This project page does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:
Tree of Life This page is within the scope of WikiProject Tree of Life, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of taxonomy and the phylogenetic tree of life 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.Tree of LifeWikipedia:WikiProject Tree of LifeTemplate:WikiProject Tree of Lifetaxonomic

This talk page can be used to discuss issues with the automated taxobox system that are common to the entire system, not just one of its templates. Discussions of this nature prior to 2017 can be found at Template talk:Automatic taxobox

Those familiar with the system prior to mid-2016 are advised to read Notes for "old hands".

Would it be feasible to implement an error tracking category for taxonomy templates that: a) don't have a pipe character in |taxon= and b) have a value for |taxon= that doesn't match the name of the template (after stripping any parenthetical terms)

I have come across some case where users who don't understand the automatic taxobox system well have tried to modify the displayed parent of a lower taxon by changing the value of |taxon= in the parent template (i.e. when attempting to change the family of a genus, a user edits the family taxonomy template |taxon= to the family they want for that genus, but this screws up the displayed family for all the other genera that still belong in that family).

In general it strikes me that a mismatch between |taxon= and the taxonomy template name could indicate a problem. Piped values of |taxon= (e.g. Bird|Aves) are usually going to be unproblematic. Mismatches with parenthetical terms (parenthetical disambiguation in taxonomy template and/or article title, and animal subgenus taxonomy templates) are often going to be unproblematic. Plantdrew (talk) 04:47, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

3 January 2026 update

Mammal subprojects with articles tagged for both mammals and subproject:

I added another line for Total. I have been using the transclusion count (https://templatecount.toolforge.org/) for the taxobox templates in previous updates. That includes transclusions outside of article namespace, and at this point a pretty significant number of the remaining transclusions of manual {{Taxobox}} are in other namespace (primarily long abandoned drafts in User space). The new line for total is based on PetScan counts in article space only. That aligns with the counts for the various WikiProjects, where I've been using PetScan counts all along. The reason I had for continuing to use transclusion counts this whole time is that PetScan is slower and sometimes doesn't work. (Case in point: for some bizarre reason, Petscan isn't working today with queries for WikiProject Hypericaceae (which I sum into the Plants count); PetScan has worked fine for every other query today, which were identical to the Hypericaceae queries aside from the WikiProject. I ended up including numbers of taxoboxes from Category:Hypericaceae in the Plants count here which is probably pretty close to what I would have gotten if I'd been able to include the numbers for the Hypericaceae WikiProject, but that isn't the exact method I'd used previously). Anyway...

We're down from 30,000 manual taxoboxes six months ago to less than 10,000 now. Only 3 WikiProjects have more than 1000 manual taxoboxes. There are 10 WikiProjects in the range of 283 to 897 manual taxoboxes; those certainly some lower hanging fruit in those with articles that could be easily converted to automatic taxoboxes (the manual taxoboxes in WikiProjects with less than 100 of them are mostly harder cases; often fossils with conflicting hypotheses about their classification). Thanks to @The Knowledge Pirate: who has put in a massive effort to implement automatic taxoboxes in recent months.

There really is only lower hanging fruit now; the low hanging fruit is gone. On December 1st there were a little over 3000 manual taxoboxes with |binomial=, but 8000 with |genus=. Most manual taxoboxes are for genera that don't have any species level articles. That means that most taxonomy templates that have yet to be created are only going to be used (at least for now) in a single article. The low hanging fruit of being able to put speciesboxes in multiple articles after creating a single taxonomy template is done. Plantdrew (talk) 03:23, 4 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]