This template is within the scope of WikiProject Plants, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of plants and botany on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PlantsWikipedia:WikiProject PlantsTemplate:WikiProject Plantsplant
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Need to handle other taxons
This template currently only handles species, whereas The Plant List holds data on higher-level taxons like genera and families.
We have links to those, but they are now obsolete because they link to the old version of the data.
If this template were to be modified, it could take care of updating these links en masse.
HTH HAND —Phil | Talk09:08, 22 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I created this template, but I don't have much experience with templates. The format of the URL used by The Plant List for genera and families pages is completely different from the format used for species; while I'm sure there must be a way to handle the different URL formats with in a single template, doing so is beyond my abilities. There could be a separate template for genera and families.
And this template isn't very widely used (probably 75% of the articles incorporating it are ones I've added it too myself), so I haven't been very interested in maintaining it. Mass updating family/genus links to The Plant List would still require adding a template in the first place (although once a template was added, it could conceivably handle further updates to The Plant List with minimal effort). For now, the version of The Plant List is hardcoded in this template (i.e., the template always links to TPL version 1.1); assuming TPL follows a consistent pattern in forming the URL in future versions, version # could be soft coded (i.e, editors would be required to enter a version number parameter when using the template, which would then link to the right version of TPL). I'm not sure that creating a template that dynamically links to TPL as TPL updates is a good idea; the information on TPL changes between versions, and it's better to cite an obsolete version of TPL, then to use TPL as a source for information which may be falsified by the next TPL update. Plantdrew (talk) 17:06, 22 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I have updated this template to match accepted input formatting used by other Wikipedias such as commons:Template:ThePlantList and fr:Modèle:ThePlantList_espèce. It should now work better with utilities such as WikipediaBioReferences. I was unable to add genus or family support to this template due to the complexity of differences in the URLs between species and higher taxon. As other wikis have done, I have created {{ThePlantList taxon}} to support linking to thePlantList at those levels. It may be more appropriate to rename this template "ThePlantList species" as other wikis have done since it only supports the species level.--MCEllis (talk) 16:52, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
