Forum:Taxa reorganized

If someone notices anything weird about the taxon pages and/or the taxon sections on creature infoboxes, don't be alarmed. I'm working on a new system (using SMW). Because this eventually mean that every taxon page and a lot of creature pages have to be changed manually, it isn't complete yet. And because of the way SMW works, the pages will not look proper until their parent and children pages have been changed. Anyone who wishes to help should join me and morgoth on IRC (if we don't respond, just go back to doing something else, leaving IRC on, and perhaps we show up), as one of us will need to explain what to change and correct you if you do anything wrong. 22:48, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

The idea
SMW can "look up" information on one page and display it on another. So, if a taxon page knows which taxons are below it, it can display the name and description of it's "children" automatically. So, the new taxon pages have a field specified for "parent". This way, we can tell each taxon which taxon is it's "parent". And then the parent page can ask "Who are my children?". And voilá, all the children are displayed on the parent page. Each taxon also has a parameter named "rank", where we can tell it whether it's a kingdom, phylum or etc. In addition, the description specified on every page is not only displayed on that page, but also on it's parent page. This field should only be a short description (one sentence). There is a separate field for additional information, and what you write there is not displayed elsewhere. On pages for creatures, you have to specify the family, genus and species, as well as the name of the person who classified and the year of classification. The family field is important, since it works like "parent" on taxon pages. Genus and species information is taken from the creature page and displayed on the family page. Genus pages are a no-no. I've concluded that they are redundant, since creatures classified in the same genus are supposed to be so similar, they don't deserve separate pages. If someone has put two "not-almost-identical" creatures in the same genus, they have mis-classified them...

How to classify creatures

 * 1) Find out which existing taxa it should belong to, for example Animalia, Chordata and Mammalia.
 * 2) When you realize you need to create a new taxon (under Mammalia in this example), enter the name in the box below the current children, and press the button.
 * 3) Fill in the remaining fields. Some of them should be filled automatically, like the parent and your name.
 * 4) Save the page. Of course, you won't see any children yet.
 * 5) Repeat until you have created the family page. Now the button should read "add species". Whether you already have created the creature page or not, enter the name of the creature to be classified.
 * 6) Fill in the the taxonomy-related fields (or the whole page if you are creating it now).
 * 7) Save. Even though you just described three taxonomical ranks (family, genus, species), it should (if you did it correctly) look at the family page and find it's parent, and display it. Then it looks for the parent of that page again, and so on. Therefore you should see all the ranks.
 * 8) Refresh the family page to see if you did things right, and the new creature appears there.

So, is this working yet?
Yes and no. I've tweaked the involved templates a lot, so they should work properly, but please report bug you see. Note: if the template looks for information on the parent page, but does not find it (because the parent page hasn't been converted), things will look messy. This is not a bug, and is fixed by converting the parent page, so that the template can find the information it's looking for. Unfortunately, we have to go to every taxon page and switch to the new template manually, as well as on the creature pages and put the classification in the infobox.This obviously takes time. Morgoth has been working well, but I (Ose) have been distracted a lot of other stuff. Anyone who wants to can help, but it may seem confusing at first, so I suggest joining IRC where we (me and morgoth, if we are there) can help you learn it. When all creature pages are done, we can do cell classifications and so on.

What does this mean?
Less work (after we're done converting all the existing pages, that is)! If you add a phylum, just refresh the kingdom page, and it appears! In addition, making taxon and creature pages is easier than ever, thanks to the new forms I created (see above).

This also means that every creature page has to use the creature infobox, and that the classification info has to go in it, not in a separate section on the page. The semantic data is generated by this template, and the form uses it to simplify adding data. Taxon pages will also mainly consist of a template, classification.

If you want to see how this is working, look at. It and all it's children pages has been converted.

Comments
Questions? I bet there is something I have forgotten to mention. 23:53, 7 August 2009 (UTC)