I'll weigh in here:
This is a challenge that seems to plague all online plant databases/encyclopedias.
On the one hand, you have a cultivated plant with hundreds or sometimes thousands of cultivars, but there is also an entry in the database for the main plant (without cultivar shown).
For example, "Tomato". We have an entry for "
Tomato (Lycopersicon lycopersicum)" so do you upload a photo of Cherokee Purple to that entry, or the Cherokee Purple entry? What if no Cherokee Purple entry exists and you don't feel like adding the entry? Or what if you have a photo of a tomato seedling and it doesn't really matter what variety it is? Or what if it's a generic tomato and you have no idea what variety it is? You just plop your photo into the generic "Tomato" entry and let that be that.
People want to talk about a plant type in general (leaving comments that are applicable to all tomatoes, for example) so you create a catch-all entry in the database for that plant, but then you have all the other entries for all the cultivars.
Trish and I have discussed this at length and we think the solution is to have both: a main generic plant entry and also all the cultivars with their own entries.
But the main plant entry should have additional features. For one, it can be made into more of an encyclopedia entry, with a free form field for an article-length description of the plant. Then people can upload photos into that entry and then others can propose they be moved out into the various cultivars once the identity is firmly established.
Additionally, on those generic plant pages, we can feature the thumbnail images of the most popular cultivars of that plant (judged by which ones get the most thumbs-ups, for example).
