Talk:List of flora of the Mojave Desert region

Alphabetize by (genus, species) or by (family,genus, species)?
I am alphabetizing by binomial name. An alternative is to alphabetize by family, then by (genus, species) within each family. Does anyone have suggestion as to which is best? FloraWilde (talk) 12:02, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Really could go either way. Overall, I think sorting by family is better. On the other hand, I've been recently doing some field work where I'm referring to a list sorted by APGIII families. I have a heck of a time finding anything in Liliaceae s.l. (I can't even remember all the families it's been split into) and Scropulariaceae s.l. (where at least I can remember the relevant families to check even if I'm not sure what goes where). I'm tempted to resort my list by genus, but I know I'll run into some other problems that way (e.g. Eupatorium s.l.). It doesn't help that the recent regional flora was published in 3 volumes over ~15 years, with the first volume not following APG at all (monocots first, Liliaceae s.l.) and the last volume fully APGified. I expect families will be fairly stable going forward, once I get used to them, but genera will continue to be dynamic. Plantdrew (talk) 21:48, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
 * It will be a bit of work, but I will make four alphabetical lists in this article, collapsing the last three lists. The first will be alphabetical by binomial name. The second will be alphabetical by family, then by binomial within each family. The third will be by flower color, then alphabetical by family, then by binomial within each family. The fourth will be by growth pattern (tree, shrub, perrenial, annual, etc.), then by flower color, then family, then binomial. The reason for doing this is that the continuing publication of books, regional floras, field guides, and even scholarly articles, organized by each of these four means, is strong empirical evidence that each organizational method is useful to some group of readers, from tourists to various kinds of professionals. I will include common names for each entry (which cannot readily be alphabetized into a list because of non-uniqueness), and also try to include an etymology for each binomial entry, especially when that etymology is useful as it is related to some observable feature of the plant. FloraWilde (talk) 16:10, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
 * In that case, considering making a table rather than multiple simple lists. Tables can be sorted by any number of columns, although they are more of a pain to format than lists. See List of best-selling books or List of rivers by discharge for examples. Tables would allow easily sorting by flower color then by growth pattern, then by family should a reader desire, but this sort order would require a 5th list if sorting isn't dynamic (as it is with a table). If you have one list set up with all the data that will correspond to the columns in a table (i.e. family, binomial, flower color, growth form, common name) it can be pretty simple to use advanced search/replace commands to add the markup needed to turn it into a table. Plantdrew (talk) 21:18, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I was going to be reading up on how to do tables, and the lists you cited will be helpful for figuring it out. FloraWilde (talk) 19:24, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Article in construction
I put up a construction tag. I will source that each plant is in the Mojave Desert and family listed, and has the common names as listed. FloraWilde (talk) 19:21, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Flower color from field guides, not Jepson
For flower color, to be added after each binomial name, I intend to use color schemes from the most recent major field guides, rather than Jepson. This is because Jepson includes all colors ever found, even if they are rarely to be seen. The Jepson full list can be included in the main species article. Field guides are usually designed to be useful in the field, even if not fully informative. The more rough-and-ready information in the field guides would be more useful to a casual Wikipedia user, such as a person out in the field with internet access, trying to identify some plant by the flower. Comments? FloraWilde (talk) 19:11, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

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