Category talk:Botany external link templates

More templates needed?
Hi. French Wikipedia has a number of useful templates for referring to online floras such as eFloras, Kew List, APWebsite, Delta-angio, Tela-métro and GRIN, amongst others. Is there a reason why English Wikipedia doesn't have equivalents (other than that no-one has got around to making them yet)? SiGarb | (Talk) 17:41, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
 * It's possible that these exist but aren't categorized here. I just noticed GRIN wasn't in this category, so I added it now. I'm not sure if the APWebsite, Kew List, or eFloras templates exist, but it's certainly worth having them. Rkitko (talk) 11:54, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Agree: I strongly agree more templates are needed. Why can't we have many of the same templates of the french Wikipedia? Five years have passed since this request and we still are very limited.  I believe it's past time to add more, especially eFloras, ITIS, Kew, and Tropicos. See their list: fr:Catégorie:Modèle de biologie créant un lien externe  I hope we can get more support and more templates added.--MCEllis (talk) 00:22, 3 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Right off the bat, a major issue is making people aware of specialized references templates, and getting them to actually use them. I created a template for The Plant List, but it's hardly been used outside of my own edits. Plantdrew (talk) 04:07, 3 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Today I copied over Tropicos, EFloras, and Kew list (WCSP) templates from commons, which are fairly well maintained english translations of the french templates. French Wikipedia has done a very good job with listing their templates on their plant pages. We may never get that far. Botanical reference templates on Fr Wikipedia are formatted as external links, meanwhile most of ours such as GRIN and ThePlantList are formatted as citations. Is Fr the model to go by, or should we just continue to create these templates in citation format because we assume the templates will never be adopted as widely as on Fr? They also have a "Bioref" template to convert many biological reference templates into citations, see fr:Catégorie:Modèle_géré_par_WikiBioReferences pretty interesting. See Hêtre_commun and Crocus_vernus as examples.


 * It may be easier for users/editors to discover the templates if you separate them on the page into their own category like Fr Wikipedia. They most likely wont be discovered or implemented if they are hidden in citations or with other miscellaneous links. I am experimenting on the Chinese yam page, which has been a taxonomic mess over the years, so I feel such links would help there and in similar situations.--MCEllis (talk) 08:12, 3 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I think it's better to assume that the templates will be used (if they're used) for citations rather than external links per se. Although it does depend on the source. Tropicos doesn't offer the lay reader much; it's probably not going to be cited very often, but would be good to include as an external link. Encyclopedia of Life is not a reliable source (it copies from Wikipedia), so should not be cited, but could be included as an external link. EFloras and WCSP are/should be cited frequently, so I think we can assume that they will end up in the references section rather than as external links.


 * You've duplicated some existing templates (although the French versions may be better). We already had GRIN and Catalogue of Life. Do check this category, it's parent, Category:Biology external link templates, and WikiProject_Plants/Resources to see what we already have. Plantdrew (talk) 18:17, 3 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I know I duplicated them, perhaps not the best practice but I didn't want to break any existing tags. The current GRIN and Catalogue of Life templates do not support the WikiBioReferences utility or other french standards. The opensource WikiBioReferences utility will easily support en:wikipedia if templates are corrected/renamed/updated.  The GRIN species and CatalogueofLife species templates I translated/imported from fr:Wikipedia and commons/wikispecies are fully compatible with interwiki standards, while the others, including the ITIS template are too outdated to support the standards.  I was hoping we could copy tags between fr:wikipedia and en:wikipedia and have them work.    Somehow we need to transition to templates that function better with interwikistandards set by fr:wikipedia, commons, and wikispecies.  See my User page for WikiBioReferences data that I was trying to get working for our en:Wikipedia. WikiBioReferences makes the whole process of creating pages and finding references for species 100 times easier. If you haven't tried it now is the time!


 * How do we see a list of pages are using the outdated templates?  I'm not sure if its possible to see what pages the old templates are being used on but updating them to support the french standards as my templates do may break the old tags.--MCEllis (talk) 21:36, 3 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Go to the template's page and hit "What links here". Hit "hide links" if you just want to see the pages using/transcluding the template (as opposed to instance where the template is mentioned on a talk page). There's also a link to get a transclusion count (GRIN is used on 117 pages, which should be too hard to fix). Plantdrew (talk) 22:54, 3 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I've had a look at the French Wikipedia. I like what they done, but I'm thinking the ship has sailed in terms of implementing the external links on en.Wikipedia following the French system. To make the templates work I need the unique ID that the external websites use to identify each record. In 2011 my only option would've been to go to 15 different websites, search for a species, and then copy 15 different IDs back to Wikipedia. In 2016, I can go to Wikidata, search for a species and get most of those 15 IDs for other websites from one page. There's no reason I should have to manually paste each of the IDs from Wikidata; that's a process that could be automated if people want to to rely on Wikidata for this (people might not be willing to trust Wikidata though; between Commons, Wikidata, Wikispecies, and Wikipedia there are 4 different Wikimedia projects to build a tree of life, and people working on one project tend to have complaints about how people working on a different project are doing it).


 * Take a look at TaxonIds which is another approach to what I think you're trying to achieve. It might be better to take this discussion to WP:PLANTS or WP:TOL where more people are likely to comment. Plantdrew (talk) 01:06, 4 February 2016 (UTC)