The search facility

[Phil Hocking]

Would it be too onerous a task for the moderators to correct the spellings of plant names in thread titles? There are not that many of them and presumably it would aid a search if the names were corrected. For example we recently had 'Neopoteria' instead of Neoporteria in a thread title, an easy slip to make and the correct spelling was used in the text of the initial posting anyway. We also had Mammillaria 'luthyii' instead of luethyi in both the title and the text. Subsequent postings used the correct spelling but would a search pick up all of the postings on that subject? Not only is on-screen proof reading a bit of a problem for the person actually doing the typing, but also it is sometimes difficult to determine the correct spelling anyway, because Google will usually come up with correct and incorrect spellings in equal measure.

Somerset Phil

[iann]

How about creating a plant name dictionary, Phil. I can plug it in to Firefox and it will underline any mis-spelled names

[pieter]

Hello,
If I am correct, the French cactus forum (cactuspro) uses a plant names dictionary. Perhaps the moderators here should contact Yann Cochard (webmaster cactuspro) to see how he resolved this exactly.
Regards,
Pieter

[Bill]

Well I certainly don't want to go down the grammar police route on here, so I think the answer to correcting post titles is no Phil, however I have been using the test forum to try out a spell checker to which we could add a plant names database if we could lay out hands on one in a suitable format, the only drawback, sorry drawbacks are a) you have to press a button to make it check your spelling and b) I can't get it to work...yet.

Thanks for that Pieter, I will follow it up, although they use a different software to us.

Bill

[Phil Hocking]

You would have a full time job if you were to correct all our typos and spelling mistakes, but it's nothing to do with 'the grammar police', or even grammar. Wasn't this binomial system of naming plants invented precisely to enable anyone in the world to know what plant you are talking about? Surely then it is important to spell the names correctly. Now that we have search engines that can look for any reference to a particular plant it makes sense IMHO not to hide it from them by using the wrong spelling. I know they don't like to upset the children in school by correcting their work these days, but we are mainly adults on the forum and shouldn't be so sensitive. We don't seem to worry about putting others right on their cultivation techniques etc and presumably one of the reasons for participating is to learn something you didn't know before. Anyway, the mistakes are often just a slip of the keyboard, not some major failure of intellect.

Somerset Phil

[Bill]

I did say go down the route, ie one thing leads to another and we are soon correcting every thing. what you say is not wrong and in no way was I suggesting any of our members are intellectually challenged. However in saying that every member can edit their own posts to correct such typos so in reality there is no excuse for them but then we are all only human. The answer is still no unless you wish to volunteer for the job of "name correcter" I am sure I could find a way of giving you editing rights, failing that you could always politely pm the person in question and point out their error.

Bill

[yann]

If I am correct, the French cactus forum (cactuspro) uses a plant names dictionary. Perhaps the moderators here should contact Yann Cochard (webmaster cactuspro) to see how he resolved this exactly.

Hi all,

You are right Pieter, we did it on cactuspro.com
Actually, Olivier made it. Its a set of files that you can use in Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org, both under windows or Linux. There's also the explanation for any .dic dictionnary. It's all explained there: (in French, but you should be able to find the files to download and install).
http://www.cactuspro.com/articles/dictionnaire
If there's a volunteer ready to translate this page from French to English, we will welcome the contribution
(please contact me before starting, as the articles section of the site is a wiki).

[DaveW]

How would you go on about Ariocarpus scapharostrus, as originally published and used for years, which I think David Hunt corrected in recent years to scaphirostris? Or Echinofossulocactus and Stenocactus, since both have been freely used in the past as being the valid genus?

Also classification comes into this when searching since not everybody agrees with the lumping unification of Rebutia, Eriosyce etc. So unless you enforce a classification a search will not always pick up posts by those using different nomenclature.

Searching by specific name alone might help, but again even these change their gender, "a's" to us's" etc on change of genus, plus also get lumped under other specific names too. All you can do is search under all variations, but I agree the correct spelling of the name would at least remove one variable.

The problem is possibly a beginner may have heard a name but not seen it spelt, so produce a phonetic approximation of it to ask a question, so not everybody will know the spelling or even know how to find it.

DaveW

[yann]

Hi Dave,

The goal of our tool is to have names correctly spelled. We do not check for the validity of the name, the dictionnary contains both Stenocactus and Echinofossulocactus.
The idea is to have correctly spelled names, so the links to the encyclopedia cards can be built automaticaly in my forum's messages.
On my forum, when someone posts a message, some words are automaticaly changed into links to different pages of the site: articles, encyclopedia, photo gallery, etc.

[AnTTun]

Humble me thinks.... we had 'fire at will' rule at some other forum. If admins/mods saw something written wrong they were free to change it. They would usually have left note in brackets like (edited by XYZ), if it was typo inside post or have just changed (part of) subject into correct one. There was no hard feelings from corrected ones, nor there were any if they missed something.

But it surely helps, when searching forum on some specific expression, to have important things spelled/typed correctly.