consolidate lexicons for common names

[AfriBats]

Hi admins & developers

Just noticed that there are now several duplicate lexicons for common names floating around (for instance "Deutsch, German", "German", "German, Deutsch"). Same is true for many other languages.

Could we please get these consolidated as soon as possible? Given the amount of work people have been putting into adding common names, it would be a shame if this is becoming useless due to multiple versions of the same language.

To prevent further proliferation of duplicate lexicons, you might want to add a notification how new lexicons should be named if users decide to do so. Maybe a rule to name a new lexicon in both the respective language and English (eg "Deutsch - German" in the case above)?

Thanks, Jakob

[tony rebelo]

Why not just adopt one of the world standards, eg. the iso standards: https://www.iso.org/iso-639-language-codes.html  or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes

Note that each language has a "iso language name" and a "native name", so the 

German

Deutsch

 or 

Greek (modern)

ελληνικά

Should not be an issue. 

[AfriBats]

Sounds good. I don't have any preference how lexicons are named, though I guess that some users would like to see that "native" names are included.

But please consolidate them asap! Where do these lexicons come from all of a sudden?

[Tony Iwane]

We'll be fixing it ASAP, it looks like they had been added by a user. That won't be possible anymore.

Tony

[Ken-ichi Ueda]

For the record, it will still be possible for curators to edit these, and for non-curators who made a name to edit it. We have an established mechanism for translations so there's no need to translate things in the lexicons themselves. In fact, doing so actually does damage b/c if we don't use consistent names for lexicons, we can't match locales like "fr-FR" to a lexicon like "French." If the lexicon changes to "French, Français" people who view the site in French will stop seeing that French name. I'm also not entirely sure why you would need to see "French, Français" next to a name that you can tell is already in French if you speak French, but if we want that, we should do so by translating the English names into their "native names" via our existing translation framework.

[Zanskar]

Hello :)

it's cool if this problem could be solved. There should be only one label "french". 

I'm actually adding all the common names of birds in french. This morning, when choosing the language in the list, as I do everytime, a second "france" possibility just appeared, and France/french too. If I add the name and I choose the FIRST in the list, the name is NOT added. It works if we choose the SECOND "France". I dont' know why but it's confusing for people who want to add a name. I'm sure this duplicate name is new because I use this tool every day.

[Zanskar]

ok the change has been made, but now, it's s impossible for a non curator to delete an existing name ! I do that very often when the name is wrong, or with a spelling mistake, or even when it was provided by an automatic robot (cool name provider or something like that with names always without accent)...
I understand on one side because we have too often bad manipulations of users with finally a mess at the end, but now I'm spending hours and hours to add 10 000 french names of birds and others reptiles, I'm stopped each time the first added name is a mistake, because the new one I will add will not be displayed by default.

[tony rebelo]

On what grounds does one decide what is "wrong" or a spelling mistake?

There are lots of "wrong" and "misspelled" vernaculars in common use.  When do curators have the right to delete someone else's common name?  What checks and balances apply?

(Ditto, I guess with posting vernacular names: is a reference or citation needed?  )

[Zanskar]

"On what grounds does one decide what is "wrong" or a spelling mistake?"

Just on the ground of common sense and knowledge. When each day - I speak for french names, maybe all is already perfect for english - I have to delete totally erroneous names, because they match the wrong species (the same common name is given for two or three different species, while the accepted name is different on avibase), or because it's written without uppercase, or "moinau" instead of "moineau" (sparow instead of sparrow), yes, i think a curator may have the possibility to delete and change it. I don't have the vainglory to know all about averything, but in some cases, it's so obvious there is a problem I would appreciate to still have the opportunity to add the good name. But once again, I understand the choice to allow only curators to do that. For the great majority the people here are totally good users, but when you see that everyday you have spam advertising pictures which are posted, who knows, if one day, someone just for the fun or because he has nothing better to do wants to delete the names, the hours of work are gone !