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SpeciesFileGroup / taxonworks

Workbench for biodiversity informatics.
http://taxonworks.org
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Extra options when synonymising genera #3481

Open dhobern opened 1 year ago

dhobern commented 1 year ago

Feature or enhancement

If I synonymise two genera, TW helpfully allows me to move all species from the newly synonymised genus to the new genus. It also allows me to add references to these species one at a time.

I would like to additional options to be offered when moving species. Both of these would be selectable default actions for the entire set of species.

  1. An option to create new combinations for all species after the move. I am cleaning up 35 years of taxonomy and I may end up later moving some of these species into third genera, but I want to keep the new combination recorded after those later moves. It would be great not to have to check every combination already exists before I do so.
  2. An option to provide a single reference that will be added to all species - typically the page on which the genera were synonymised. This could most naturally be attached to the combination in 1.

Location

Task - New taxon name (when making a Subjective synonym relationship between two genera)

Screenshot, napkin sketch of interface, or conceptual description

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Data curator / biodiversity informatician

dhobern commented 1 year ago

One thought - these functions could be separated. A tool to instantiate combinations where these don't exist for all children of a genus (or for a more generic name search) would be a good cleanup tool. It could include checkboxes to deselect some names if appropriate.

dhobern commented 1 year ago

A good example today. Many species in the genus Barsine have in recent decades been moved to Striatella (around 50 of them). I'd moved these to Striatella by synonymising Barsine with Striatella, using the checkboxes to select all the ones I wanted and then moving them to the new genus, after which I deleted the synonymy. So these all had Striatella as a parent but no explicit combination. Several checklists have now listed these species under Striatella.

Today, Striatella (a newly recognised homonym) was replaced by Striatochrista so I needed to change the parent for all 50 of them, but I wanted to add combinations in Striatella for each one. I had to right-click all names in the genus, click Edit, scroll down for each one, select add new combination and click Add. A tool would have saved me 20 minutes on just this one genus.