What is Morphpedia?

The Morphpedia project is a community effort organized by MorphMarket to build and maintain an online, up-to-date, and accurate resource about herp morphs and traits.

What benefits does this bring to the hobby versus other resources?

• Easily accessible being centralized, online, and free
• Transparent community-driven process with public record of discussion and debate
• Accurate due to community involvement, corrections, and moderation by editors and experts
• Continually updated so as to contain newer traits and discoveries
• Coverage for all herps eventually
• Enhanced with market data such as availability and price, ads for sale, and breeder pages
• Will ultimately inform the marketplace's model of genetics used for ads, search and calculators
• Books aren’t as easy to access as online resources, aren't free, and slowly go out of date. That being said, scholarly resources are essential and will be cited by this resource.

How does it work?

• Morphpedia consists of published articles about herp traits which contain facts, descriptions, issues and representative photos.
• The content for these articles is created in our community forums. Each article will have a corresponding Topic in the community forums.
• Everyone is free to provide feedback and input in the discussion of a Topic; however, only editors and experts will be able to make updates to the first post (e.g. "wiki") in the Topic, which represents the content to be published.
• Each night, the contents of the wiki posts are fetched and published as articles on the main MorphMarket website. 
• Integration with the main site allows for nice formatting, the addition of information such as market and price data, and the Trait Explorer, which allows for easy searching, filtering and sorting of trait articles.

Details

Parts of Morphpedia

In the community forums you will find:

• Categories: for Morphpedia content, organized by species.
• Topics: Each herp trait has a corresponding topic page.
• Wiki: The first post of each topic is a wiki post controlled and updated by our editors and experts, which can incorporate the community feedback from the discussion below.
• Discussion: Discussion posts come after the initial wiki post. All users are free to post here in order to contribute suggestions, corrections, and discussion, all within the context of community review. 

- On the main MorphMarket website:

• Published Article: wikis which are in published state will show up on the main marketplace website. This is the final product.

Trait Article Publication

Trait topics may be created and registered by anyone but not all traits will be published as articles. These registered topics can still be seen in the forums, where discussion and additional evidence can be provided. They may be published later or never at all.

Published traits will be proven and/or require either:

• notable visual differences
• a photo side-by-side with a wild type is beneficial
• significant community acceptance
• marketplace traction (e.g., ads from a number of sellers)

• This is ultimately subjective but means that projects will require a level of establishment before they are accepted. The wiki provides a place for discussion about the trait without publication. In many cases, an unpublished trait may be published sometime in the future when more evidence has been gained/shown.
• The initial focus is on single genes traits at first rather than combos (which are endless), as well as other traits such as localities, however trait articles include some combos.

Status Tags

Tags are used to track the status of a trait wiki, with tags in the format `mp-status-*`.

• `mp-status-published` -- if we recognize the trait and it is a published article
• `mp-status-draft` -- some sections complete but not ready to publish
• `mp-status-facts` -- facts part is completed
• `mp-status-autogenerated` -- template was automatically created using our script
• `mp-status-alias` -- this is a "stub" wiki for discussing the trait, but it is recognized as being the same as some other trait, thus we do not publish an independent article
• -`mp-status-registered` -- registered with a wiki, but not yet ready to be published, perhaps not enough evidence yet to meet requirements (e.g., trait shown genetic), requires further discussion or information

Trait Aliases

How will traits that are generally considered to be the same (Banana/Coral Glow, Lesser/Butter, etc) handled?

• In the wiki, we will allow separate articles to be created. 
• In cases where there is consensus that the traits are the same, only one article will be published. In that article, the other names will be listed as aliases.
• The other aliases, if they have significant history can have their own topic/wiki with the status `mp-status-alias`. This will provide a place for a record of history, discussion, and evidence.
• The primary name will be chosen based on community adoption and/or other historical details.

Wiki Post Structure

The best way to see the sections is to view our demo topic, which is kept up to date as a reference for all wikis.

https://community.morphmarket.com/t/morphpedia-ball-pythons-demo-topic/11906

Broadly speaking, it contains:

* Main Photos image carousel at the top

  * A collection of single-gene images showing a range of expressions

  * Caption structure: "Morph Name By Image Owners Name"

  * Example: "GHI by Shaun Hacke at Dark Blizzard Exotics”

* Facts section

  - First Producer: prefer person name, and include MorphMarket numeric user id if possible

  - Trait type: incomplete dominant, dominant, unproven dominant, recessive, locality, polygenic/line-bred

  - Tags can indicate useful groupings (sex linked trait, dark gene, light gene). Some tags are added automatically in the backend which show up in the published article, such as if it has any issue listed.

* Prose sections

  - Issues

  - Related Traits: should be linked to the other articles

* Combos Photos image carousel at the bottom

  * A collection of combos including this trait

  * Same caption structure as above

* References

Photos

• All image contributions are appreciated but only a maximum number will be selected for use in the article, e.g. 25 in order to avoid clutter.
• Our goal is for the these pictures to have both stunning examples as well as examples which span the quality level for each morph to help drive home the point that there is extreme natural variation within the morphs.
• Over time the selected photos may be updated to ones which are more stunning or useful in demonstrating variation or certain features.
• Image quality matters.
• You must have taken the photo yourself or own the rights to it.

Photo Tips

• The better the lighting in the picture the higher the chance we will feature it on the Morphpedia page.
• Try to get the animal as in-focus as possible.
• Close up pictures of particular areas, such as the head, eyes, “alien heads”, belly pictures… etc.
• While hatchlings and clutch photos make for some of the best eye candy, we also want to see adults to show how each one ages.
• Rename the image file with the name of the traits in the animal.

Roles Guidelines

There are three groups:

• All are welcome to provide input in the discussion on the Topic
• Editors will incorporate changes from discussion into the Wikis
• Experts will adjudicate controversial or uncertain content; or, we will publish it but with commentary about the confidence of those ideas.

How do we choose experts?

• In the beginning, we plan to operation more informally. Editors will reach out to experts as needed.
• Longer term we hope to have teams of experts per species who have both experience and reputation but also interest and availability. We may choose a large pool of experts for some categories, where their names are known, but where only a percentage vote at any given time to avoid negativity in decisions.
• In any case, we welcome ALL experts to join and provide input to the discussions, especially the originators of traits.
• We will also reach out to experts who may not be directly involved, to interview them on different issues and will cite them in the articles.

How do we choose our editors?

• Trusted community users who we have relationships with and/or have demonstrated their reliability in the forums or other settings.
• The editor's main job is to incorporate useful and evidenced contributions from users, verifying with experts as needed.
• A great way to be invited to become an editor is to be active and demonstrate yourself to be thoughtful and useful in the forums. Many of these users have been promoted up to Respected Forum Members and a feature even to Moderator status.

Discussion Guidelines for All

We welcome all feedback, but for best chance of your feedback being used it should have:

• Proof and references
• Clear utility

For any information shared, please share sources - whether it be first-hand or provide a reference. Prepare to have your ideas challenged in a friendly healthy way.

• Like elsewhere in the forum, we encourage positive, constructive discourse. Please do not assume someone's negative intentions or "read into" text with a negative tone. See our Community Guidelines for more helpful ideas.
• If you are recommending changes about **visual** aspects of a morph, provide clear pictures that verify it.
• If you are changing the **information** of a morph, such as genetic issues, origins of its name, first breeder… So on, provide a source in a comment below. Personal experience must be well documented and have replication, once isn’t evidence.
• Don’t add offer pictures from websites outside of MorphMarket marketplace and community unless they are your own.

Editing Guidelines for Editors

• Please fill in the “reason for edit” field before submitting your edit. It can be found by clicking the “!” Icon on the edit screen. This will help others review your changes more easily.
• Make sure photos have captions which give credit to the photo owner.
• Take care not to edit the wiki at the same time. A warning will appear saying "Editing Conflict". 
• In the absence of high confidence, we prefer to preserve multiple opinions where there is reasonable evidence for each side, rather than to oversimplifying and omitting potentially valid viewpoints. Obviously what constitutes a viewpoint worth representing is subjective to a degree.
• Reach out to experts as needed.
• We will develop more comprehensive editing guidelines as the project progresses.