Editing Template:Taxobox colour/doc

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<strong>Note to template editors</strong>: Edits to the taxonomic terms (taxa) in this template depend for their effect in manual taxoboxes on the colour-determining taxon being at a rank allowed to change the taxobox colour by {{tl|Taxobox}}, so this may need altering. Colours must be defined using the rgb(..,..,..) format to enable {{tl|Sets taxobox colour}} to work correctly.

== Purpose ==
This template is one of a number of configuration templates used in the taxobox system, in this case in both [[Template:Taxobox|manual]] and [[WP:Automated taxobox system|automated taxoboxes]].

It generates the appropriate colour for a taxobox.

It should only be used by other taxobox templates.

=== Use by taxonomy templates ===
Manual taxoboxes call this template from {{tl|Taxobox}}, which looks at the values of ranks given in the taxobox from phylum upwards and uses the taxobox colour for the first colour-setting taxon found (or the error colour if none is found). {{tl|Sets taxobox colour}} is used to decide whether a taxon is colour-setting, which it does by using this template.

Automated taxoboxes use a function in [[Module:Autotaxobox]], which finds a colour-setting taxon by searching up the taxonomic hierarchy coded in taxonomy templates (i.e. templates with names of the form "Taxonomy/''taxon-name''").

=== Setting colour within a taxobox ===
Both manual and automatic taxoboxes usually generate their colours automatically. If this fails, or if for some reason the automatically generated colour should be over-ridden, {{para|color_as}} can be used to set the colour based on a supplied taxon. Thus:
<syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext">| color_as = Animalia
</syntaxhighlight>
within a taxobox forces its colour to be the one appropriate for animal taxoboxes. The taxon given as the value of {{para|color_as}} must be in the switch statement in this template. Thus {{para|color_as|Felis}} fails and assigns the error colour.

==Taxobox colour scheme==
{{Taxobox colour scheme}}

== Tracking categories ==
* {{clc|Taxoboxes with the error color}}
* {{clc|Taxoboxes with no color}}

== Supporting templates ==
* [[Template:Sets taxobox colour]]
* [[Template:Taxobox/Error colour]]

== See also ==
Other configuration templates include:
*{{tl|Anglicise rank}} – converts the Latin form that is used in taxonomy templates to the English equivalent
*{{tl|Principal rank}} – defines the Linnaean principal ranks that are shown by default in automated taxoboxes
*{{tl|Is italic taxon}} – defines which ranks cause taxon names to be italicized in automated taxoboxes
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