Viewing post #162670 by daylily

From another thread on this subject in the database forum...

dave said: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).

and from Sue above in this thread...

Calif_Sue said:I have been talking to Zuzu about the generic rose entry and one thing we thought we'd like to do is add some general info like photos and descriptions of different rose classes and styles like singles, semi-doubles, full doubles, floribundas, hybrid tea shaped blooms, etc. and then just a few shots of them in landscapes and mixed beds. She was thinking that "mystery roses might not belong on this kind of page. When you look up "rose" in the encyclopedia, you won't see mystery roses, but you will see rose landscape scenes like Rita's, and this is supposed to be like an encyclopedia page." We may edit a few of hers down so we can add a few other images, not sure yet.

We can do something like that with daylilies. A few examples of the different forms and bloom traits, the species and the newest bloom styles and some daylilies in landscape shots would round it out.

(bold and italic put there by me for emphasis)

If you go to the hemerocallis daylily page, there are shots there of daylilies in beds, but also 3 that could be no ID, and one that the caption says it is no ID.
Daylilies (Hemerocallis)

I do think it would be great to have the encyclopedia type info - with daylily examples of different forms for example.

But I still do not think it is a good idea to just have bloom photos of NoID or any old daylily. Like I said above, with hundreds of thousands of seedlings grown each year, and as Sue corrected me - over 70,000 named daylilies - I do not see the point in having unnamed, or NoID daylilies on the main page. Species - yes. Examples of different forms or patterns - yes.

It sounds in Sue's reply to me above that she does not want NoIDs or just blooms that someone does not know what they are, or maybe seedlings on the main page.

Dave's post seems to me to say, even if you know you have Cherokee Purple, you don't feel like looking up the individual tomato to post it under, just post it on the main page. Sue seems to me to say she would like to use the main page as an information page, with shots of individual daylilies as examples of traits only. Maybe I am misunderstanding Sue's reply, or Dave's post.

I am not in favor of leaving them there hoping someone will ID them either. With 70,000 named ones, I do not believe one can actually ID a NoID daylily. You can guess, but you can't know. There are a handful of daylilies that do have very distinguishing faces and markings - but looking at the 4 on the main daylily page of the database - how would you ever ID them? They could be any number of different daylilies.

On plants that have 100 cultivars, so your not going to get that many entries - being able to put generic plants on the main page could be beneficial, but I don't think it is with daylilies. There are to many cultivars. We could easily end up with thousands of daylily "mug shots" on the main page.