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Symbiota / Symbiota-deprecated

This original code fork is considered deprecated and no longer maintained by the community. We recommend that you use one of the several actively developed forks.
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Data cleaning suggestions/comments #121

Closed Barkworth closed 5 years ago

Barkworth commented 6 years ago

I have recently been doing some data cleaning for contributors to OpenHerbarium. I love the tools that already exist in Symbiota but, as usual, want more. 1) In one case, the authorship of a name has been changed. There are over 100 records with that name. I tried to use the table view in the editing to correct them but one cannot select Author as the field to be changed. The same problem comes up when correcting the spelling of a scientific name. If the complete list of fields were allowed, that would take care of this problem. The alternative seems to be downloading and then restoring. Or wading through the records one by one.
2) Some names are not marked as problems because they are in whatever is checked for the semi-manual mode but they do not have an author and family in the record because they are not in the nomenclatural backbone (people in OH have to upload data from a spreadsheet because the internet is just too slow). It would be good to have such names highlighted and correctable, either via the data cleaning tool or by enabling editing of author and family in table view. Also picking up records in which lower case has been used for the first letter of the generic name.
3) Some names were identified by the data cleaning tool as being unmatched but were completely correct and in the nomenclatural backbone. By completely correct I mean that I copied the supposedly incorrect names, pasted them into IPNI and/or Tropicos and then searched for them in the Taxonomic viewer. If all looked good, as it sometimes did, I copied them back into the “remap to” space and would find that they had been successfully remapped – to the name that was supposedly a problem. I guess all is well that ends well but it is puzzling.

Barkworth commented 5 years ago

Another about the data cleaning tools

  1. When remapping, it would be nice if there were an option to also map the author and family. This might require enabling selection of the taxonomic tree being used. It is time consuming to have to page through the specimens adding these two fields.