How to edit/remove a term that’s in multiple taxonomies?

Some of the terms on my site appear with the same exact slug, in multiple taxonomies.

For example: ‘education’ appears in both the ‘department’ taxonomy and the ‘topic’ taxonomy.

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Now, I can’t seem to modify or delete a term from one taxonomy without affecting the term in the other taxonomy.

  • If I change ‘education’ to ‘department-of-education’ in the
    ‘department’ taxonomy, it changes to ‘department-of-education’ in the
    ‘topic’ taxonomy as well.
  • If I delete ‘education’ from departments,
    it disappears from topics as well.

How can I separate the terms?

WordPress does seem to prevent same-named terms in different taxonomies in the admin, but my taxonomies and terms were imported in the course of a site migration using a WXR file, and WordPress let them in—so now I’m stuck with them.

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1 comment

  1. As it turns out, though terms could not be edited without affecting all instances, they could be deleted without deleting all instances.

    So, it looks as though the answer is this:

    • you cannot separately edit a term that’s in multiple taxonomies, but
    • you can remove that term from a taxonomy without removing it from the
      other taxonomies it appears in.

    For related ideas, see http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/3005.