How do I report an error?

I could not find any convenient way to report an error.

At 28823962 subclass Polypodiidae (ferns) the image shows a shell (probably from family Polypodiidae).

As long as this picture shows English Wiktionary will not link to the EoL page, preferring Tree of Life, NCBI, ITIS, APWeb, Tropicos, Fossilworks, as well as Wikipedia, Wikispecies, and WikiCommons.

Sorry for this delayed reply, @Dennis_During! I must have missed a notification; it looks like someone has curated this page- or possibly the offending resource file- since your message. Please let me know if there is still a problem with this page.

Jen

I still wonder about exactly to efficiently report what I believe to be an error. I regularly link Wiktionary articles to EoL pages and am interested in the link not being to a page with an error, especially an.obvious one. I’d like to think that I was just one of many such users aiding EoL’s curators.

Indeed you are- but you have caught us early in our new platform, following a long overdue rebuild of the EOL codebase, so not all our tools are in place yet.

Routine cleanup, for one-off errors, is normally performed by our online curator community. Not all of their tools are up yet, as we are still importing the curation actions (like image rating) that they performed in the old platform. This ongoing curation import may be what updated the Polypodiidae page since your error report. When their prior work is restored, we will stand the curator tools back up so curation work can continue. (Normally that shell image should have been hidden on that page, not just downrated).

In the meantime, any registered EOL member can perform a superficial fix by selecting a different image from the taxon page gallery to display in the overview. I’m afraid we have not yet implemented shared login between this forum and eol.org, so that does require a separate registration. You are welcome to report errors here just as you did, and/or register at eol.org if you’d like to curate the overview image of pages of interest directly.

Thanks for your patience, and your report!

Hey!

I couldn’t find any convenient way either to report another error that I came across.
I came up to Ichneumon alpinator species page and noticed that they (whole Ichneumon genus) are listed as eulophid wasps.
https://eol.org/pages/14858
I tried to make a comment on the page (above Overview), but it opened another tab and gave me an Internal server error - 500

Thanks for reporting, @JaysWildlife! That comment error looks like a new bug. We’ll have a look.

Meanwhile, paging @schulzk- the Ichneumon genus may be out of place. Could you check on it in the updated Dynamic Hierarchy?

1 Like

@JaysWildlife sorry I forgot to get back to you when we published our new default hierarchy. That genus has been moved to the Ichneumonidae. I hope that meets with your approval.

Sorry for the delay, @Dennis_During! This was the first time we updated our default hierarchy in the new platform; we hope to make updates more regular going forward. Meanwhile, the snail homonyms have been banished from the fern gallery.

Hi. I know nothing about EOL, but I would like to point out an error here: Arctostaphylos australis Eastw. - Encyclopedia of Life. The “australis” translates to “southern,” not “Australian.” This plant is native to Baja California, and indeed there are no Arctostaphylos in Australia.

Ah, thanks. A common name is not technically a report of geographic range, but that will mislead a lot of people. It looks like none of our other sources have suggested an alternative common name, but that’s alright. It can do without.

Thanks for reporting!

Jen

Having a link on the EOL pages to be able to automatically report errors would be a very helpful addition. This would allow anyone knowledgeable to quickly flag a problem for someone to work on. Fundamentally what is needed, though, is support for curation by taxonomic experts. Both of those are generally problems for online taxonomic databases, not just EOL. For example, the EOL maps for Mitra dalli Gardner and its senior homonym Mitra dalli Engerrand and Urbina (listed under Subcancilla) are reversed.

Hi - hoping this is a useful place to report. I came to EOL from an iNaturalist taxon page for Sedum crassularia. I was puzzled because the page had pulled through the species description text from EOL. This suggests that its a Mediterranean species, yet all the iNat records are from subSaharan Africa.

POWO confirms that its a species that only occurs in Africa:

(New users can only put two links in a post so this is #1 of #2)

#2 of #2

Here is the text from EOL that iNat has pulled. In turn, it comes from a wiki article for a European species. That species has the same common name as EOL lists for Sedum crassularia, but there are no indications that it is a synonym. (Can you tell I’m not a Sedum expert?)

So I wanted to report that there’s a problem with this specific page, but also - without being familiar with how EOL works - I wondered if there could be a more general problem with matching to wiki articles via common names? Hope not!

best wishes

iNaturalist refers to this page Symphytum grandiflorum DC. articles - Encyclopedia of Life but it is about Symphytum grandiflorum DC. or about Kriechende Beinwell (Symphytum ibericum?