Talk:Alex (parrot)

Criticism section is weird

Terrace seems to be the only source in this section, and his claims are rather bizarre. He's claiming a Clever Hans effect, yet if you've ever read any of Pepperberg's papers, you'd see that the person asking the questions is kept unaware of the answers, so if there's a Clever Hans effect, then the humans are telepathic, which would be a much bigger result.  ;) But anyway, noting that would be WP:OR, so nothing can be done about it... -- 213.176.153.100 (talk) 13:43, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

It's 2020 and researchers who have not been peer-reviewed concerning Alex are being saddled side-by-side with experimental data which actually proves Alex's ability to understand language and at least communicate this understanding using a minimal "code". It's really bizzare and ideological and still needs to be fixed. I've noted that these researchers have not conducted peer-reviewed work on Alex in the section mentioned talonx77.183.190.49 (talk) 17:56, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Linking

Please put something behind the "(parrot)" since it makes it hard to link the page to reddit, facebook, twitter etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.183.147.58 (talk) 09:16, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

@185.183.147.58: This actually pertains to URL encoding and the usage of a valid URL scheme. Sometimes the last parenthesis is omitted due to the code or the auto-generation starting without the closing parenthesis. Even if you used the "incorrect" URL - you should still be redirected here. For example, Alex (parrot gives you a link back here.

There's also the usage of some percent-encoding to obtain the URL. %28 is used for the opening parenthesis and %29 for the closing parenthesis. You have seen this with some URLs that have %20 which represents a space. So for this article, you can use Alex%20%28parrot%29 to link to the article: Alex (parrot) or any variation. This link would prevent any issues from markup language form a closing parenthesis. (and yes, these variations are very common on popular subreddits such as TIL to submit reposts on there) – The Grid (talk) 20:34, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Capitalizing the animal's name in the infobox

I capitalized the name "grey parrot" in the species section of the infobox and had it swiftly reverted by @The Grid with the note that the common name of the species is not capitalized. This is not standard practice on Wikipedia. Take for example the infobox of Koko (the gorilla). Even though "western gorilla" is generally written in lower case letters, the word "western" is capitalized as "Western" in the same section of the template, presumably because it is at the beginning of the cell in the second column. Furthermore, if you look at the rest of Alex's (ie. this page's) infobox, words like "male" and "intelligent" are capitalized as well. Inconsistency is a major eyesore. ~~~~ LinicMarino (talk) 07:22, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Hello! You're right that article names are in sentence case. This is usually not the case for infoboxes when it comes to providing text for parameters. The closest policy for infoboxes is MOS:INFOBOXSTYLE but nothing stated about capitalization. MOS:LISTCAPS might be more relevant? Even with your example, it probably should be "western gorilla" for the species. My thought process is these aren't sentences with adding information to the infobox (unless you actually are providing a sentence). I understand there's most likely going to be an inconsistency if you try to look at other articles for animals. You can revert my edit if you would like. – The Grid (talk) 14:21, 28 August 2023 (UTC)