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Should we expand extinct genera if the species detail / image diversity is poor? #102

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@hyanwong

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@davidebbo says:

One thing I struggle with is whether to include species, or stop at the genus. In the majority of cases, there is only a wikidata page for the genus, and it lists a potentially large set of species. But in terms of image (if any), they would all share the same one from the genus. So my thought is that it's best to use the genus as the leaf, rather than spamming the tree with a bunch of species that all share the same image. If people want to learn more about the individual species, they can just go to the wikipedia page. ... if some species become more stable, they're likely to end up with their own Wiki page, which will them naturally make them expand in the tree.

The difficulty here is that some taxa have very good species resolution, so I think we would want to expand these to the species level. I'm not sure how we would decide on which taxa to leave only at the genus level: should this just be dependent on the picture availability (I agree that we don't want multiple taxa with the same image, however: do you have any nice illustrations of this problem @davidebbo ?)

This could be a good use-case for having a "fake" leaf representing the genus, which is unexpandable. We could have all the species in the ordered_leaves table, but simply refuse to expand the genus tip down to the species level. There's a bit of an issue knowing what to do with search here, I guess.

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