Talk:Starmaya coffee

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Hi Elmidae. Thank you for reviewing the article! I appreciate the input. I would like to discuss your edits and the assertion of 'borderline promotional material.'

Before I go on, I'll say that your assertion of 'borderline promotional material' did make me take a step back and remember that the researchers have applied for an IP trademark of Starmaya and for that reason, I should be cautious in mirroring any promotional tone. I would also note that I have been explicitly cautious of trademarking of F1 hybrids and what the impact a monopoly on plant stock could mean for smallholders. Having said that...

First a nit-pick (and please understand I am arguing in good faith); borderline isn't the same as 'promotional material.' If content is deemed borderline then it is debatable either way and therefore up for discussion, not immediate deletion. As an analogy, one can be borderline-speeding at 65mph and not violate a 65mph speed-limit. To be deleted, the content must be promotional. Deleting content that is 'borderline' moves the goalposts. No longer is 'promotional' the line not to be crossed. Now 'borderline promotional' is the line not to be crossed.

Second, based on the text you removed, I assume you believe the entire section about a seed garden is promotional and I disagree. Seed garden breeding is a broadly-used technique for propagating plants and in the case of Starmaya, it is one of the critical factors that makes it a notable coffee variety—notable in this case because it potentially makes easier/cheaper the use of advanced F1 hybrids for impoverished smallholder farmers who can't otherwise afford F1 hybrids produced via somatic embryogenesis. And that assumes they have a lab in the region that can do SE, which is rarely the case. I agree that because the intent is to trademark and thus profit from Starmaya, care must be taken to avoid a promotional tone. It is still noteworthy that an F1 hybrid coffee tree is able to be propagated by seed.

It is very similar to the situation with gene editing and CRISPR. The technique for editing genes using CRISPR is notable and CRISPR technology is patented. There is still a Wiki article documenting the notability of the technique and technology even if it is patented. As an author I need to ensure I'm not writing promotional material and I don't think the entire 'seed garden' section was promotional in tone. In the article for CRISPR is the statement "The technique is considered highly significant in biotechnology and medicine..." That statement is necessary because it explicitly states the notability of the technique. Would you consider that statement promotional?

I would agree the following statement could be perceived as promotional and could be re-written: "The democratization of use of F1 hybrid becomes more realistic with the reduced cost and technical difficulties that such a seed garden populated with Starmaya represents. [emphasis added]" However, the rest of the section could stand as non-promotional and valuable to the rest of the article (the intent is to expand the section "seed garden" and eventually, possibly create a dedicated article on seed gardens if I can find enough good source material).

A proposed modification to the seed garden section would be something like the following:

Seed garden

Proving that Starmaya can be successfully produced by a seed garden as opposed to somatic embryogenesis (SE) is important because SE is an expensive and technically sophisticated process of propagating large numbers of clones. The research team lead by Frédéric Georget of CIRAD proved that a seed garden is capable of producing F1 hybrids at roughly half the cost of SE. They also estimate that a seed garden could effectively produce a half-million F1 hybrid seeds per hectare, per year.

Therefore seed gardens can play an important role in getting genetically-advanced plant stock to more small holder coffee farmers around the world.

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Thanks again for your input.

—Michael.C.Wright (talk) 05:33, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

@Michael.C.Wright: to clarify, my "promotional" comment was not aimed at text promoting a product (which, while a common problem in new articles, I'm not seeing here) but at promoting a particular finding or thesis. You know the argument structure one generally applies in a journal article: setting out a study aim, demonstrating that one has investigated it thoroughly, justifying the findings, and finally ending up on a variant of "these results will be useful for [furthering some application that funding bodies are interested in]". That is something that ought to be removed from the material before it has the right shape for an encyclopedic entry; we just want the finding. Similarly, almost all explicit in-text attribution of facts to specific authors tends to act as more of an added name-drop than as required attribution - e.g., "X et al. demonstrated that Y (ref to work by X et al.)" is less desirable, from the perspective of a neutral encyclopedic tone, than "It was found that Y (ref)" or simply "Y (ref)". Overall, the aim is to summarise the facts stripped of academic argumentation and attribution overhead. I would ask you to interpret my edits in that light.

Under these considerations, my take on a seed garden subsection would be the condensed version I proposed. We don't generally want to state in Wikipedia's voice that something is "important", that something is a research direction that ought to be followed up, etc. If that is a widely held and multiply-published opinion, as in the case of CRISPR, then that in itself is worth summarizing and sourcing, but it looks to me as if in this case we just have the conclusions of one or two individual studies; and at that level we would not normally take it into the encyclopedia, but leave the referenced sources to make the case on their own turf. And in any case I would suggest that an article seed garden would be the proper place for that rather than here. Cheers --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 16:07, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

References

@Elmidae: I still don't fully understand exactly what was promotional and again, I still question the 'borderline' modifier. Either it's promotional or it isn't. If its borderline, then it is debatable, not deletable.

For example, what specifically about the following statement is promotional and not simply restating the findings of the study?

The proof of concept study established that the Starmaya cultivar has resistance to the coffee leaf rust disease, produces a coffee beverage of very good quality, and can be effectively propagated by a seed garden.

All of those points are important information to know about a specific coffee breed: disease resistance, beverage quality, and the ability to easily reproduce it. Those points are further discussed in the body of the article and therefore are important to be presented in the lead. Your edit not only removed summary content that is supported by the body of the article but made the lead short, technically needing a {{Lead_too_short}} maintenance tag. The edit degraded, not improved the article quality.

I could understand the following being 'borderline' promotional in that it advances a particular, desired outcome that may or may not materialize:

The ability to propagate large numbers of F1 hybrid seeds using a seed garden as opposed to using SE in expensive laboratories will help to professionalize and democratize coffee seed programs

However, that goal is a large part of the reason the study was performed to begin with. They state it in the introduction to the study:

With an annual renewal rate estimated at over one billion trees for C. arabica (B. Bertrand, personal communication), this type of propagation by seeds should allow rapid and large-scale dissemination of Arabica F1 hybrids.

They reiterate the point in the Results and Discussion section of the paper:

Moreover, only a few micropropagation laboratories in the world are able to commercially produce such Arabica F1 hybrids, and none of them produces more than 2 million somatic embryo-derived plantlets per year, which represents a key constraint for the democratization of using such hybrids.

I could understand if your argument was to change the verbiage to something like this:

The ability to propagate large numbers of F1 hybrid seeds using a seed garden as opposed to using SE in expensive laboratories is one way to help professionalize and democratize coffee seed programs.

I am hoping to make two points:

1. 'borderline' anything isn't 'the thing.' Borderline dead is still alive, not dead. Deleting 'borderline' content without opening a discussion invites unnecessary edit battles and is not the generally-understood method of editing articles (see below).
2. the main goal of the study was to prove that an F1 hybrid coffee tree can be mass-produced, making them affordable and obtainable for very large numbers of smallholder farmers. And that is independent of the specific, soon-to-be-trademarked variety.

I would also add from the following: Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/FAQ#Lack_of_neutrality_as_an_excuse_to_delete

...there is usually no need to immediately delete text that can instead be rewritten as necessary over time. Obvious exceptions are articles about living people or clear vandalism, but generally there is no need for text to meet the highest standards of neutrality today if there's a reasonable chance of getting there.

Again, I do appreciate the feedback but it would have been more productive and appropriate to affix maintenance tags and open a discussion rather than delete content whole-sale (15% of the article was deleted in one edit).

--Michael.C.Wright (talk) 23:22, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

@Michael.C.Wright:

• "borderline promotional" was me being polite. I consider the removed material to be unduly focused on the research agenda of one or two specific studies. I suggest we leave that particular phrasing out of the reckoning.
• Maintenance templates are of use when a) there's a reasonable amount of editors who will see the article in question - this number is very low for newly created articles, and in fact at the moment is likely to be 3 (the two of us and the admin who did some syntax fixing yesterday); b) the person who places the templates is unable or unwilling to carry out the changes themselves - but I did take the time to apply what I considered suitable fixes. These templates are not a way to avoid deletion of material, because text deletion is not a big deal; anything can be reinstated from the history. Also, the part of the guideline you cite above warns about removal (instead of reworking) of material that should be in the article but is phrased in a non-neutral manner. What I removed is material that I don't think should be in the article.

"Delete then discuss whether the deletion should stand" is just as common as "add then discuss whether the addition should stand". In either case anybody is welcome to undo the change, go back to the state before the action, and have the discussion from that basis (that's the bold, revert, discuss cycle, probably the most useful Golden Rule on WP). All of which is to say, you are welcome to revert my deletion and then we figure out what ought to be done, if you would prefer that.

• As for why I don't think you ought to: consider this hypothetical text addition to Pig.

X et al. conducted a study to test whether pig-pens require 10 m walls. To that end, they tested the percentage of pigs that could fly, using porcine flight analysis. They found that 99 out of 100 pigs crashed at take-off. This result has important implications for pig-pen design, and should promote the construction of cheaper pig-pens that are more affordable for farmers in developing countries.

As I have tried to point out above, that's not suitable content for an encyclopedic article. What we want is:

99% of pigs can't fly (X et al., 2021).

You could make a much better case when including that material in Pig pen (pretty interesting article :), but even there the last sentence would be a no-go. What I'm seeing in the proposed seed bank paragraph is the inclusion of the entire thing in Pig. I'm pretty sure I'm well in tune with project style when I'm saying that this shouldn't be done.

Lastly, if we find ourselves stuck, we might ask for further opinions, e.g. at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 00:10, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

"Starmaya Coffee" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Starmaya Coffee. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 April 30#Starmaya Coffee until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Michael.C.Wright (talk) 09:25, 30 April 2021 (UTC)