User:Animal lover 666

What are automatic taxoboxes and why use them?

Many articles have infoboxes. In the case of any taxon (natural grouping of types of animals), the infobox includes its higher taxons (the ones which include them - some times also known as ancestral taxons), including the immediate higher taxon (known as the parent taxon) and other major taxons. Other information is included - e.g the child taxons, a picture (photo or drawing) to represent the taxon, and the fossil range (the time period when we know this taxon lived).

Regarding the list of ancestral taxons, the question is: how do you place the full list on each article? Originally, the data was placed manually on each article. That resulted in inconsistent data (different ancestral taxons claied for a specific intermediate taxon), huge amounts of edits when the official classification changes, inconsistent rules for which taxons are considered major (shown on all taxons where they are ancestral), linking mistakes (a link to a taxon leads to the wrong article or to a disambiguation page), and inconsistent formatting (the correct fotmatting is:the taxon being discussed, and its synonymous ancestors, in bold; all higher ancestors which are listed, linked to and not in bold; genus and species, but not any higher taxons, in italics; a dagger for ectinct taxons). Additionally, this method requires separate parameters for each row in the taxobox, causing ugly workarounds when there are not enough non-rank parameters for what is needed in one place.

The solution is the automatic taxobox. The system supporting them includes 3 components:
 * 1) A database of taxons, implemented using a collection of templates of the form "Template:Taxonomy/...". These include all the data regarding which taxons to show on distant descent taxons, and how to show them.
 * 2) A small number of automatic taxobox templates, which include the entry point to the database, along with details specific to the taxon in question and not its descendants
 * 3) A complex system of templates and Lua modules to create the specific taxoboxes from the above.

An edit replacing a manual taxobox with an automatic one would appear at first to be vandalism. After all, it removes source content from the page. However, it isn't - and can be recognized by the replacement of "{{Taxobox" with "{{Automatic Taxobox" or "{{Speciesbox" (or several others, only one of which I have ever used). And some times the page will look wrong immediately after the edit, if a new taxonomy template is needed (and occasionally even an edit which makes no change to the page won't fix it).