Spanish iris etc
Mary Sue Ittner (Sat, 22 Jul 2006 11:49:25 PDT)

I had avoided the Iris wiki pages for a long time since I knew they would
present a huge challenge. But when we started adding John Lonsdale's
pictures I was forced to come up with some way of dividing the pages. I
asked for help in doing this since I admit I am not an expert on Iris and
used some of the few suggestions I got to name the pages. In the past we
have had requests not to make our wiki pages more complicated beyond the
genus level as we wanted our information to be available to a wide range of
users so we have not named our wiki subgenus pages by the subgenus name
except perhaps in the case of Moraea when a lot of people were familiar
with Homeria, Galaxia, and some of the other former genera that were
combined into Moraea. It's one reason I insisted our wiki not be divided by
families as most people would not be able to find the information they
needed searching that way. So I was at a loss about how to name the wiki
iris pages. So this is what I came up with:
Bulbous irises with wiki pages named
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>Juno
Irises,
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>Reticulata
Irises, and
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>Spanish
Irises.
Irises with rhizomes with wiki pages named
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>Aril
Irises,
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>Garden
Bearded Irises,
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>Beardless
Irises,
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>Crested
Irises, and
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>Pacific
Coast Irises.

My choices could not be perfect and I hoped that by explaining on the top
of each page and including the botanical subgenus name if I could find what
they were, people could live with my choices. I'm not sure when I started
on this project, maybe March. I worked on it for months and months, making
one subpage at a time as we removed the information for the species for
each group as we transferred them and added new pictures and species from
John. Now I wish I had just left them all alphabetical and just divided the
pages as Iris One, Iris Two, Iris Three, etc. I'll keep that in mind if and
when we tackle any other large genera.

If the name Spanish Iris is going to agitate people, it can be changed, but
I do not have time at the moment to do it. And no doubt some people won't
be happy with using Xiphium as it will only have meaning to those people
who are well versed with Iris. I spent some time today hoping to make it
better, but that's all the time I have to devote to this. If Rodger is
willing to help that would be great. If not I suggest Jim McKenney does it
since he is the one who first complained about the choice of words. People
can make changes to other people's work on a wiki. All I ask is if the name
of the page is changed all of the iris wiki pages are changed at the same
time to reflect this so the links will work as I do not have time to do it.
And I ask you to name the page something that is consistent with the other
wiki Iris pages and name it in a wiki page way by writing the words
together instead of using brackets.

Mary Sue