Talk:Key:species

Wikidata property

Avoid using capital letter and space: species=quercus_robur

• wikidata:Property talk:P1282#"_" or " " as value

try it yourself in overpass-turbo

/*
This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard.
The original search was:
“species~_”
*/
[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
nwr["species"~"_"]({{bbox}});
// print results
out geom;

• wikidata:User talk:Ivan A. Krestinin#KrBot2 on OpenStreetMap Tag:species

Davileci (talk) 22:13, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

No, you didn't understand this. species=* is used a proper noun. It's the same as subject=* etc. Please stop with your reverts that are false documentation. Don't make ironic edits to prove your argument.

Tell others to discuss their (wrong) opinions on OSM. Don't edit for applications. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P1282#"_"_or_"_"_as_value
—— Kovposch (talk) 10:25, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

The names of species=* and subject=* are common for the individuals who belong to their class as they can be defined by its features.

• Ideally, a key is one word, in lowercase, using British English if possible.
• When that can't be the case, a key should be one concept, whose words are underscore_separated. (Any tags you like#Syntactic conventions for new tags).
• Use lowercase ASCII chars and underscores (Any tags you like#Characters).

Davileci (talk) 08:59, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

First of all, if you want to change this, you should make a proposal, not edit the wiki page to make it not reflect the usage. But this is already de facto.
You are conveniently missing the item above or below. This is an attribute "properties that "are unstructured and flexible, commonly containing mixed case, spaces, and other special characters.". Freeform text "use any characters you can think of".
species=* and species:en=* would have the same format. Both are taxonomic names.
—— Kovposch (talk) 16:51, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Species synonyms

Does anyone have recommendations for tagging species that have synonymous binomial designations? For example, the London plane can be designed as either Platanus × hispanica or Platanus × acerifolia.

My initial intuition would be to add an :alt suffix (similar to how we already have e.g. species:wikidata=*), but alt is already a language suffix for the Southern Altai language; so perhaps the appropriate way to tag these synonyms might be to use alt_species (following the same scheme as name=* and alt_name=*).

Acording to OSM Tag History, it looks like someone already used alt_species once, but it was later removed in favor of the semicolon-separated multiple values syntax. However, that page explicitly recommends to "always try to use semantic tags instead of chaining values together. Use for example old_name=*, loc_name=*, short_name=* instead of a MV in name=*". And indeed, it goes on to describe several ways to tag multiple values (including alt_ prefixes), without singling out one of the methods as preferable over the others.

So my question is: does anyone have strong objections to using alt_species for binomial designation synonyms? And if so, why? —Waldyrious (talk) 10:15, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

I don't agree with using *_species=* to have alt_*=* for naming everything. It's not organized and scalable. This is further confusing whether alt_species=* is the plant that's planted or placed (in planters or pots) alternatively (eg rotation, seasonal, exhibition), and old_species=* for the previous plant planted.
If this is needed, I would consider species:alt_name=* as bridge:alt_name=* and tunnel:alt_name=* . But the question is, is this really necessary when there's species:wikidata=* ? London plane even lists 5 synonyms.
—— Kovposch (talk) 16:18, 30 June 2025 (UTC)