Template talk:TNCStatus

@Dr vulpes:, this is an interesting idea.

One immediate concern I have is that it decouples the status from the date given in |status_ref=. While I don't suppose there is very much value to a typical reader in displaying what the TNC status was as of some day in 2022 (which is unlikely to have been changed since then), going further back there is more likelihood that a status has changed and an older access date (say 10+ years) may indicate that the status be checked to make sure it is current. And it won't be obvious (without viewing the source code in edit mode) that this template is being used to provide an up-to-date status when the date given for the reference is quite old. Wikidata is more likely to have recently updated TNC statuses than Wikipedia, but could also be potentially out of date. There is some value for editors (or someone else concerned with fact-checking) to have a date that corresponds to when a (potentially dynamic) source was accessed.

Another concern (although not really one of mine) is that some Wikipedians are quite resistant to the notion of getting anything from Wikidata ({{Short description}} grew out of this, which is something I view as creating a massive amount of work for Wikipedians in order to avoid Wikidata, with very little benefit). If there is support for pulling conservation status from Wikidata, that could also be accomplished by including the functionality of this template in the code for taxoboxes. Some editions of Wikipedia in other languages already have taxoboxes that pull information from Wikidata (I'm thinking particularly of the Russian Wikipedia, where the taxobox shows identifiers for several taxonomic databases (similar to what {{Taxonbar}} does on English Wikipedia). Of course, there might not be support for modifying taxoboxes to do that.

The date issue I raise could be resolved with another template, maybe {{TNCRef}}?, that pulls the date of a statement on Wikidata, and replacing existing |status_refs= with that template. With taxoboxes set up to need |status=, |status_system=, and |status_ref=, I don't see a way to pull status and statement date from Wikidata with a single template (but if taxoboxes were set up to display status via Wikidata with no parameters needing to be specified, it should be possible to display the statement date as well as the status).

I think you should bring this template up at WP:TOL to see if there is support for pulling conservation status from Wikidata, and if there is, to determine how best to do so. Plantdrew (talk) 01:53, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Hey @Plantdrew, originally I wanted to write a bot that would just pull everything off TNC and then do a massive update every month. At WP:BRFA, it was suggested that instead I should make a template instead. As for the ref idea I just started working on the R code to organize that where I've been extracting more of the data from the TNC API to fill it out more(see the conservation status in this item wikidata:Q5309785), all that's left is to make the template or modify Speciesbox. I took a step back after I got things kind of put together and figured I should work out some of the bugs. Such write some logic that would prevent the template from displaying the TNC conservation status if the status_system is not TNC. I also wanted to update the status_ref with the date the ref was put on the article, and the date that TNC assessed the conservation status. Something like status_ref = <ref name="TNC status 08 May 2023">.

I didn't even think about WP:TOL, to be honest I just sort of bumbled into this project. I'll stop everything and go reach out of there to get and idea of the next best steps forward and their feelings on using Wikidata, thanks for bringing that to my attention. The template could be done without Wikidata but it would basically just be a rather large csv file that I would just update every so often and I don't know if the system is designed to do that.

If you have any other ideas or directions you think this should go I'm all ears. Dr vulpes ^{(💬 • 📝)} 03:11, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

@Plantdrew Were your concerns about the TNCStatus template ever resolved to your satisfaction? I ask because I've been using it all over Wikipedia and I want to make sure that I'm not creating a problem for the Plants project by doing so. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 15:40, 12 October 2023 (UTC)