Crop wrangling

"Crop wrangling" is the name we give to the data curation/editing that goes on with our crop data. It is done by volunteers.

Crop wrangler guide
''This guide is a draft. Review/comment is actively sought!''

Default language
The default language of Growstuff is US English. This is due not to any particular superiority as a language, but because we expect a majority of our users to be native English speakers, and because US English speakers are less likely to be familiar with other variants of English than the reverse.

See also: Internationalization

Simple cases
This should work for the vast majority of crops:


 * By default, the system name should be in US English.
 * This is usually, but not always, the name used by English-language Wikipedia
 * If Wikipedia uses another dialect of English for the page name, it will almost certainly list regional variations (including US English) in the body of the article.

More complicated cases

 * If multiple US English names exist and you're not sure which is most common, you can find the most popular via Google advanced search, limiting the search by geographic location to the US, and looking for which one has the most search results. If the search results are polluted by homonymous terms, you can add other relevant terms under "all these words" or exclude unwanted ones using "none of these words".
 * If no US English name exists, but a full or partial US English translation can be made, do so. For instance, the bean "frijol jamapa" is known in Mexico, but has no name in US English.  However, "frijol" is "bean", and a likely translation is "jamapa bean".
 * If no US English name exists whatsoever, and no translation is possible, then use the most common international name for it. For example: a rare fruit is only grown in Cuba, and its name (in Spanish) has no English cognate.  Its Growstuff system name will be its local name in Cuban Spanish.
 * When using full or partial names from languages which use character sets other than the Latin alphabet used in English, transliterate them into English using a standard transliteration scheme.

Pluralization

 * Use singular names wherever possible, eg. "bean" rather than "beans".
 * Only use a plural if the singular makes no sense. For instance, in English you can say "I ate a strawberry" and so you would use the singular, however we don't say "I ate an oat" so in that case you would put "oats".  Plurals should be quite rare under this rule.
 * Since this is roughly the same rule used by English Wikipedia, you can use their page titles as a guide.
 * Known exceptions at the time of writing: oats, chives.

Variant names in other dialects/languages
Crops may have many names in many languages. Our goal is to (eventually) include as many of these international names as possible.

However, for the meantime, here are a list of crops that may cause confusion, and what people should use instead.