Wikipedia talk:Automated taxobox system

This talk page can be used to discuss issues with the automated taxobox system that are common to the entire system, not just one of its templates. Discussions of this nature prior to 2017 can be found at Template talk:Automatic taxobox

Those familiar with the system prior to mid-2016 are advised to read Notes for "old hands".

Template:Taxonomy/* |rank=

Howdy! I'm a bit rusty so I made a silly mistake today and put |rank=tribe instead of |rank=tribus. I have two thoughts about this.

1) For the |rank= parameter, should we perhaps code the template/module to also support plain English in addition to Latin? Would make it more beginner friendly / less likely for this kind of error.

2) Where is the list of Latin ranks at? I checked Template:Don't edit this line, Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system/intro, and Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system looking for documentation on this and couldn't find it. Perhaps documentation on the |rank= parameter should be added to one of these spots.

Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:30, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

For #1, I later found Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system/taxonomy templates#rank and Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system/ranks#Rank table, which is super helpful. The link to those was in an unexpected place, in a group notice. Perhaps those links can be added in more places.

For #2, I did find some English entries at Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system/ranks#Rank table that had multiple Latin entries, so maybe that is why Latin is preferred (it is less ambiguous). For example, English "clade" appears to translate to both Latin "clade" and Latin "cladus". I have no idea what the difference is, but that's what the table says.

Anyway, just now I added an English-to-Latin rank translation feature to User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/TemplateTaxonomyAddCite in case anyone finds that helpful. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:28, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

The problem is that the automated taxobox system is very complex, so the documentation is equally so. Do you have any ideas on how to flag up the rank values better?

One of the reasons for keeping to Latin is that other language wikis have copied and so made use of our taxonomy templates, and keeping ranks to Latin makes life simpler for them. Limiting the number of ranks accepted also makes the configuration of the system easier, including defining which ranks are recognized, which are italicized, and which are 'principal' and so displayed automatically. Unrecognized ranks get flagged up in Category:Taxonomy templates using unrecognized rank parameters which is monitored regularly by a number of editors, so they will be fixed later if not sooner. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:43, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Do you have any ideas on how to flag up the rank values better? Sure. I went ahead and made this edit to Template:Don't edit this line/doc, so that information about the ranks is present in one of the standard spots for such info.

keeping ranks to Latin makes life simpler for them. I suspect that not many people speak Latin, whereas the standard language for communicating cross-project (on meta.wikipedia.org, for example) is English. So maybe English would have been a better choice for standardizing it back in the day.

Anyway, as for a practical solution/improvement, maybe it'd make sense to add a line of code to the module right before any rank stuff happens. The line would be something like $rank = englishToLatin( $rank );. Then you can code up an englishToLatin() function that has an associative array and does a lookup. So the idea is to take any English and convert it to Latin for internal use. Here's something similar I did in JavaScript: User:Novem_Linguae/Scripts/TemplateTaxonomyAddCite.js#L-200.

If too much work don't worry about it, but throwing the idea out there. Would help make this template less fragile and more beginner friendly. Thanks for listening :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:51, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps the simplest thing would be to add a comment to the create template like there is for the |refs= parameter, e.g. <!-- taxon rank in Latin, e.g. familia for family -->.  —  Jts1882 | talk  07:16, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Good idea. Done at Template:Taxonomy/preload. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:12, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Error tracking category for mismatches in template name and taxon parameter?

Would it be feasible to implement an error tracking category for taxonomy templates that: a) don't have a pipe character in |taxon= and b) have a value for |taxon= that doesn't match the name of the template (after stripping any parenthetical terms)

I have come across some case where users who don't understand the automatic taxobox system well have tried to modify the displayed parent of a lower taxon by changing the value of |taxon= in the parent template (i.e. when attempting to change the family of a genus, a user edits the family taxonomy template |taxon= to the family they want for that genus, but this screws up the displayed family for all the other genera that still belong in that family).

In general it strikes me that a mismatch between |taxon= and the taxonomy template name could indicate a problem. Piped values of |taxon= (e.g. Bird|Aves) are usually going to be unproblematic. Mismatches with parenthetical terms (parenthetical disambiguation in taxonomy template and/or article title, and animal subgenus taxonomy templates) are often going to be unproblematic. Plantdrew (talk) 04:47, 13 November 2025 (UTC)