the first one in each word does and the rest is just showing a placeholder symbol. Here’s an examples of what I’m seeing (it seems to work fine in other places):
Cool. I’ve since optimized Scientific over English, but it looks really odd to have the epithets capitalized.
Would it be possible if Scientific Name is selected, to have the correct capitalization? Maybe Italics as well?
Further, if the scientific name is first, could the common name be in the smaller font and in parentheses (as the Scientific name is for other options)? And it’s redundant to repeat the scientific name.
It currently looks like this: Genus Species · Common Name (Genus species)
But I would prefer this: Genus species (Common Name)
is there a way to edit (or remove) the locality we’d selected with the previous place-based system? (i previously had my account set to display names used in Iceland, and on the taxon page of any taxon that has an Icelandic name set to Iceland, i now see “AKA [name] (Icelandic)” in smaller print under the main title, regardless of which [or how many] common name lexicons i select, even when i turn common names off altogether)
(edit: the AKA subtitle seems to go away if i set my common name lexicon to Icelandic (Iceland) and only that, but if i set any other lexicons in addition to that, then the name is just duplicated in the main title and the subtitle)
Yes, that’s what I’d like to see!
But wherever on the site, it looks like the way I’ve described it.
I’m using Firefox if that makes a difference. (Update: Looks the same in Chrome and Edge)
Started out looking at random observations and couldn’t find any with the code.
Looked at over 100 Oak species and the Bur Oak was the only one I could find with the code.
