Flag for Taxon: plants (Kingdom Plantae)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| deleted user | plants (Kingdom Plantae) |
New Years proposal: to capitalise English names of plants and other organisms as done already with animals. |
Jan. 2, 2018 13:52:49 +0000 | bouteloua |
please discuss in more public forum: groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/inaturalist |
Comments
Google Groups are a free service...anyone can create an account. In the absence of a community forum hosted on iNaturalist.org directly, the Google Group has served as the main area for discussion of site-wide issues for many years.
At https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/inaturalist, click "Sign In" in the top right corner, then "More Options," then "Create Account."
You don't have to use your actual personal information when you sign up...
I couldn't possibly fathom the number of throwaway Google and other online accounts that I have created over the past 20 yrs of my use of the internet. Nothing will happen if you use false information. : )
Most websites, including iNaturalist*, are logging your IP address, which reveals your general location. As well they are tracking your pages visited, links clicked, searches conducted, and sometimes even where your cursor hovered as you browsed a page.
You can use any number of other email services to create the required confirmation email account. Yahoo, mail.com, Outlook, Zoho, AOL, etc. Google accounts don't necessarily require use of Gmail, which is part of the reason they ask for your current email. (Of course also to track you to sell better ads.)
With your level of concern you might want to look into a service like a VPN, one such example is called Private Internet Access. You can then set your computer to spoof the website to thinking you are in a different country.
cassi
*right click on any iNat page>view page source>and search the file for "analytics" -- you will see that a Google Analytics script is installed on every iNat page. This is common practice.
Edit: fixed URL to Google Analytics
Nutcracker, if you don't want to use the google group please email help@inaturalist and talk to them. Please stop unilaterally changing things without discussing with the community. It's not how things work here. I genuinely appreciate your ID expertise but it's getting pretty tiresome that you keep changing things against the will of the community without even trying to discuss it further. Common names are turning into a huge battleground on here and you are making it a lot worse when you do that stuff.
BTW so far it isn't illegal to provide fake info to google in any country i am aware of. Google probably has the most latitude in the US of anywhere, since our country is now basically controlled by corporations, and even here there is no consequence to giving them a fake phone number or whatever. In fact i never gave them a phone number at all. Also just so you know, they already know everything about you. Which doesn't make it ok but that's the truth.
But it's fine if you don't want to use it. just STOP editorializing common names and changing them without consulting the community.
also to address the original proposal, granted I am US centric or whatever but in every case i've ever seen in professional documents, etc, plant common names are not capitalized unless they contain a person or place name, etc.
If you didn't want to create a Google Group topic, I suppose here are my own responses to the original 4 notes:
Plants and animals also follow different codes for scientific names.
BSBI is, of course, just one example among thousands. Checking 10 plant field guides/floras physically nearest to me, 9 out of 10 use lowercase common names. Like charlie, I also use lowercase names in my reports.
True! It would be easier to force "Title Case" since that can be done programmatically. It's already forcing "Sentence case," which is particularly annoying to me. Previous versions of the website displayed common names for plants exactly as they are entered into the names section. It's currently a mixed bag--taxon pages, /observations, Identify, and individual observation pages show sentence case, but the page titles, personal observation pages (example), Calendar pages (example), and Lists (example) still display appropriately in lowercase.
Yes, it can be a little difficult.
cassi
(never Cassi)
i guess i am not capitalized, like a plant, here too :)
no, if there were a way to change them with consulting the community, i don't think you'd be the one doing it! I think you're way overreaching, I don't think you were made curator to editorialize all the common names based on your own preferences. And if you are opposed to ITIS or another US entity being forced on you, why are you forcing a European list on us? Please just stoooooooooooooooooooop.
Kelsey and Dayton, or for that matter Darwin and Linnaeus, are not granted full control over language and cultural labels for plants. Their principal is flat out wrong, whoever they are. This kind of cultural vandalism is honestly gross.
@kueda @loarie can you weigh in here? We've got one curator who is trying to change all of the common names based on his opinions of how he wants common names to work, based on some European site, and totally in conflict with the curator guidance and the last six years of precedence. Can we get clarity once and for all that one curator shouldn't binge-edit to their preferred common names? I thought this had been resolved the last time it happened, but apparently it hasn't been.
Kelsey and Dayton 1942(?) is certainly not an authority for common names in the US my experience. Most modern plant field guides and floras disregard the principle you mentioned that attempts to apply taxonomy to common names. Ok, it's poison ivy, poison-ivy, and poisonivy, but it's definitely most commonly known as "poison ivy."
One thought -- perhaps one should be able to choose their preferred Lexicon rather than common names only being dictated by website language or place. Then nutcracker could upload a list of BSBI names, choose BSBI as his preferred lexicon? Or "iSpot s afr" or Ojibwe, etc. Currently they only show up in search results -- dozens of lexicons, but they can't be displayed by default as a user's preference.
yeah, if we could get the admins to do that, it would be awesome, because i'm pretty tired of this myself.
As far as I can tell, the original proposal is about changing capitalization, not changing common names in other ways.
@nutcracker, as @charlie and @bouteloua have said, this is not the right forum for bringing up capitalization for plant common names. Propose it in the Google Group or send us an email at help@inaturalist.org, those are the avenues to reach admins.
Otherwise, as a curator you are asked to adhere to the policies in the Curator Guide. Not adhering to the Curator Guide can result in the loss of curator privileges.
Now to address the greater issue of common names, I think it's safe to say it's not something that will ever have a perfect solution, it will always be a compromise. But hopefully we can come up with a better solution soon, move on from there and have people direct their energy on to other things. Right now the main thing is that there is consistency that should be adhered to.
Personally, if there's a different common name than what I am used to, I just move on and get back to going outside and making more observations. :) Although I do recognize the importance of common names, especially when it comes to outreach.
Obviously quite a few issues here.
1) We have a clear policy on common name capitalization. nutcracker, you and I have already discussed this in a private message (July 10, 2017), in which I made the same suggestion Cassi made: raise your concerns in the Google Group. While I understand that you don't like Google, I'm afraid that if you refuse to use Google products you should not use iNaturalist because we use Google Groups, GMail, Google Maps, Google Analytics, and a host of other Google products and services in our work on iNaturalist. We've been thinking a lot about ways to bring these discussions onto the site, but even if we do that there's no good way to use iNat without also using or supporting a Google product or two. On top of that, it's fairly trivial to set up a one-off account to access the Google Group as Cassi suggested. Your actions are obviously controversial, and if you're not willing to even discuss them in the forum we provide, I'm going to remove your curator privileges the next time we get a complaint. If the forum we provide isn't adequate for you, maybe iNat isn't the right venue for you.
2) We don't have a clear policy on how to choose the global default name within a lexicon, so perhaps we need one, but I honestly don't see a clear way forward there. The common name used in the area the taxon is native to isn't adequate as this situation shows (plenty of other US/UK clashes and AUS/NZ clashes one could cite), nor is using the name in the area with the most users, since that's obviously going to be biased in favor of Americans in a lot of cases. I can raise this in the Google Group, but I don't anticipate having a productive discussion because I don't think there's a rational way to make decisions like this, so my inclination is to acknowledge the irrationality and have admins make the choice in controversial situations and lock the those names from future edits.
3) I don't really see why place and locale preference aren't already solving this problem, esp. these US / UK conflicts. Is it really just because people don't like the default place filter on obs search? I'm not entirely opposed to having users choose a name lexicon, but it does add one more layer of complexity to an increasingly abstruse system of rules and exceptions. I'm personally happy to ditch that default obs search filter if that's really the only thing prevent people like Cassi from seeing the names they want to see.
Thanks all. I have noticed that the place based names don't show up in the app and other places, such as the top of the browser window sometimes. I can live with that, as long as people are being fair and not acting unilaterally with the naming, but i can tell you i've gotten messages and comments from multiple users asking about these names that have been changed, and presumably they aren't setting default places for whatever reason, so the problem definitely goes beyond me. I also personally am pretty strongly opposed to the "Kelsey and Dayton" approach that was described above, we ran into it being used locally at work and had a ton of problems with people just not knowing what plants were. As much as i do complain about taxonomy, the bottom line is that scientific names are Linnaean or supposed to be monophylletic, and that isn't true for common names.
Also, i know this could be turned around and applied to me too, but maybe Nutcracker should just use the scientific names only mode? That works now, right?
i don't think not wanting to force taxonomy onto common names has any bearing on american-centrism. In fact it's the other way around, iwant us to be able to retain our common names without you messing with them, and could care less what you call your plants wherever you are.. we can use the Latin names if we need to compare.
if you really want a wholly seperate experience from your area, you should think of setting up an iNat portal. beyond that... i don't see why the place-oriented names aren't enough. If nothing else, one person from an area without many users trying to force their names on others is honestly worse than tens of thousands of users wanting their names there? if you want one name to display in Europe and others don't disagree, add it to the Europe place. Don't change the default, which pushes it on the whole world. If you will just do that, then this individual issue can be solved.
If you can't get the Google Account figured out, I'd be happy to help set it up for you.
This isn't a place to troubleshoot issues with the capitalization. Please use the Google Group or message help@inaturalist.org
This should be discussed on the Google Group rather than a flag that only a small handful of curators that look at flags will see. groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/inaturalist
thanks!