Is it at all possible to make it so the system allows for diacritics?

why?

Because common names for plants in languages other than English (like Spanish for example) need diacritical marks to be correct.

For example: Jalapeno is not a word.

There's a funny episode in the Trailer Park Boys (Nova Scotia production) where Ricky and Bubbles are arguing over the proper pronunciation of their favorite flavor of chips. Ricky insists it's juh-LAP-en-oh, Bubbles corrects him to ha-la-PEEN-oh. The joke is that they are both wrong, because they are not pronouncing the ñ right (ha-la-PEEN-yo).

I understand there is a technical issue involved here with respect to character sets or something. Basically the way the database is set up, it doesn't work right with accents and tildes. So there might be some major structural revision required to get those diacritical marks to work. It might be possible, but that's not really the right question.

My vote is always for accuracy over simplicity. Seems easy enough (but what do I know about programming) to just add in those letters to whatever dictionary this site accesses. I also think it is more courteous to have a way to correctly enter names that have not been Anglicized. On the flip side, it may make searching more difficult - using Baja's example, would a search for japapeno show up if the database properly showed the n with a tilde above it?

Accuracy and courtesy are admirable, but they can create insoluble problems. Some people insist that cultivar names registered with diacritical marks should be listed that way in our database, but that is unnecessary. Russian cultivars are registered in the Cyrillic alphabet, after all, and it might be accurate and courteous to list them that way in our database, but it would also be highly impractical. As a result, the names are not translated, but are simply transliterated in English. By the same token, we can regard the elimination of diacritical marks in French, Spanish, and German names as a form of transliteration.

"Jalapeno" may not be a word in Spanish, but it's completely understandable to the rest of us, and I personally would not want to have to browse through Google to find an "n" with a tilde to copy and paste whenever I want to search for the plant in our database.

Our system does not recognize a letter with a diacritical mark as being essentially the same as the same letter without the diacritical mark. This leads to errors in the alphabetization of cultivars unless the diacritical marks are eliminated. It ultimately also leads to duplicate entries because the cultivar is not found in the logical spot in the alphabetical listings.

Names with diacritical marks can be added to the also-sold-as field without causing misalphabetization or triggering the "odd character" signal that makes some names invisible in edit mode. If you really need something to show up in search results with or without the diacritical marks, you can add the name with the marks to the also-sold-as field, but is that worth the time and effort it would take?

"Jalapeno" is not a word in any language that I know of. Maybe I'm stuck in another era or something. Our database has a non-word as the name for those plants, including peppers and lilies and iris and hibiscus, no two ways about that. It's certainly not the correct name of any cultivar. I understand if there are technical reasons for this, and that sounds to be the case, but the database is in error. I can live with that, of course, as I have with other names. It's not a big deal but it's not correct.

I don't know the ins and outs of searching but I would imagine if you strip the diacritical marks from input strings and target strings (convert all instances of ñ to n for searches, for example) you will get the most comprehensive results. The same would work in theory for accented vowels (a search for o would also return instances of ó).

I totally understand why it wouldn't be practical to do something about the issue but in many cases, diacritical marks are required to differentiate between words. For example, in Portuguese Grandpa is "Vovô" and Grandma is "Vovó". Another example is "para" and "Pará", "para" meaning for and "Pará" being a state in Brazil. Another great example is "coco" and "cocô". "Coco" means coconut and "cocô" means something that you will just have to find out for yourselves if you really want to.
If making the system recognize accented letters as being the same as their unaccented versions is not possible then I don't think using diacritics would be a good idea, just as zuzu said.
Also, if there is ever the need for someone to go and fix names in the database, I'll be glad to do it. I have and still do fix names on Google Maps all the time. I think it's fun actually.
I think Vietnamese is probably my favorite language to correct.

I've been thinking, would putting a cultivar's name with diacritics in the cultivar field and putting the same name in the ASA field without diacritics be a solution at least when it comes to cultivars? Because if the non-accented name was in the ASA box then searching for it without diacritics would still make it show up in the search results. Right?

No, that wouldn't work because cultivars are alphabetized according to the name in the cultivar field, not the name in the also-sold-as field. Most of the people who are active in forums with custom databases (roses, irises, daylilies, etc.) search for cultivars in the alphabetical listings and don't use the search engine for that purpose. Also, when mods and admins process new plant proposals, they look through the alphabetical listings to see whether the plant is already there under a slightly different spelling. They can't use the search engine for that purpose. Some of these custom databases are quite large. A daylily misalphabetized because of a diacritical mark could be pages and pages away from its appropriate spot in the alphabetical listings.

Baja_Costero said:I don't know the ins and outs of searching but I would imagine if you strip the diacritical marks from input strings and target strings (convert all instances of ñ to n for searches, for example) you will get the most comprehensive results. The same would work in theory for accented vowels (a search for o would also return instances of ó).

Unfortunately it's not simple to do this. Computers can't easily "see" that an accented character is similar to the non-accented ones used in the basic ASCII character set. There would need to be a huge reference table matching all the various accented characters with the ASCII set. Whilst this is quite possible, it would take some time (plus the difficulty of deciding which character sets to support) and the cost-to-benefit ratio would make it a very low priorty for Dave.

To make the system easy to maintain and operate, we limit entries in the database to using the ASCII character set. Unfortunately this does mean that some cultivars are not accurately represented in the database, but it does mean most people will be able to find them easily.

zuzu said:... cultivars are alphabetized according to the name in the cultivar field, not the name in the also-sold-as field. Most of the people who are active in forums with custom databases (roses, irises, daylilies, etc.) search for cultivars in the alphabetical listings and don't use the search engine for that purpose. Also, when mods and admins process new plant proposals, they look through the alphabetical listings to see whether the plant is already there under a slightly different spelling. They can't use the search engine for that purpose. Some of these custom databases are quite large. A daylily misalphabetized because of a diacritical mark could be pages and pages away from its appropriate spot in the alphabetical listings.

To add to Zuzu's comment, the reason the a cultivar name with a diacritical mark or accented character may be a long way from where one would expect it is because even the "alphabetical" order we are accustomed to is actually determined by the order of the characters in the character set. The ASCII character set is the typical basis for many of the extended character sets now in use and so accented characters or characters with diacritical marks would actually be listed after the complete ASCII set (i.e. all the upper and lower case English alphabet and numerals).

As Zuzu has already mentioned, the easiest way to allow for names with diacritics is to add them to the also-sold-as field. This allows for both the ASCII version and the correct cultivar name to be searched.

What about common names? I found this plant that has diacritics in its name but it doesn't show the wierd question mark symbol. Cardon Blanco (Cephalocereus columna-trajani)
It looks like it was Dave who added the name.

Thank you Zuzu and Joshua for explaining all the details about this. The situation makes a lot more sense to me now.