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Re: Problems with the horse chestnut

Try this out. In Recorder, try entering a record and in the taxon field, enter "horse chestnut". When you hit enter, or click out of the field, Recorder will find a direct match and so won't prompt you any further. All appears to be well until you do a report some time later and find a moth in amongst your trees. The problem is, there is a horse chestnut moth and this is what gets matched in recorder. The reason you don't get prompted is because the tree of the same name is spelt as horse-chestnut (with a hyphen). So unless the data keyer knows they have to type horse-chestnut with a hyphen, or vice versa if doing moths, then there's a real danger of entering duff data unwittingly.

I'd suggest a few of solutions to this problem:

1. Parse punctuation and spaces as equal, so that "horse chestnut" and "horse-chestnut" are interpreted as the same string and thus we get prompted to select the horse chestnut we really mean.

2. Always prompt, even though there is only one possible choice.

What do others think? Any other simpler solutions (such as adding "horse-chestnut" as a synonym of "horse chestnut"? Would that work?)

Charles

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

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Re: Problems with the horse chestnut

Linked with the other threads regarding common-name & synonym confusions, I insist that when using any form of lookup with R6, the data-entry keyer only types in a partial word.

So in this case, start with "Hor" , then once your choices come up, can you add the "se". The other fail-safe here is to expand the box so that the different checklists come into sight.

On a slightly unrelated note, we've stopped using the 'Preferred Checklist' option due to these common name/synonym errors.

This and a few other refinements have made it into the 2nd edtion of our manual. Eg, using Google to correct or narrrow down spelling errors by the orginal recorder, then put that entry through the search tools (or perhaps the NHM http://nbn.nhm.ac.uk/nhm/bin/nbntax … h?st=basic search site to find out which list it's in).

Ye get the idea.