User talk:Trappist the monk

CS1This user is responsible for those .

Comments are welcome. If your comments are about my work on a particular article, please make
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Template:ThePlantList

Do you want to puzzle out the best way to yank this out of Category:CS1 maint: others? Izno (talk) 17:35, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I guess my question is: why does that template use |others= at all? The template defaults to one of two values: Missouri Botanical Garden and Richard Pankhurst. Visiting The Plant list pages linked from ~/doc, those that list Missouri Botanical Garden don't mention the Garden at all; those that list Pankhurst, mention RJP as a source: 'The record derives from RJP...'; not sure that warrants mention in a citation.

The thing that is being cited is a page on a website so |work= in the template should simply be: 'The Plant List' – for which |website= is the more appropriate parameter.

Why is |publisher= different for different identifiers? The reader gets the information from 'The Plant List' website regardless of which sponsoring organization is listed as 'publisher'.

And then there is this: 'Note that this website has been superseded by World Flora Online'. That tagline sort of suggests that 'The Plant List' will one day go away so why bother maintaining the template?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:30, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

The template is a bit of a hybrid. A few comments:

• It's widely used for external links, which I assume is why the superseded by World Flora Online was added. It would be better to replace this with a WFO link rather than using a "citation" template. Is there a way to search for cases where it is in the external sources section
• The three ancillary templates seem an unnecessary complication. I'd remove them and keep it as a simple citation template, but I don't know if that would break something. Getting the ID from wikidata might be useful for an external link, but inappropriate for a citation (editors need to have seen what they are linking to at the time of the access-date).
• I can't find any examples of |others= using "rjp" but there are some with other values (e.g. "kew") where it returns a blank rather than "Missouri Botanical Garden".
• The |others= parameter is stating the work from which the Plant List record is derived. This is at best unnecessary, potentially inaccurate if the record has errors (which has plagued The Plant List).

In short, I'd suggest a simple citation with |website=The Plant List (that is the name of the website) and |publisher=Missouri Botanical Garden (as that is the hosting website), which was how the template was created. @Plantdrew and Peter coxhead: might have some helpful thoughts. —  Jts1882 | talk  08:12, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

This search would suggest that the template is widely used in references (~490 articles with <ref ...>{{ThePlantList|...}}</ref>). The template count tool says that the template is used on ~550 pages; the link count tool concurrs. That suggests that the template's predominant use is as a reference. If the template is used in both the article body (as reference) and in §External links, the §External links use is redundant and should be removed.

I can't find any examples of |others= using "rjp" Not sure what you mean by that. Regardless, I agree that the template's |others= assignment is superfluous. To my mind, the |publisher= assignment is also superfluous and the simple |publisher=Missouri Botanical Garden that you suggest should be omitted from a rewritten template because it is not at all obvious from the website that Missouri Botanical Garden is in fact the hosting organization. Were it important to the MBG, it would be stated so at How to Cite The Plant List and/or Terms of Use for The Plant List.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:58, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I created the template as a wrapper for {{Cite web}} by copying (and modifying) {{PLANTS}}. Support for |others= was added by subsequent editors. We ought to replace all references to The Plant List (most of which aren't using this template) to an updated source (either World Flora Online or Plants of the World Online); that's something I've thought about working on, but it's way down on my to-do list. Plantdrew (talk) 15:36, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

As noted above, The Plant List is obsolete, and ideally all uses as an external link would be removed, and all uses as a citation would be replaced by a more appropriate taxonomic database. This will eventually happen, I guess, but in the meantime, simplifying the template is a good idea and I support it. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:26, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I didn't expect this many people to chime in, I just thought this would be a remove/replace. Oh well. I've removed others now without comment on the rest. Izno (talk) 18:47, 21 April 2024 (UTC)