User talk:Plantdrew/Archive 5

Happy New Year Plantdrew!

Happy New Year!

Plantdrew,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. Poepkop (talk) 17:55, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year 2016}} to user talk pages.

.

Thank you, and happy New Year to you too. Plantdrew (talk) 20:09, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Plantdrew!

Happy New Year!

Plantdrew,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 07:26, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Thank you, and best New Year wishes to you too. Plantdrew (talk) 07:29, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Green algae as pollution indicator

Hi, I have a problem related to unicellular green algae, and i think that you are the one who can help me. i wanted to know which unicellular algae functions as indicators of clean water. Ankit2299 (talk) 17:32, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Ankit2299: Sorry, I don't have an answer for you. I think different algae are likely to be sensitive to different pollutants, so picking an indicator species depends on what pollutant you're interested in. And some pollutants are beneficial to algal growth (see algal bloom). Plantdrew (talk) 18:10, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Actually i am solving a crossword puzzle. so let me give an hint to this specific algae it is a 7 letters long word, and its second letter is E. please help me. Ankit2299 (talk) 18:18, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Ankit2299: Hmm. Is the crossword intended for people with specialist knowledge of algae? That clue seems awfully specific if the crossword is geared towards a general audience. If it's a general crossword, I think it must be looking for some descriptive term rather than a specific alga. But I'm not coming up with anything that would fit. "Seaweed" is the right length and has the E, but I wouldn't really call unicellular algae seaweeds (they're more plankton). Plantdrew (talk) 19:23, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

The crossword is for students pursuing Medical Entrance Examination. Seaweed could be the answer, but are seaweeds indicators of water pollution? Moreover seaweeds aren't unicellular and mostly consists of red algae. The clue says "Unicellular green algae which acts as indicators of clean water" . Well thanks for your efforts. Ankit2299 (talk) 05:42, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't really think it's seaweed, but I have no idea what the answer should be. As far as I've been able to find, Wikipedia doesn't have an article on any unicellular green algae that are seven letters long and with an "E" as the second letter. Lemanea is a multicellular red algae with seven letters and an "E". I found a couple other articles that were seven letters with an "E", but they weren't unicellular green algae. Seven letters, "E" as the second letter, unicellular, and green? I'm stumped. Plantdrew (talk) 07:03, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@Ankit2299: are you sure of the "E"? Euglena is a unicellular green alga that is one of a number of genera used in assessing fresh water pollution. (Google "euglena water pollution".) Peter coxhead (talk) 20:38, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Ulva and Enteromorpha

Many thanks for your comments. However Ulva and Enteromoroha are two different genera. In the British Isles there are two (perhaps three) different species: Ulva lactuca and U. rigida. In Enteromorpha there, in the British Isles, seven different species: E. compressa, E. flexuosa, E. intestinalis, E. linza, E. muscoides, E. prolifera and E.ralfsii. Ref. Hardy, F.G. and Guiry, M.D. 2003. A Check-list and Atlas of the Seaweeds of Britain and Ireland. The British Phycological Society. ISBN 0 9527115-16. Thanks, if I can find further info I will contact you again. but am sure this is correct.Osborne 20:14, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

@Osborne: the 2003 checklist is out-of-date. The "definitive" secondary source is AlgaeBase, and this says that Enteromorpha is a synonym of Ulva: see here. The relevant paper is referenced at Sea lettuce and appeared in 2003, which is presumably why it didn't influence the checklist. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:44, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

@Osborne: (edit conflict) I'm not sure how I can explain it any better than I already did. Ulva and Enteromorpha are 'names for two genera. But there's no obligation to accept both genera. Linnaeus had some species in Ulva that moved by later taxonomists into the genus Enteromorpha. Enteromorpha was recognized as a distinct genus for a long time, but in 2003 a study was published arguing that all the Enteromorpha species should be moved back in to Ulva. You have a book from that same year that still recognizes Enteromorpha as distinct; not surprisingly, since the book was likely published (or at least in press) before the study uniting the two genera came out. Michael Guiry is one of the authors of your 2003 book. He also is the person chiefly responsible for maintaining Algaebase. Algaebase/Guiry now treat Enteromorpha is a synonym of Ulva (the Enteromorpha page on Algaebase was last updated by Guiry on 19 October 2015). Do we go with what Guiry thought in 2003 (when he lacked knowledge of a study that came out that same year), or do we go with what Guiry thought in late 2015? Plantdrew (talk) 20:50, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks - that's the problem! You explained it perfectly. I best just leave it until someone makes the decision. I am too old to like the change but no doubt Michael Guiry is right! Osborne 17:12, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Ah Ah Ah. Have found:- "...Ulva (formerly Enteromorpha) intestinalis.. In Guiry, M.D., John, D.M., Rindi, F. and McCarthy, T.K. 2007.(Eds) New Survey of Clare Island Volume 6: The Freshwater and Terrestrial Algae. Royal Irish Academy. p.23 and 99. ISBN:-13: 978-1-904890-31-7 Osborne 20:08, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Delightful series in The Guardian - "New to nature"; and thank you again

Hi again Plantdrew,
Thank you for your help and patience with my contributions, but far more importantly, thank you for all your contributions to the Wikipedia project.
There's a wonderful little series going in that UK newspaper. Mostly animalia but sometimes flora. Pete AU aka --Shirt58 (talk) 12:46, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

@Shirt58: The Guardian series is very nice; written with enough detail to be usefully informative to a specialist, but comprehensible to a general audience. Just what Wikipedia should strive for. Thanks for your kind words, and thank for your contributions to the project. Plantdrew (talk) 21:00, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	This is in recognition of your overall commitment to quality content. Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 20:23, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the barnstar and for all you do for Wikipedia. Plantdrew (talk) 00:14, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Hypericum Barnstar

	Hypericum Barnstar
	For your work on Hypericum articles. Even though many of them are behind the scenes, they make a big difference! Fritzmann2002 18:30, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

@Fritzmann2002: Thank you for the unique barnstar. And thank you for your efforts on Wikipedia. Plantdrew (talk) 18:47, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

A question about Guzmania, the article

Hi, I was thinking of moving Guzmania#Species to List of Guzmania species and I saw that "As of September 2014, the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families recognizes 215 species, including hybrids". I checked the reference and it says " 316 records retrieved". Is that section outdated? I'd rather move a complete list to a new article than an unfinished one. Anarchyte (work | talk) 04:02, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

@Anarchyte: The 316 records include some taxonomic synonyms which should be represented on Wikipedia by redirects rather than articles; they should not be included in a List of Guzmania species. The synonym entries on the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP) are not bolded. I hope that there are exactly 101 non-bolded synonyms in the WCSP listing, but I'm not enthusiastic about verifying that myself. Splitting the species list to "List of Guzmania species" seems reasonable. I hope I can trust that Wikipedia is correct in stating that WCSP recognizes 215 accepted species of Guzmania with another 101 synonyms in Guzmania. Plantdrew (talk) 04:40, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Oh! the genus Guzmania itself is included in the 316 record count. There should be 215 species (and potentially 100 synonym redirects) if Wikipedia is representing WCSP correctly for Guzmania. Plantdrew (talk) 04:54, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

I've created the page, could you please add some categories that would be related to this genus/list? And having it only say 215 is fine, with the other 101 being synonyms which should be redirected? Anarchyte (work | talk) 05:23, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

@Anarchyte:. I've added some categories. Saying 215 is fine. Thanks for your work on the list. Plantdrew (talk) 15:03, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

thanks

for your edits today, I do have a thing about cats without project tags. have taken note of your replacement. In some cases it is not always obvious which projects would be more relevant, but it is appreciated you put them in the right project. cheers JarrahTree 09:04, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

WP:INCOMPATIBLE

Hi Plantdrew, thank you for your clear explanation here that redirects can be categorized when the category is incompatible with the title of the target page on WP:INCOMPATIBLE I wondered if you could please elaborate on a discussion regarding the issue here. Tanbircdq (talk) 17:48, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure that there's really anything I can elaborate on short of quoting the examples given in INCOMPATIBLE. It appears that Ronz removed the categories again after Starcheers said that the artist, label and year categories were justified, and after you'd mentioned INCOMPATIBLE on Starcheers talk page, which Ronz acknowledged. The matter really ought to be settled. I'll note that I'm not entirely comfortable with the language categories; I'd expect an English language album to be entirely in English (but there's certainly a slippery slope from an album with songs in 3 different languages to an otherwise English album containing one song with a few non-English phrases). Plantdrew (talk) 21:26, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi, thank you for your reply. I agree that if there is an album which features English songs with a few lyrics in another language then the category for the other language shouldn't be included, however, the said album features two songs in Arabic. This is no different to an English-language film with large sections in other language, for example Inglourious Basterds features conversations in French and German therefore includes the categories Category:French-language films and Category:German-language films but although it features Italian as this is only a few words the category Category:Italian-language films isn't justified for inclusion.

Categories are meant to be helpful not a hindrance, I say WP:IAR and include them if they are. Tanbircdq (talk) 12:42, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Tropaeolum incisum and Caltha

You sometimes assign importance and quality scales to plant articles. Often, these scales seem to relate to previous versions of the article. I recently extended Tropaeolum incisum (assessed by you) and Caltha (assessed by a bot). I do not think the editor who does an extention should assess the article as well, so perhaps you could revisit both of them. I did put a lot of effort in Caltha, so I am hoping for more than "start-class". If you think that is not justified, please provide me with specific advice, so I can earn it at least "C-class". Kind regards, Dwergenpaartje (talk) 11:20, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: just noticed this; please see User talk:Dwergenpaartje#Biological keys and copyright which may be of some relevance. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:18, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: Indeed, rating on the quality scale is rarely updated after an article is extended (it's easy to overlook since assessment usually requires somebody happening to end up on a rarely-viewed talk page to notice that the assessment is lower than it should be). It's OK for an editor to reassess an article they've worked on (especially for Stub->Start upgrades, but it may be better to seek another set of eyes for potential B or C class articles). 95% of plant articles are start or stub, which makes it difficult to get a sense of what the community considers to be C or better. I tend to be pretty conservative and am not very comfortable assessing articles as C or better.

However, looking at the criteria for C class, I think both the articles you've been working on could be considered C class, but adding a little more information would make that rating more solid. For Caltha, I'd like to see more than 1 sentence for distribution and habitat as well as some information on ecology (how are they pollinated? does anything eat them?). I'll leave the issues with the key for a separate discussion. For Tropaeolum incisum, I'd like to see a taxonomy section (it was originally described as a variety of T. polyphyllum, then elevated to species). Again, more information on ecology (pollinators and predators) would be nice. Maybe also a cultivation section? The first few pages of Google result have quite a few results about cultivating it (but on the other hand, Google Shopping has no results, so it may be difficult for gardeners to acquire). Do take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Template which sketches out what information should appear in an article about a plant. Generally speaking, I'd say a C-class article should touch on suggested sections 1-6 (and when they are relevant for a particuar plant, sections 7-11). Plantdrew (talk) 17:41, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: Thank you. I'll be working on this as soon as I have the time. I'll let you know when I think I am done. Kind regards, Dwergenpaartje (talk) 16:58, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: A lot of additional work has been done on Caltha, and some on Tropaeolum incisum along the lines you suggested. Difficulty with the Caltha page is that no genus level literature on other than taxonomy, morphology and phylogeny exists. I summerized some of the information of the Caltha palustris page, but I guess it is better not to copy all of it. I'm curious to learn what you think of it. Dwergenpaartje (talk) 14:33, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: Excellent work. It is often difficult to find information on some topics for higher taxa. I agree that it's better not to copy everything from Caltha palustris (but including some of it does help the reader understand the genus better). Plantdrew (talk) 17:58, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Redirect issue

I made a right mess of setting up a list of redirects like Aphonopelma clarki, partly through getting into a rhythm with other redirects and not noticing the English name involved in this one, and partly through incompetence (I plead age!). We have discussed before, I think, redirects from synonyms to English names, and what R cats to use. In an ideal world there would be "R from alternative scientific name to English name", but given that there isn't, what's your view on the double categorization I used? Peter coxhead (talk) 17:09, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: I'm still holding out for "R from alternative scientific name to English name" (or at least I haven't being doing any edits on synonym redirects to common name). I think your double categorization is fine given the templates we have now. In the Template_talk:R_from_alternative_scientific_name#Meaning_of_this_template last discussion Paine Ellsworth recommended using {{[[Template:[R to common name|[R to common name]]}}; it redirects to {{R from common name}}, but I note that "to common name" is only used on a dozen pages. It'd be pretty easy to clear existing usage and create a clean ad hoc category (not a Category per se, just the "What links here" list of transclusions). The category won't necessarily stay clean in the long term, though.

SchreiberBike and William Avery seem to be the other editors who are very active with organism related redirects. They've both been adding "R from scientific name" for synonym->common name redirects (e.g. Trionyx cartilageneus). So these redirects are picking up rcats.

Working with what we have now, I think we should use "R to common name" as one way to mark synonyms->common name redirects as slightly different from accepted->common name redirects. And double categorizing with "R from alternative scientific name" as you've done seems appropriate and useful (with two rcats, Catscan can be used to pull out these redirects in the future, even if the "to common name" links get polluted). I'll clean out "to common name" for now.

Going forward, {{R avoided double redirect}} might be a model for a new template to handle these cases.

BTW, I've checked through Category:Redirects to scientific names and put all the spiders (and fungi) I could find in the appropriate subcategory. Plantdrew (talk) 19:50, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply; I think that you're right. The combination

    {{Redr
    |from alternative scientific name|p1=...
    |to common name|p2=...
    }}

seems to capture best for now what the redirect actually is, and can be used to pick up such redirects in future. I will definitely support the creation of "R from alternative scientific name to common name" if this comes up for discussion.

I had noticed your tireless work on categorizing redirects, etc. 220th by number of edits; wow! Peter coxhead (talk) 21:11, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

The Redirect Barnstar

		The Redirect Barnstar
		Your diligent work in the area of redirect categorization and improvement is duly recognized and greatly appreciated. You are truly one of the unsung heroes of Wikipedia, and we hope you continue to enjoy your improvement of this awesome encyclopedia! Thank you User:Plantdrew for your tireless work behind the scenes improving redirect pages related to WikiProject Tree of Life and WikiProject Plants. Great work! MCEllis (talk) 17:58, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you very much. This is a new barnstar for me, and is very appropriate. And thank you for your work on reference/external link templates. Plantdrew (talk) 19:53, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Redirect categorization

Hi Plantdrew! You've been interested in redirect categorization and the This is a redirect template in the past, so I wanted to let you know that there is a discussion at Template talk:This is a redirect#One parameter that might interest you.  Good faith! Paine  21:16, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Subcategorizing redirects related to monotypic taxa

It seems to me that there are enough articles in Category:Redirects to monotypic taxa and Category:Redirects from monotypic taxa to make it worth subcategorizing, as we did for Category:Redirects to scientific names, etc. What do you think? Peter coxhead (talk) 21:18, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Yes to subcategorizing. I've been acting as if subcategories were already supported for more than a year (by including a switch whenever I've edited a monotypic redirect). Plantdrew (talk) 21:57, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Ditto. Ok, I'll look at the templates. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:03, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: It's going to be harder to figure out what should be subcategorized where for these. With common names, it's usually obvious at a glance what kind of organism something is. With scientific names (and alternative scientific names), once you figure out what kind of organism a particular genus is, it's obvious how to handle potentially dozens of binomial redirects. For monotypic redirects most of them will need to be checked individually to figure out what they are. To keep from checking twice, maybe more subcategories should be supported from the start? I assuming you're doing plants and spiders. Fungi will probably want support. The "to" category seems to be largely plants and Lepidoptera with a fair amount of fungi and non-insect arthropods (not that I'm very enthusiastic editing hundreds of moth redirects). The "from" category seems to be heavy on plants, birds and other vertebrates. Plantdrew (talk) 22:45, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm reluctant to provide separate subcategories unless the relevant WikiProjects want them; the rationale for the R categories generally is that they are for maintenance, so if no-one is interested in maintaining them, it's hard to justify.

What we need are tools to interrogate the talk page of a categorized article, since this will almost always show where it belongs. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:57, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I've started with Category:Redirects to monotypic taxa. An impressive number of plant and fungi redirects have already appeared there, and more will doubtless come over time. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:12, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Looking good. I saw another 160 redirects drop into subcategories over the course of a couple hours. I'll give it a few days to settle down, then check over what remains in the main category. I'm glad you got fungi included (that was my main concern above; otherwise I think Sasata would've come along in a couple months and requested a subcategory anyway, after one round of checking the main category). Plantdrew (talk) 18:00, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm currently working on the monotypic spider genera – they are in a bit of a mess, with very inconsistent use of articles at the species name or at the disambiguated genus name. There shouldn't be any spiders left in the general category, because I have a list of all spider genera from the old version of the World Spider Catalog, and have cross-checked with it. When I've done a basic pass through the spiders, I'll move on to Category:Redirects from monotypic taxa. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:40, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Spiders and insects never seem to have gotten consistently on board the "monotypic taxon at lowest rank, but no lower than genus" thing. And in the absence of consistency it's hard to know best practice. I've seen active and experienced editors (who I think should know better) moving monotypic genera to binomial titles (as well as some old school, mostly retired editors doing likewise, though they may not know better). Plantdrew (talk) 22:53, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

The main issue with WP:SPIDERS is that it was most active quite a long while ago, and so developed 'traditions' that aren't usual now. However, no-one seems to have objected to my updating the project pages, so I think we should go with:

• Monospecific genera at the genus
• unless the genus needs to be disambiguated (always by adding "(spider)") in which case at the species

This will require a few moves, some of which I can't make so will need an admin.

There are other issues too, such as genus articles in Category:Monotypic spider genera with no species redirect, and if there is one, it often doesn't have the R cat template. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:29, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Another issue, which we've touched on before, is how to deal with articles like Diving bell spider in which the only species in the genus is at the English name. It still slightly bothers me. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:42, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

And it would also help if the genera in Category:Monotypic spider genera had actually all been monotypic; quite a few now have more than one species, so I've been creating genus and species articles. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:34, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

112 articles use "(spider)" as a disambiguator versus 19 with "(genus)", so it looks like "(spider)" is the way to go. I agree about the monotypic genera at common name; I'm not comfortable putting {{R to monotypic taxon}} on the binomial. Missing species redirects (or non R-catted) should be fairly easy to resolve now that all the categories are in place (and it will be far easier to maintain going down the road); Category:Monotypic spider genera should match up with Category:Redirects to monotypic taxa of spiders. I don't see any easy solution for genera that cease to be monotypic (though it's just the general issue of keeping taxonomy up to date). Plantdrew (talk) 18:08, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: I've moved all of the 19, so only redirects should have "(genus)" now. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:14, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I think it's good practice to update the links on the dab page (MOSDAB discourages linking to redirects in dab pages). Doing this for your moves now. (ah, I see you took care of the most recent ones). Plantdrew (talk) 03:06, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

But it would be good if you could check; it's more efficient as you know to go through doing one thing and then go back to do another, but I don't always remember or I get distracted... Peter coxhead (talk) 08:16, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

I thought at first that the two categories should match pretty closely, but spider taxonomists seem good at choosing genus names that need disambiguating, so when it's fixed, Category:Redirects from monotypic taxa of spiders will be important too. As you say, having these two categories will definitely make maintenance easier in future. I'm about a third of the way through Category:Monotypic spider genera. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:15, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Ok, I've now started off the subcategorizing of Category:Redirects from monotypic taxa. We'll see how well the categories fill over the next few days. I've done a few manually; my impression so far is that the subcategorization on the R cat template may be less complete than for other relevant R cats. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:12, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Good work. I checked the "to" redirects for any plants/fungi/spiders alphabetically through to "Ak..". I turned up several that had the switch for plants and displayed the subcategory but were still listed in the main category. I guess I'll keep waiting. For my own future reference, this CatScan search picks up some of the plant redirects that need a switch for the subcategory. Plantdrew (talk) 02:51, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Moves

Stemonitis has made some moves that need an admin; see User talk:Stemonitis#Monotypic spider taxa needing moves and a couple more sections below. I think I've sorted out the categorization following the moves, but if you have time :-) another eye is always good. Having the subcategories makes it much easier to pick up articles at the wrong rank. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:32, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

I've also asked Stemonitis to deal with Caldcluvia paniculosa; this should not have been moved to Ackama paniculosa – at least not without appropriate sources. And anyway it's a nom. inval. according to IPNI here. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:37, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: I'll take a look over the moves to make sure everything is in order (I had several of them on my watchlist already; presumably I added them due to monotypy issues).

I saw you added TPL as a source for the genus authority for Ceratiola. TPL doesn't display genus authorities anywhere, as far as I can tell. I usually get genus authorities from Tropicos, but I'm bad about citing them.

As for paniculosa, I've left a response on Stemonitis's page, but Ackama paniculosa was re-published here in 2013. I'm not going to defend placement in Ackama based on a primary source, but I find it quite concerning that IPNI hasn't picked up the re-publication after 2+ years. Plantdrew (talk) 17:08, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Re Ceratiola, whoops, that was an error – I need to check the other pages I've fixed for moves to the genus. (My explanation is that I've been doing spiders lately and the World Spider Catalog is a reference for both the genus and the species, so I guess I've been in the habit of adding the ref twice.)

Re Ackama paniculosa, it's tricky, I agree. What's odd about IPNI is that Kanchi Gandhi (who has been involved with IPNI) is actually mentioned as a source of nomenclatural advice in the paper. I'll e-mail IPNI about this, and if IPNI is updated I e-mailed Kanchi Gandhi, and IPNI was updated almost immediately. So it might be possible to move the article – properly of course. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:39, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

By the way, I hadn't realized that a whole series of moves/changes were made by a single new editor, else I should have explained more carefully. I was just checking in TPL to see if all the monospecific genera that needed moving were actually monospecific, and fixing those that apparently weren't.

There are some more genera that are claimed here to be monospecific but not in TPL, but I'll go slower this time – more haste, less speed... Peter coxhead (talk) 19:32, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Nice that IPNI updated. As I mentioned on Stemonitis's page, I take a hands-off approach to taxonomic updates initiated by other editors that are based on primary sources. I recognize why we should be going with secondary sources, but in practice, they don't do what they are supposed to. At Wikipedia, we want to wait and see that proposed taxonomic changes are broadly taken up in the literature. But we don't actually survey the literature (and most species are rarely mentioned in the literature; another problem). We usually pick one secondary/tertiary source and follow that. There wouldn't be a problem if the secondary source was taking it's own wait and see approach and surveying the literature. But the non-primary sources aren't waiting and seeing. Seeming taxonomic conservatism is a function of a slow update cycle, not actual conservatism; we just don't know how TPL/WCSP feel about Ackama paniculosa. And when updates happen there's no guarantee that controversial upheavals aren't embraced by the secondary source. The Code is clear about Acacia, but it's still controversial which is way we have a Acacia/Acacia sensu lato mess that I don't want to touch. For another example, the two leading amphibian databases are run by people who deeply disagree about whether the genus Rana should be split up; this lead to quite a bit of controversy. Neither of the amphibian databases seems much interested in what the consensus is in the literature (the one that opposes splitting Rana pays lip service to the literature consensus, but wants to use Phylocode clade names to keep the genus intact) Anyway, enough ranting. Plantdrew (talk) 23:08, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

No, not a 'rant'; perfectly sound points. One positive point: IPNI is, in my experience, extremely fast in updating if you e-mail them; I've queried something with Kanchi Gandhi on a Sunday and seen it fixed within the hour! Of course this doesn't deal with acceptance. Rafaël Govaerts at WCSP is also good at responding to queries. However, I believe that the update cycle for WCSP has been affected by reductions in government funding for Kew, although I don't have any inside knowledge on this.

A 'rant' of my own: TPL continues to be hopeless where extracts from Tropicos are involved. We have the following three genera marked as monotypic, but with the article wrongly at the species not the genus:

• Osmundastrum – at Osmundastrum cinnamomeum
• Schwalbea – at Schwalbea americana
• Sicana – at Sicana odorifera

None are monospecific in TPL, but as far as I can tell, this is always wrong. For example, TPL here also lists Osmundastrum asiaticum Tagawa as "Accepted" with 2 star confidence, citing Tropicos. But if you go to the Tropicos entry here, it is marked "**", meaning "invalid", and indeed this name isn't in IPNI. The correct name for this generic placement is Osmundastrum asiaticum (Fernald) X.C. Zhang according to both IPNI and Tropicos; Tropicos says the accepted name for this taxon according to the Flora of China is Osmundastrum cinnamomeum. So Osmundastrum actually is monospecific. Sigh... Peter coxhead (talk) 07:45, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Schwalbea australis seems to be treated as a synonym of S. americana. I'm not so sure about Sicana sphaerica and Sicana trinitensis. Both are accepted in fairly recent publications (that I haven't looked at), and I'm not finding anything that treats them as synonyms (but I haven't looked very hard). There's good reason to be skeptical of poorly studied supposed wild relatives of a crop; they could easily be naturalized populations of the cultivated plant. On a side note, it's ironic that the paper that apparently gives a conservation assessment for Sicana trinitensis is titled How free access internet resources benefit biodiversity and conservation research... but is locked behind a paywall. Plantdrew (talk) 17:41, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

R cats again

Ah, so there's a choice between {{R from other disambiguation}} and {{R from unnecessary disambiguation}}! Interesting. I'd only just learnt from you of the existence of the former; I'll certainly make use of the latter too.

I'm still puzzled over redirects from the scientific name of a species in a monospecific genus to an English name. It seems to me that nine times out of ten the English name really applies to the species, so it would be better if

• the article at the English name was treated as the species article
• the redirect from the scientific name of the species was tagged with {{R from scientific name}} and not with {{R to monotypic taxon}}
• the redirect from the scientific name of the genus was tagged with {{R from scientific name}} and with {{R from monotypic taxon}}

What do you think? Peter coxhead (talk) 08:58, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Makes sense to me. I looked at all of the sites given on the first page of Google results for "boldo", and every site that mentioned a scientific name had Peumus boldus, while none mentioned the genus. The species seems to be the predominant topic, with genus subordinate.

Ok, another task to look forward to when the current batch of monotypic taxa are fixed! Peter coxhead (talk) 18:01, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

How are you going through the "to monotypic taxa"? Are you systematically checking each link working backwards alphabetically now? I saw a few days ago you were working forward alphabetically hitting a seemingly random subset of plants. No doubt my recent edits look pretty random if you've looked at them. I've been working off the Catscan search I linked above, hitting redirects that had a "plant described in year" category but lacking the plant switch for monotypic taxa. I'll do the same for fungi next. Once I've done those I'll go back and systematically check each redirect alphabetically starting with B (I have checked all the A's already). Plantdrew (talk) 17:51, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

I started off just looking through the lists and fixing names I recognized. Just lately I've been working systematically backwards through Category:Redirects to monotypic taxa. I'll keep updating where I've got to at User:Peter_coxhead/Work_page#Plants. At first I was prone to miss fungi, so probably U–Z need rechecking for fungi, but I'm doing them all now. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:01, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Quality scale scores

I think I have used all available information on Berberis ilicifolia, and also did some work on Calyceraceae. Perhaps you may want to change the quality scores of these pages. Kind regards, Dwergenpaartje (talk) 13:48, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: I took a look at them and changed the quality score to C. Thanks for your work on them. Plantdrew (talk) 16:28, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

What's never quite clear to me is how relative assessments should be. It doesn't seem quite right, somehow, to end up with "C" when the article basically contains everything there is about a little known species that is relevant to Wikipedia readers, yet on an absolute scale the article is lacking. To be honest, I think I vacillate in my assessments: sometimes more relative, sometimes more absolute. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:51, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

It's all pretty subjective. If I'd just stumbled across Berberis ilicifolia in it's present state I probably would've upgraded it to start, but since I was asked specifically to look at it I'm inclined to be more generous. Overall, I think assessment tends to be more conservative than the criteria actually call for, but I go along with the perceived consensus. C really isn't very good: "missing important content or contains much irrelevant material", "may still have significant problems or require substantial cleanup". I do think assessment should be more relative. You should read the essay WP:CL-RULE. By the way, why did you add {{R from alternative scientific name}} to Jubaea chilensis‎? As far as I can tell it's a straightforward case of monotypy. Plantdrew (talk) 17:26, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Little request

Hello Plantdrew, can you check the last edit in Orchidaceae by user:Wavelength please. I see no value on the subject. Thanks and best regards. Orchi (talk) 20:54, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

@Orchi:. I removed it. It's not relevant to orchids per se. Including it opens the door to other scientific names with interesting (but irrelevat) etymology. Plantdrew (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

I thank you. Orchi (talk) 21:22, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

RE: Binomial authority parentheses

Thank you for the heads-up. I'll keep that in mind. Sandvich18 (talk) 06:43, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Carpodetus serratus and Roussea simplex

Hello, I've expanded Carpodetus serratus and created Roussea simplex. Perhaps you may want to look at the quality scaling of these pages. Concerning Roussea, could you please advise me concerning the question I posed on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Wine#Roussea, because the regulars do not seem to be in a hurry to answer my query. Kind regards, Dwergenpaartje (talk) 15:38, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: I've bumped the articles you've been working on up to C-class. Thanks for your contributions. As for Roussea, it was mentioned as a synonym in Trebbiano, but was removed in this edit (made by an IP associated with Kew Gardens, so presumably was somebody interested in the genus). I can't find anything about grapes/wines named Roussea aside from Wikipedia mirrors, so it appears to be a pretty obscure term. I think it's fair to co-opt it for the plant genus.

Also, Rousseau (disambiguation) says that Rousseau is an alternative name for Chardonnay. I don't know much about grape cultivar classification or wine classification, but I think there may not be a 1-to-1 correspondence between cultivar and wine variety (or at best, wine varieties are associated with a cultivar group and not a single cultivar). Given the number of close variant spellings of Roussea listed in Trebbiano, I suspect that Roussea/Rousseau probably refer to the same thing in the wine world (whatever that thing may be). Plantdrew (talk) 16:46, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Please see User talk:Peter coxhead#Authority of subfamilies for more on this issue. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:14, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Lists of cultivars

Hi Plantdrew,

A few years ago I made the "Lists of cultivars" page. It was little more than a bulleted list, but today I changed the format. What do you think? I'm concerned that the cultivar lists themselves might get a bit lost in the page now. My intention was to make things more findable by adding common names and sortability. I also wanted to give readers some context and options to explore. Any ideas that might improve it? —Ringbang (talk) 03:16, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Addendum: I was thinking of changing the background colour of the "List of cultivars" column to highlight it. —Ringbang (talk) 03:56, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

@Ringbang: The cultivar lists themselves are kind of hard to spot. They'd be more obvious in the left most column rather than the right most, but a change in background color might help to highlight them. I don't see much value to the taxonomic rank column. An ornamental plant/food plant column would be useful (Category:Cultivars breaks down mostly along an ornamental/food plant basis, and I'm trying to clean it up a little more right now). Food plants might perhaps be broken down further into fruit/vegetable/grain cultivars.

There's a lot of potential cleanup with Wikipedia's treatment of cultivars. There's the subcategories of Category:Cultivars, various templates listing cultivars, and the cultivar lists you're trying to account for. All of these should probably be reconciled. And there's a lot of stuff that gets blurry around the edges. Wikipedia has articles on apple and pear cultivars valued for their aesthetic properties (ornamentals) that aren't represented on the apple/pear lists that focus on food cultivars. Another complication is that cultivar status has a precise technical meaning. There are various articles on distinctive cultivated plants that aren't technically cultivars; Category:Cannabis strains is in the cultivar category tree, but formally naming a Cannabis cultivar entails acknowledging possesion of a plant that is illegal in most jurisdictions, so Cannabis strains aren't likely to be formal cultivars.

Without getting too deep into the cleanup aspect for now, I'd suggest emphasizing the cultivar lists somehow (colour and/or leftward placement) and adding a ornamental/food column (perhaps replacing the taxonomic rank). Plantdrew (talk) 04:19, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, that confirmed some misgivings I had about the article. I made some changes that I think improve the usability while still giving readers an entrance and path for the eye. Initially I placed the cultivar lists in the leftmost column, but moved it to a subordinate position after thinking about how readers might go about finding a list of interest. I hesitated to add a "Food/Ornament/Both" column, and what you mentioned about apple and pear trees tells me you have an idea why. At this point I oppose adding such a column because I doubt I'll ever have the data necessary to avoid making ethnocentric assumptions, and I don't want to invite other editors to make those assumptions, either.

About Cannabis and other edge cases: It seems like it would be useful to have a term with a purview slightly broader than cultivar has. Domesticated plants is too broad, and cultigen is too ambiguous. I'd be willing to rename Lists of cultivars to make it more inclusive if I knew what to rename it to. —Ringbang (talk) 02:21, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@Ringbang: The list is looking better now, thanks for your work. Unfortunately, there really isn't a better word than "cultigen" that encompasses all the classes of distinct plants selected by humans. In general usage, "variety" could be understood to cover cultivars, strains, landraces, etc, but variety also has a precise meaning in botany, and most cultigens aren't botanical varieties. Italian traditional maize varieties aren't botanical varieties, and a very much doubt they've been formally named as cultivars. They might be landraces, but that's been contentious term on Wikipedia as well. Plantdrew (talk) 16:48, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Do you think I should rename it to Lists of cultigens? My understanding is that this term sometimes connote an unknown taxonomic origin, and I wouldn't want readers to read it that way. Is cultigen preferable to Lists of plant varieties, cultivars, and strains, or is even that not inclusive enough? —Ringbang (talk) 03:57, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

@Ringbang: I'm not sure it's worth renaming. It's just a huge can of worms. If you do want to move it, I'd suggest "Lists of plant cultivars, strains, and varieties". Listing variety after the other terms better establishes the context that variety is being used in the colloquial sense rather than the strict botanical sense. Plantdrew (talk) 16:57, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Help finding articles in need of tagging?

I saw you comment over at the Wikipedia:WikiProject Insects page regarding catscan, and was wondering if other, similar tools existed for taskforce-level tagging. I'm hoping to get going on tagging Hymenoptera-related insect articles, which already have the {{WikiProject Insects}} tag, but not |Hymenoptera=yes. I'm having trouble because the taxonomic categories are in article space, and the category for taskforce-tagged articles (Category:Hymenoptera articles) is on the talk page. Do you have any ideas? I'm stumped and would appreciate advice! M. A. Broussard (talk) 05:23, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@M. A. Broussard: That is tricky, and a rather large task; there are 3887 non-ant Hymenoptera related articles with a WikiProject Insects tag (based on this catscan search, click Do it!). I believe Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser allows searches for category intersections that cross article/talk space, but I don't have much experience with AWB myself. Bots can be programmed to find what you're wanting, and given the scale of the task, you're probably going to want a bot to do it anyway. The tagging for the ant task force was accomplished by a bot; I'm not sure, but I think User:jonkerz may have made the bot request for the ants, so you may want to ask them.

Basically, you want the bot to add |Hymenoptera=yes to non-ant Hymenoptera articles that already have the insects banner (perhaps also inheriting the importance rating from insects), per the catscan search I linked above. That will pick up a few insect tagged articles that may not be really relevant (e.g. Lithuanian Museum of Ancient Beekeeping), and may miss a few untagged articles that are possibly relevant (e.g. waggle dance). Most of the borderline relevant stuff (whether insect tagged or not) seems to fall under Category:Beekeeping. Plantdrew (talk) 17:03, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@M. A. Broussard: Tagging for the ant task force was accomplished by a bot operated by Magioladitis. I followed the instructions on User:Yobot#WikiProject_tagging (and notified the wikiproject here, and added the request here).

Some notes:

• Most of the tagged pages were not previously tagged with WP:INSECTS' banner.
• Before requesting bot tagging you probably want to set up an assessment log (to catch bot/human errors), and create a New Articles page (to avoid having to make another bot run in a year or two).
• Importance assessment was 100% manual, and it took way longer than expected.

jonkerz ♠talk 19:03, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

There were a lot of pages lacking the insects banner at the time the ants task force was set up. That's no longer the case. I think it might be easier to use banner presence rather then going through the Hymenoptera category tree to identify and exclude irrelevant (or marginally relevant) subcategories such as beekeeping and media portrayals of hymenopterans. But it comes down to what the bot owner prefers. Plantdrew (talk) 20:22, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the information, both of you. I've put in a request to tag the Hymenoptera articles--hopefully it should be relatively straightforward. M. A. Broussard (talk) 00:53, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Goldfish (jaspergeli)

A tag has been placed on Goldfish (jaspergeli) requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section R2 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a redirect from the article namespace to a different namespace except the Category, Template, Wikipedia, Help, or Portal namespaces.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Stefan2 (talk) 09:45, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Polygonum caespitosum/Persicaria longiseta

Thanks for drawing my attention to my mistake. I have restored both articles to the state they were in before the merge and redirect, and posted a message explaining my reasons at both Talk:Polygonum caespitosum and Talk:Persicaria longiseta. (They are two copies of the same message, so don't bother reading both.) I have also posted an answer to your post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants#Polygonum caespitosum/Persicaria longiseta. In my opinion, the original message that I posted at Talk:Persicaria longiseta is unhelpful, and since the issues are now covered better in the other messages on the various pages, I am inclined to remove it. However, since that would also mean removing two posts of yours, I prefer to consult you, rather than doing so on my own. Would you object if I were to remove the original talk page section at Talk:Persicaria longiseta? The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 09:25, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

@JamesBWatson: Thanks for discovering the problem with P. caespitosum redirecting to P. longiseta. Feel free to remove my replies on the talk page if you want. Plantdrew (talk) 17:25, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

@JamesBWatson: Sorry for eavesdropping. I had a look at the P. caespitosum article and it struck me there are no illustrations. I looked for files that are categorised under any of the synonyms but found none. However there are six photos in the Category Polygonum cespitosum. You'r in a much better position to judge whether these photos are indeed the species described in Polygonum caespitosum. By the way, I think most modern field floras accept the subdivision of Polygonum and I think the move to Persicaria is warranted. Dwergenpaartje (talk) 09:00, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately all the photos were taken in the US, so are presumably P. longiseta if we're recognizing that as a a species. Plantdrew (talk) 14:24, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't think of checking locations. Dwergenpaartje (talk) 15:39, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: On the issue of Polygonum caespitosum v Polygonum cespitosum, you seem to be right: at least, I can't see any reason why this should fall under any of the exceptions. I have moved the article to Polygonum cespitosum. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 11:08, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Brexia - Strasburgeria - Ixerba - Cuttsia

I recently created Brexia, Strasburgeria, and expanded Ixerba and Cuttsia. Perhaps I could again tempt you to have a look at the quality scaling of these articles. Thank you in advance. Dwergenpaartje (talk) 08:45, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: Done. I put Brexia and Ixerba to B-class. Although the article rating guidelines don't call for images below GA class, I think they're pretty important for organisms; I've often left fairly lengthy and comprehensive articles at start-class when they lack an image; in this case, I put Strasburgeria as C-class, but might consider it a B with an image. I had trouble deciding what to do with Cuttsia; it feels a little less detailed than the others so I went with C. Plantdrew (talk) 16:29, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

That's great, thank you. I agree with your assessments. I feel we need people that contribute plant images from areas except Europe, Australia/New Zealand and North-America, in this case New Caledonia. Is there any method to identify the area commons contributors live? Dwergenpaartje (talk) 16:36, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: Not really. There are categories and templates for Commons editors that wish to disclose their location, but that's likely a small portion of the editorial pool, and there's nothing for New Caledonia. People working on the French Wikipedia's New Caledonia project might actually live there, but the project doesn't seem to be very active. Plantdrew (talk) 16:59, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Relevant RfC

You may want to comment at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#RFC:_Should_lists_of_species_that_share_a_common_name_be_set_indexes_or_disambiguation_pages?. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:25, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. Plantdrew (talk) 15:29, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi Plantdrew

I saw you rated the article Muisca (beetle) and Muisca bitaeniata as "stubs". I don't know the criteria but looking at the nl:wiki page for the latter (nl:Muisca bitaeniata), classified as "stub" there is no information on that page, while my efforts would classify it more than stub. I translated the linked original source in French from 1844 and heavily referenced the article. Now I added the image at both. There truly is not much more (only some more French translation from the Google book) to say about this beetle as there was only 1 specimen found ever that was described by Spinola (see text). Now with the images included, could it be a "Start"? Cheers, Tisquesusa (talk) 01:37, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

@Tisquesusa: I've changed the rating to start; indeed, there isn't much information out there about these beetles, so the present Wikipedia articles are more than a stub of human knowledge about them. Although the format is a little strange, I think the tamu.edu reference is saying that there are two species in the genus. Or maybe more; their coverage of Claridae isn't marked as complete (see here). The Dutch Wikipedia has nl:Muisca cylindricollis. I've added a reference (in Portuguese) to Muisca (beetle) that might be enough to support a stub for Muisca cylindricollis, though I haven't been able to find the paper from 1962 when that species was first described (as Cregya cylindricollis). Nor can I find the Ekis paper from 1975 which would really help to clarify things. How did you figure out that Ekis's first name was Ginter? Did you find more citation details for this paper? Plantdrew (talk) 03:03, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, great work and cooperation, not seen anywhere else. I have spent quite some hours on the short article and think I found everything there was to find (apart from a longer description of the beetle by Spinola but my French is not good enough to translate that all from the Google book, so I focused on the most important aspects; colour and sizes). I searched on Google for "Entomologist Ekis" and then the first name "Ginter" came up, so I assume it is him. If you're uncertain of his first name I may de-link the Ekis name to avoid confusion? What I found is that the Brazilian entomologist Peracchi classified that "cylindricollis" beetle under Muisca but then in 1975 Ekis reclassied it, that's the reference I linked. If you have better sources, feel free to change it. Thanks for the start class, it is only on the talk page and not on the article, so not a big deal anyway but the stub status would be more for "let me fill this red link with the most basic of info and not look further" and that was not what reflects the effort in the short article I made. My main personal project is on the Muisca people so I was interested to find other meanings of "Muisca" via the disambig page. After that I found more, linked at the bottom of the Muisca people article which I am improving. Only registered for 4 days now so a lot to catch up, but I just finished my 16th new article Thomagata. If you're interested have a read, your sharp eye may help in improving even more. Thanks again and cheers, Tisquesusa (talk) 03:47, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

From what I'm finding, I'm pretty convinced that the entomologist "Ekis" is "Ginter Ekis", so you did a good job figuring that out. Peracchi apparently never put cylindricollis in the genus Muisca, but tamu.edu has a confusing format. As far as I can tell when tamu.edu lists genus x = genus y, it means that genus y is a synonym of genus x (and not that x is a synonym of y). From my understanding of what is on tamu.edu, the Ekis paper is the key to understanding this situation. Best wishes for your work on Muisca people related articles; that is an interesting topic that needs to be better represented on Wikipedia. Plantdrew (talk) 04:39, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Please grade Peony articles

Hello. I noticed you found the article on Nikolai Schipczinsky translated from ru: and improved it. Thanks. I have now extensively edited Paeonia anomala, Paeonia veitchii, Paeonia ludlowii and Paeonia delavayi. Perhaps I may ask you to review the grading of these pages, and advise me how to get the first two to C-class. Thanks in advance, Dwergenpaartje (talk) 10:45, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: My recent regrading of the first two was done in haste. Looking at them more thoroughly, C class is appropriate for all 4. I would like to see a cultivation section for P. veitchii and P. delavayii though. I think the cultivation sections should start off with an explanation of why it's cultivated (i.e., as an ornamental). Also worth mentioning is history of cultivation (this is kind of covered for P. veitchii), and whether there are any cultivars (P. delavayi has at least one cultivar). In writing a cultivation section, avoid giving advice (per WP:NOTHOWTO). I think the phrasing in the cultivation section of P. anomala is excellent. Some of the phrasing in the cultivation section of P. ludlowii reads like advice; words like "should" and "needs to be" (as in "watering needs to be done with caution") should be avoided (notice how I'm giving advice with "should be avoided"). 15:14, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, that is very helpful. I succeeded in finding some information on cultivation, particularly hybrids, and also on diseases for P. delavayi. Nothing much on P. veitchii though. Dwergenpaartje (talk) 14:33, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Disambiguating again

Hello, after working with you on Sessility, I thought of you again today when this came up. I was trying to disambiguate Schwartz, and two articles - Phosinella cancellata & Rissoina fenestrata link to Schwartz. They mean the German paleontologist, bio here: [[1]] (in German). I don't think he has an article, but with all the possible variations in the name I could have missed it. Should he? Is anyone who names a species considered notable? Would you suggest just unlinking these, turing them into precise red-links, etc. MB (talk) 03:29, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

@MB: There doesn't seem to be any clear consensus as to whether people who have described species necessarily deserve articles. Species are generally considered notable (WP:SPECIESOUTCOMES), and articles on species frequently link the person responsible for describing them. See here for a recent discussion of notability of taxonomic authorities (focusing on plants).

I think an article on the German paleontologist "Gustav Schwartz" would likely be notable for inclusion on Wikipedia. And a red-link for Gustav at Schwartz (surname) would be OK as well. I'd suggest precise red-links rather than unlinking. Plantdrew (talk) 04:03, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

I created a stub for Gustav Schwartz MB (talk) 16:39, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Looks good. Plantdrew (talk) 18:52, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the cleanup. I noticed that in Alvania, Schwartz shows up twice. I assume this is the same guy. I'm not that familiar with taxonomy - if you want to link these, and/or add these species into his article if appropriate. Is Alvania schwartziana named after him? Is Alvania watsoni described by him? MB (talk) 19:34, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Seems he described A. watsoni, see here. It seems pretty likely that A. schwartziana is named for him, but I can't find anything to confirm that. I've asked at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gastropods#Gustav Schwartz.2FAlvania. Plantdrew (talk) 20:29, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Just for you, for all your help at RfD with taxonomy

In matters floral

Plantdrew's quite oral

That user knows

A bug from a rose

My poetry don't smell as sweet as

Shakespeare's but we try a feat of

Getting the Linnaen system into

Neelix creations

(That came down with a bump didn't it!)

My sincere thanks for all the hard work you do over at WP:RFD to get through the Neelix creations. There are stacks of em. I listed a lot of made up ones for speedy deletion, I have a load of wasps next. I actually know latin a little bit self taught but that does not help with what the Linnaen taxonomy would call it (and of course the word taxonomx is not Latin but Greek and so on but Neelix redirects get you like that I have lots of apis to do wasps or bees, in latin a bee is an apis and a wasp is a vespa as any fule kno but I don't know what it is in taxonomy. loads of them listed under apis but are wasps, which seems odd to me but a lot of them seem to be taxonomically correct so it is plouhh through eacg individually). Si Trew (talk) 23:35, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

@SimonTrew: Thank you for the poem. Taxonomy is from Greek, but scientific names can be from Greek too (even though people often call them "Latin names") There can even be Latin and Greek together in a binomial (though not in the same word). Etymologically speaking, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi (with an English common name of "bearberry") is one of my favorite scientific names.

Are you saying there are a bunch of Neelix created bee/wasp redirects that need to attention? If so, point me to the list and I'll take a look. Plantdrew (talk) 01:37, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

There are but I cannot find em (I tried). There are so many botany ones that I can't search for them effectively. There is apis this and pis that, and probably some of them are valid redirects but a lot are nonsense in the usual way. Having done so many kinda your eyes cloud over after a while so please excuse me but I am going to take the nonsense historical Latin ones next, you might find them below Tulipa lutea which I happened not to have closed on my browser when Twinklingling it for speedy and don ít know if that went red or not, but may give you an open sesame, I think they were inm the section in the same sectoion below that. but there are 'thousands upon thousands of taxonomy ones that sheesh I dunno we might as well publish Wikpedia Neelix Taxonomy instead of all the reliable sources that are usually mentioned in um not botanical but whatever you would call them articles about the things that live in the world about you. Si Trew (talk) 09:09, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

I am now doing the people in the Neelix list mentioned in Latin classics, to give you a break. Si Trew (talk) 08:47, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

By the way I and another editor contributed to create {{ety}} and it works very well (it was before the days of Lua) but I see that the instructions are way too daunting so it never really caught on. You can do {{ety|grc|Arctostaphylos|uva|bear|One bear over another}} for example. The best one I think that Carl Linne made which he was a bit sex-obsessed poor chap is to make testicles into what we call orchids, they were never called that before Linne denoted them thus. The etymology is of course from the greek but the target Orchidaceae don't give any etymology. Which is a bit of a balls-up. Si Trew (talk) 09:15, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

A lot of these terms is what my little dictionary calls "New Latin" or "New Greek" i.e. invented simply to name something when Latin with a bit of Greek was the Internet, was the way to give it to a wider audience. Newton wrote in Latin, most scholars wrote in Latin. Then some kind of around about fifty years ago someone said Latin is old fashioned we will not teach Latin it is a dead language only spoken by dead people. So I only learned my Latin and Greek in my spare time and am not very good at it, but because I speak French and Roma and a bit of Spanish and so on, I can see where it comes from even though I may not know the word or its formation exactly. Daily I speak Hungarian and I can see the Latin influences and that is a very peculiar language like a very peculiar country, it is has a language not related to anything else in Europe really (well it is Finno-Ugric. So some things to me stick out like a sore thumb and I know they are wrong but can't tell you why. Si Trew (talk) 09:26, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

The etymology template look really nice, but it's understandable that it didn't catch on. There are a lot of templates on Wikipedia. I know the syntax for a few templates that I use frequently. I look up the syntax for some other templates that I use infrequently. And there are probably thousands of templates that might be useful in some of my edits, but I don't know of most of them, and I don't usually think of trying to apply the ones I'm vaguely aware of. If I ever decide to spend time expanding etymology sections, I'll keep {{ety}} in mind.

Yes, "New Latin/Greek". Scientific names in the last 250 years would be mostly incomprehensible to a citizen of Rome or Athens 2000 years ago. I'm not finding it now, but sometime in the last year I was talking to somebody on Wikipedia about whether the orchid etymology section should link to Clitoria. I see that Clitoria was recently linked to orchid. While the sexual aspect of the etymology for both plants is interesting, I don't think cross-links are encyclopedic. Plantdrew (talk) 03:51, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Move discussion for Adansonia

There's a move discussion at Talk:Adansonia#Requested move 1 May 2016 and I feel like I may be applying NCFLORA incorrectly. Would you mind chiming in there and setting me straight? Ibadibam (talk) 17:09, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

@Ibadibam: Thanks for alerting me to the move request. I wouldn't exactly say that "WP:NCFLORA trumps COMMONNAME". Most organisms are only recognizable by specialists, who use the scientific name to communicate about them; that is, "the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources)" (per WP:COMMONNAME) is the scientific name. The other thing is, most plants that occur in English speaking countries do have "vernacular" names that are invented by specialists. But the specialists don't use them much themselves, and there's no effort to standardize them; different specialist sources promote different vernacular names. And a lot of times, the invented vernacular names are half-hearted translations of the scientific name. I don't see how "Bigelow's coreopsis" (for Coreopsis bigelovii) really helps the lay reader; if they know what a coreopsis is in the first place, they probably won't have much trouble with "bigelovii", and if they don't know what a coreopsis is, then the vernacular name doesn't help. NC:FLORA is first and foremost about not using invented vernacular names (which aren't at all "common" in the sense of COMMONNAME) for article titles.

Then there's a smaller number of plants that are recognized by lay people and do have a genuine common name (and not invented by specialists). The problem is, plants with this level of recognition frequently have different names in different regions (and a name that refers to plant A in one area might refer to plant B somewhere else). With multiple common names in play, the scientific name may still end up being the "most commonly used" name overall (and there's a precision/ambiguity issue when the same name refers to different plants).

A handful of plants are very well known, and have a (nearly) universal, unambigous common name. We often have these at common name titles. Tree genera (such as oak, willow, pine) are a frequent exception to NC:FLORAs preference for scientific names. I think baobabs are probably better known than hornbeams, so there might be a case for moving. What kills it for me, is that there is really one species that is the baobab, although the term can also apply to the entire genus. There's no perfect solution. Dandelion and sunflower are other cases where the common name might be a good choice of title, but it's tricky to decide whether it should be the title of the genus page or the single most prominent species in the genus. Plantdrew (talk) 02:10, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

As always, I am indebted to you for your mastery of the nuanced intersection of taxonomy and Wikipedia guidelines, and your willingness to take the time to help fellow editors! Ibadibam (talk) 01:06, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Pelidnota Lutea

You asked to be pinged when this RfD was closed. I made a hash of the close operation, so I'm letting you know directly in case the ping didn't work. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 13:08, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. Plantdrew (talk) 16:17, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Paeonia mairei - P. obovata - Edouard-Ernest Maire

Hello, perhaps I may again ask you to have a look at a few pages I edited and review their grading: Paeonia mairei and Paeonia obovata. It seems strange the latter earned "mid" importance, same as the Peony article, when this is a really important ornamental and cut flower, but this species is not. You already graded Edouard-Ernest Maire, and I think stub is fine, but perhaps you could see if you think the underreferenced tag is justified. Most importantly, I would like your advice on the organisation of the Peony page. I'm rather struggling with it and it hampers me doing further edits. Thank you in advance, kind regards, Dwergenpaartje (talk) 09:01, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje: Sorry, I've been away for a few days and am just getting caught up on Wikipedia. I've reviewed the pages you requested.

As for organization of the peony page, feel free to disregard the suggested order in template for plant articles if it is hindering your work. The template doesn't mention etymology, but this usually appears at the beginning of an article, if it appears at all. You might try something like the following (click to expand):

Extended content
2.2 Etymology 1 Description 1.1 Morphology 1.3 Genome 4 Distribution 2 Taxonomy 2.1 Phylogeny 7 Species 3 Growth habits and flower types 3.1 Plant growth habits 3.2 Flower types 6 Cultivation 6.1 Propagation 5 Chemistry and biological activity 1.2 Phytochemistry (merge, no need for separate section header) 8 Symbolism and uses 9 Gallery 10 References 11 External links

I think the species list belongs under Taxonomy (or immediately after). Growth habits and flower types (especially flower types) gets into stuff that is more relevant to cultivation, so I'd like to see that near the cultivation section (but growth habit and flower types also bears on Description, so maybe description should be moved down?). I'm not sure that the sections "Chemistry and biological activity" and "Phytochemistry" are both needed; merge these into one section (mentioning C3 carbon fixation doesn't really fit well in any of the existing sections, but it could probably go into Morphology). The Species section has a lot of white space. Maybe the images of the species should be tiled into the space to the right of the species list? If that doesn't work, I'd suggest listing the species (at least the herbaceous ones) in two columns, and moving the images into the Gallery section at the end of the article (most of what's currently in the Gallery isn't very useful compared to the images you've added, so you could clear a lot of that out). Plantdrew (talk) 21:11, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I don't think I have ever thanked you

I just took this out of RfD as it is a bit off topic but I don't think I ever have actually thanked you for coming here with your professional botanical expertise and sorting out the botanic ones. I do so now.

Where I live it is quite nice my landlords threw out this old cast iron bathtub to put a new plastic one in before we moved here and I just filled it up with a lot of soil and as it happens there was a load of spare wood and with a tenon saw and a bit of that the two went together to make a frame, and despite a lovely caption Bill Watterson wrote for Calvin and Hobbes sometimes life is unfair in your favour, it just perfectly fitted so it goes in a wooden frame that was going for scrap too. I whacked some bulbs in. Came out rather nice but it is in rather a shady spot so need to get things that don't need too much sun. This year I am going to get some trellis and start get things climbing up the walls. The Hungarian roses are beautiful they are doing magnificently at the moment they grow much quicker than an English rose because of the different climate they are essentially a climber/rambler and they have been doing marvellously about three meters across by three meters high now. Mind you, I wouldn't say he was lazy but my landlord, well, he is so lazy he concreted over the window boxes (joke). I have a beautiful garden. Voltaire in Candide said il faut cultiver notre jardin, we must dig our own garden. I know it means metaphorically to plough one's own furrow or whatever although it never seems to be translated that way which to me would be the obvious translation, but I get so much pleasure out of my garden. I even got a fencepost to take root. My compost heap is doing very nicely too, that takes a couple of years to really get to ferment.

You can take the botanical taxonomic ones but I can speak French comme une vache espanol ("like a spanish cow") so I really enjoy when I can actually not "put one over on you" but kinda for once I am the expert and you are the idiot if you see what I mean! What I really mean is that I love the collaborative effort of working on Wikipedia together, all of us, to make it better. I thank you for that sincerely merci beaucoup kősszonom. We all have our different talents and only by working together can we make this the biggest, best, freest, most wonderful resource that we can ever provide to people who don't have our talents, skills, money or schooling. Imagine if everyone in the world, in every language, could get hold of every bit of information they could possibly want or something like that that Jimbo said when he started this project. I never forget that (well I just forgotten it cos I misquoted it no doubt but I never forget the sentiment). That is the "vision" in management speak, but it's easy sitting in a comfy chair in a warm house to forget that. We must never forget that. Some people rely on us as their only source of information. We can't let them down.

Hmmm I never thought of this why would a daffodil be called a narcissus? I mean they don't look at themselves in the mirror etc is it because they droop down in the evenings etc like Narcissus looking into the lake? One of Linnés I imagine. Si Trew (talk) 21:30, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Incidentally you may help me. I was only thinking of this the other day but the French word compote you know the jam and stuff well I can't do the circumflex I don't think but it is over the second O and usually indicates a "missing" S (from Latin) like fenetre (sorry the missing circumflex) is from Latin fenestra from whence we get of course defenestration, bloody marvellous word, only English would have a specific word to mean "to throw someone out of a window". I presume this is cognate with English compost but it had just never occurred to me before. Must be, surely? Like they both ferment down and stuff. Probably quite Old French and departed I dunno four centuries ago but probably cognate I would think? If not I have given you another remarkable fact cos I bet it is so your compost heap, if you have one, you can now call a "triage de compote" or whatever and start charging tourists. Si Trew (talk) 21:55, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm may not be cognate I dunno. perhaps it is a back formation then when English companies try to sell you jam that is called "compote". Hmmm.. Si Trew (talk) 22:02, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

@SimonTrew: Thank you for the the thank you, and thank you for your hard work with redirects. I've enjoyed working with you. So much of what I do here is cleaning up in the footsteps of long departed (or barely active) editors, so it sometimes feels like direct collaboration is lacking from my Wikipedia experience. Of course, that stems from my choices about what to edit, so I can only blame myself. It's been nice that our editorial interests have been overlapping recently.

Your bathtub garden sounds nice. I have a small plot at my work where I grow herbs and vegetables. Another tenant in my apartment building had put some effort into planting ornamental plants around the building. She moved out a few months ago, and the landlord then cut down all the shrubs (but didn't bother to dig up the root wads) and sent a lawnmower over everything else. I've put back in a few herbs that were doing well in my plot at work, but I don't really trust that the landlord won't mow them down again. If I had a bathtub for a planter, it wouldn't get mowed.

Linnaeus formally named Narcissus, but the name has been around for a long time (though it might possibly have referred to a different plant in antiquity). I've always assumed it was named for being a handsome plant, without any consideration of reflections or an elevated/narcissistic sense of self (and I've always assumed Adonis (plant) was named for being handsome as well). To reiterate a point I made at RfD, don't look very hard for meaning in scientific names. They're arbitrary. Narcissus plants are named for the mythological character, but don't assume there's any particular kind of logical connection. Simmondsia chinensis is a blatant misnomer (it doesn't grow in China), but that doesn't invalidate it as a scientific name.

I've never looked into the etymology of compote/compost, but they've always reminded me of each other. Compote just doesn't sound appetizing, it's too close to compost. Plantdrew (talk) 04:08, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Sorry for barging in on your conversation guys, and I know it probably happened a long time ago, but Narcissus was named as such because in the Greek myth, Narcissus turned into a daffodil because the lake he stared at until his death was surrounded by such plants, which drooped down near the water's edge, so giving the impression they were looking at themselves. Megaraptor12345 (talk) 15:46, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

@Megaraptor12345: nope, see Narcissus (plant)#Etymology. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:53, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

2016 Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Search Community Survey

The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation has appointed a committee to lead the search for the foundation’s next Executive Director. One of our first tasks is to write the job description of the executive director position, and we are asking for input from the Wikimedia community. Please take a few minutes and complete this survey to help us better understand community and staff expectations for the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director.

• Survey, (hosted by Qualtrics)

Thank you, The Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Search Steering Committee via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:48, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Monospecific genus articles at the English name

I find myself constantly baffled as to how to write the opening sentence for an article on a monospecific genus which is at the English name. King baboon spider is perhaps my preferred style, but it's against the advice not to use the phrase "scientific name" and instead to write something like:

The king baboon spider (Pelinobius muticus) ... the only species in the genus Pelinobius'.

which to me inappropriately de-emphasizes the species and also implies that the English name applies only to the species, whereas it's more common in less popular groups such as spiders for the English name to apply to at least the genus, if not a larger group.

Another approach, as at Greenbottle blue tarantula, is to give up on starting with the title of the article, and write as if the article were at the genus name. I prefer the text of the article this way, but on the other hand I believe in starting the article with its title. (Of course another answer is not to have such articles at the English name, but where RMs are needed, it's a hassle and the outcome not certain.)

Do you have any thoughts about this issue? Peter coxhead (talk) 08:12, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Hmm. I think the phrasing at king baboon spider is fine. But I'm not a fan of enclosing either the English or the scientific name in parentheses; some presentations of Wikipedia strip out parenthetical phrases (e.g. Google Knowledge Graph, and previously the Wikipedia pop-up preview). But with no parentheses, text is needed to connect scientific and English name. I've struggled with the phrasing in typical plant articles. For species I've been going with "Pelinobius muticus, the king baboon spider, ...", but the construction looks strange to me with possessives ("...the Smith's baboon spider...") and plurals ("...the baboon spiders..."). Since the plural form would be needed for polyspecific genera, I haven't really found any satisfactory way to present common names for genera. Monospecific genera present another complication. I don't think I've done any editing of the opening sentence for monospecific genera with English name titles, so I haven't really thought about this precise case before. If the phrase "scientific name" is discouraged, would "known scientifically as" work? Plantdrew (talk) 22:29, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

The consensus favouring the style "Bold Engish name (Scientific name) ..." is recorded at Wikipedia:WikiProject Animals#Article content, with a link to the discussion that led to it. I've been reverted before when I changed animal articles to have a bold English name, with this link cited in the edit summary. So I don't think it's the specific phrase "scientific name" that is objected to, rather that the precise format, including parentheses, is considered mandatory by some editors. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:20, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

I've seen that discussion. It's only relevant for the minority of articles that are at vernacular name titles, and doesn't really address ranks above species or monotypy. I'm willing to respect that consensus for species at vernacular name titles (not that I work on those much), but I think be WP:BOLD and {{WP:IAR]] for more complicated cases such as vernacular titled monotypic genera.

I'd like to start regular (like one a day) move requests of some of the animal articles with really badly chosen vernacular name titles to build awareness of how poorly WP:NCFAUNA works in the grand scheme of things (at this point, I think it's out of line with WP:COMMONNAME, the title guidance at WP:TOL, and the actual practice of animal editors working on anything but birds and non-rodent mammals). But I know if I start that discussion it's going suck up all my energy for editing Wikipedia. Plantdrew (talk) 16:57, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Please rate peony species articles

Hello. Thank you again for the good advice and the revaluation of plant articles. I recently did substantial work on Paeonia brownii, Paeonia californica, Paeonia cambessedesii and Paeonia emodi, and I hope you are willing to have a look at their quality class again. Thank you in advance. Dwergenpaartje (talk) 11:39, 18 June 2016 (UTC) @Dwergenpaartje: Done. They look to be C-class. Plantdrew (talk) 19:01, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

A Star for you!

	A Living Barnstar
	For ceaseless work on classing articles for WikiProjects Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:33, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

@Chiswick Chap:. Thank you very much for the barnstar. And thank your for your work on the various living things in culture articles. Plantdrew (talk) 22:39, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Oldfield Thomas

I see that you fixed something I did wrong. I had lowercased Oldfield in several articles based on the capitalization used at that time at Oldfield mouse and Thomasomys. I will go back and revert the changes I made. Do you know if that applies to Peromyscus polionotus ((O)ldfield mouse) too? If so, I'll work on that too. Thanks,  SchreiberBike | ⌨  02:54, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

@SchreiberBike:, well, I'm having second thoughts. I'm not actually finding any sources that have "foo Oldfield mouse"; it's either title case as "Foo Oldfield Mouse" or completely lower case as "foo oldfield mouse". However, it makes sense to me that "Oldfield" should capitalized as a proper noun, as it seem pretty clear that Oldfield Thomas is the namesake of Thomasomys (on the other hand, it seems that Peromyscus poliontous is likely named for a habitat preference for old fields, so that should be lower case). Looking at the titles of species in Thomasomys it appears that Wikipedia has a weird hybrid of sources. Most species are listed in MSW where "Foo Oldfield Mouse" is a consistent format for common names. However, there are species that aren't listed in MSW where Wikipedia has apparently invoked the MSW common name format in the absence of any sources. I don't see where the common name for Thomasomys hudsoni came from; it's not in MSW or the IUCN Redlist. Beady-eyed mouse's common name comes from IUCN; MSW has it as "Beady-eyed Oldfield Mouse". There are some other species not listed in MSW where the sourceable common name seems to be "foo thomasomys".

More broadly, I'm not sure that any of the Thomasomys species have common names that are more commonly used in reliable sources than the scientific names. WP:COMMONNAME is about use in sources, not a blanket mandate for using common names instead of scientific names for obscure organisms. Sources that bother to include common names are divided between "Foo Oldfield Mouse", "foo oldfield mouse" and "foo thomasomys". WikiProject Rodents suggests that scientific names should be used as titles in most cases. I'm considering initiatng a request to move Thomasomys species to scientific names. Plantdrew (talk) 03:23, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

That makes sense. I've been looking at Google Scholar and it's pretty clear that Peromyscus polionotus is lower case oldfield. For the Thomasomys species there's a lot less published and where it is, it is rare for a common name to be used. The connection between Thomasomys and Oldfield Thomas is well supported though, so where a common name is used in that genus, I think Oldfield should be capitalized. I can go through the Thomasomys species articles and fix the capitalization there if you think I should.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  03:51, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

@SchreiberBike: Everything in Thomasomys is now back at "foo Oldfield mouse" except Beady-eyed mouse and Thomasomys ucucha. No need for you to go through and check for fixing capitalizations. I've got a script running that makes links to redirects a different color (green) than links to article titles (blue). This makes it easy for me to quickly check (in this case) whether the "Oldfield" capitalization is the article title rather than a redirect. As I know you do a lot of work on redirects related to organism common names and alternative scientific names (and thanks for your efforts in this area!), you might also find different colors for redirects and article titles useful. Copy User:Plantdrew/common.css to User:SchreiberBike/common.css to achieve this (there are also some more sophisticated scripts that provide additional ways to color code type of links if you're interested). Plantdrew (talk) 04:11, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Wow that script is very useful. I can see that will help me a lot in my work. Thank you for that.

It does look like the text of most of the Thomasomys articles still needs to have the capitalization corrected. The titles are right but the common names are still mostly lower case "oldfield". I'll work on that today. If you go ahead and rename them to scientific names, which makes sense to me, there will be a need to change what is bolded. Let me know and I can do that. Keep up the good work and thanks again.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  19:00, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

SchreiberBike/Plantdrew If either of you can confirm why the oldfield mouse (Peromyscus polionotus) is called "oldfield" can you please add it to the etymology section of Wiktionary:oldfield mouse, thanks. :) —Pengo 06:33, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Anthemis chrysanta

Thank you for stepping in; I will proceed immediately creating that article. In any case, I will let you know when I am finished: it would be good that you give it a review both for English and content worthiness. MOUNTOLIVE _{fedeli alla linea} 10:46, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Done. I have loosely translated es.wiki (actually translation is quite literal, but I have completely skipped some sections such as 'taxonomy') and also added a good source I found onlie. In that source (atlas and red book of Spanish threatened vascular flora) there is additional info on description and habitat which I didnt dare to translate due to very specific vocabulary. For sure you know those terms...you also seem to know some Spanish, so maybe you want to give it a try with translation and expand it a little (I believe a proper description should be in place). Best regards. MOUNTOLIVE _{fedeli alla linea} 13:18, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

@Mountolive: It looks pretty good for now, thanks for your work creating the article. I don't have time at the moment, but I'll look at expanding it with information from the Spanish Red Book in a couple of days. Plantdrew (talk) 17:04, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Olea capensis and Olea laurifolia

Olea laurifolia is no longer recognised as a species, but has been sunk under Olea europaea subsp. africana.

The confusion between Olea laurifolia and Olea capensis subsp macrocarpa came about because there is a description of Olea laurifolia by Sim in 1907 in a publication called ‘Forest Flora of the Cape Colony’ that is based on a specimen of Olea capensis subsp. macrocarpa, and the latter was for some time wrongly called Olea laurifolia. The ‘true’ Olea laurifolia described originally by Lamarck is now recognised to be the same as Olea europaea subsp africana.

So I suspect that the trees in the Knysna area that are called Olea laurifolia are just out of date botanically speaking and should be called Olea capensis subsp macrocarpa.

Olea capensis subsp macrocarpa is variable but the leaves are usually elliptic-ovate

Olea europaea subsp africana is also variable, but its leaves are usually narrowly elliptic, usually less than 15mm wide, and the under surface is usually covered in small scales JubaJoubert (talk) 07:27, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

@JubaJoubert:. Do you have a reference that explains the situation? I can understand that Olea laurifolia may be widely misapplied, but sources I'm looking at have O. europea subsp. africana as a synonym of Olea europaea subsp. cuspidata. I see that SANBI has the synonymy the other way around, but it appears to me that if the two subspecies are the same, cuspidata (1942) would have priority over africana (1979). I found a fairly recent revision of Olea, but I don't have access to the full text at the moment; I'll check it when I'm on a different network tomorrow. Plantdrew (talk) 23:25, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Looking at the revision now, it has Olea laurifolia auct non Lam. as a synonym of O. capensis subsp. macrocarpa, so that checks out. But it has O. laurifolia Lam. is a synonym of O. capensis subsp. capensis. And Olea europaea subsp. africana is a synonym of Olea europaea subsp. cuspidata. Plantdrew (talk) 16:06, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Good day Plantdrew. A person who works at SANBI gave me the information. Go to this link and see for yourself. It is the SANBI Red Data list of South African plant species: http://redlist.sanbi.org/ JubaJoubert (talk) 19:32, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Help with section orders / ranks

Hi Plantdrew,

Guess you noticed the weird ordering of sections on List of recently extinct plants and similar pages. As you appear to be the first to have noticed / edit the ordering on any of these pages, I thought I'd try to expand on why these lists are like this and see if you'd be interested in perhaps helping to create some rules for the bot which generates them, sometime in the future, to stop future lists from being as messy.

Basically, the problem is that the source data I'm using is from the IUCN Red List, and they don't attempt to add a lot of fine granularity to their taxonomic tree data. So, for example, in the list of endangered mammals Beastie Bot originally intermixed whales with deer and gazelle. Whale and deer families all belong to the same order ("Cetartiodactyls"), so the bot mixes them all together with some kind of weird deer-whale-deer ordering (which can be seen in the earliest versions of the article).

I solved the issue by manually going through all the relevant taxonomic families used by the IUCN and sorting them into cetaceans and non-cetaceans in a custom rules list for my bot. Similarly, I've also combined several other mammal groups such as New World monkeys, separated snakes from lizards, and created a giant paraphyletic group called "fish".

So far, I've done nothing of the sort for the plant lists, so their ordering can seem somewhat random. (It actually defaults to placing "more threatened" groups first using an obscure measurement found on the IUCN's site, but for all intents and purposes it might as well be random).

I'm going to attempt to create the remaining IUCN Red List plant lists either tonight or in the next few days. My knowledge of plant diversity is pretty limited, so in case you're interested in helping make future versions better, later on I'll try and write up some instructions for fixing/improving the tree data. Cheers —Pengo 06:24, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

@Pengo: I believe most fields of taxonomy have a traditional sort order that originated in great chain of being-thinking and persisted until quite recently in spite of the fact that GCOB-thinking doesn't reflect evolution at all. Of course, in light of evolution, any sort order is largely arbitrary which is way the GCOB-inspired sort orders have persisted for so long. Aside from plants, the only sort order I'm vaguely familiar with is for birds, which seems to still be going strong today and is followed in your List of recently extinct birds (ostriches at the beginning, songbirds at the end). When traditional sort orders are abandoned (in whole or in part), the alternative has usually been to arrange taxa alphabetically.

While plants are largely sorted alphabetically in recent works, there are some groups based on presence/absence of key evolutionary innovations that are still used in sorting:

1. Algae (non land plants)
2. Bryophytes (non vascular land plants)
3. Pteridophytes (non-seeded vascular plants)
4. Gymnosperms (seeded non-flowering plants)
5. Dicotyledons (flowering plants
6. Monocotyledons (flower plants; in the traditional sort order, monocots precede dicots, but they follow dicots in more recent works)

I'd suggest this sort order for any further IUCN lists you do. Algae can (and perhaps should) be split into red/green/etc. There's no harm in splitting bryophytes into hornworts/liverworts/mosses, but I don't think there's much consensus for a sort order for the three bryophyte groups. I don't think Pteridophyte systematics are well settled yet, and the latest research is a major upheaval of a traditional "fern ally"/"fern" dichotomy, with Equisteum and Psilotum now grouped with the "true ferns". I'd avoid splitting Pteridophytes any further at present. I didn't quite get the order right in the extinct plant list (from either a modern or traditional perspective). I'm going to tweak it a little further to what I think should be best practice. Plantdrew (talk) 16:02, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Ok, so I'm having a go at mapping IUCN's taxa to the headings you've given above. Bryophytes and algae are straight forward enough (though I have some questions). But as every page on any plant taxon seems to give three different conflicting taxonomic systems, it's starting to do my head in, so I'm going to ask you if you can give your opinion on how to sort out the rest for me / fill in the blanks.

Here's IUCN's taxa that they place directly under Tracheophyta (vascular plants) in alphabetical order:

• Cycadopsida — Gymnosperms
• Equisetopsida — Pteridophytes
• Ginkgoopsida — Gymnosperms
• Gnetopsida — Gymnosperms
• Isoetopsida — Pteridophytes
• Liliopsida — Monocotyledons
• Lycopodiopsida — Pteridophytes
• Magnoliopsida — Dicotyledons
• Marattiopsida — Pteridophytes
• Pinopsida — Gymnosperms
• Polypodiopsida — Pteridophytes
• Psilotopsida — Pteridophytes

What categories should the rest be given?

If you need to look deeper into the tree, if you go to iucnredlist.org and click "Other Search Options" and then "Taxonomy" you can unfold a larger tree.

On algae, they have three taxa (under Plantae): Chlorophyta (green algae), Rhodophyta (red algae), and Charophyta (they list just two species under this taxa, which appears to be another type of green algae). The question is, can I call Chlorophyta "green algae" if there's another phylum (Charophyta) that's also green algae? Or more simply, what common names can I give these different groups?

Thanks for your help —Pengo 05:11, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

@Pengo: Well, our green algae article includes Charophyta. Chlorophyta+Charophyta do form a clade. You could call Charophyta "charophytes", "charophyte algae", "charophyte green algae" or something along those lines. But if that were done I think Chlorophyta should take a parallel construction (e.g. "chlorophyte algae"). Best just to put both under "green algae", I think.

I've edited the list in your comment to include categories for all the groups. Plantdrew (talk) 16:42, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! —Pengo 01:27, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Clibanarius erythropus / St Piran's Crab

Fair enough about how a vernacular name was chosen for this species. I suggest a compromise whereby a Popular Culture' section is inserted highlighting that this species was recently in the UK news and why. I will use encyclopedic language. The competition was run by the BBC who merely used Facebook as a convenient way of assembling a result, a not uncommon practise in 2016. keep up your good work. dorkinglad (talk)

@Dorkinglad: I think putting it in a Popular Culture section is a fair compromise. It's too bad the BBC hasn't (as far as I can tell) published anything aside from tweets announcing the results of the competition. The National Trust Cornwall blog will have to do as a source, I guess. Plantdrew (talk) 20:42, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for accepting the suggested solution. It's important I think to encourage people to make the information available as accessible as possible. Vernacular names are a way into a subject and this one was well covered although unusual. dorkinglad (talk)

word check

....please have a look here [2]. Orchi (talk) 18:34, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for alerting me. I think it's better to link conquistador and let readers form their own judgement. Plantdrew (talk) 18:53, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

...thanks.Orchi (talk) 21:06, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

help .. at Blue gum?

Hi Plantdrew. I've written about the term Blue gum at Talk:Blue gum, but no at the article. Could you help me?. I think it's no easy for me to incorporate some info to the article (if you consider it worths to do it). I explain there, the way I've came to Blue gum. Thanks!. --PLA y Grande Covián (talk) 07:16, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for alerting me, I will comment further at Talk:Blue gum. Plantdrew (talk) 16:55, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Chrozophora indica

May kindly post a message on article talk page, giving reason for the proposed deletion, for the sake of record. I have no opinion on the proposed deletion itself due to insufficient knowledge on the matter. Happy editting! 07:35, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

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Copying within Wikipedia requires proper attribution

Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. It appears that you copied or moved text from Selaginella bryopteris into Sanjeevani (plant). While you are welcome to re-use Wikipedia's content, here or elsewhere, Wikipedia's licensing does require that you provide attribution to the original contributor(s). When copying within Wikipedia, this is supplied at minimum in an edit summary at the page into which you've copied content. It is good practice, especially if copying is extensive, to also place a properly formatted {{copied}} template on the talk pages of the source and destination. The attribution has been provided for this situation, but if you have copied material between pages before, even if it was a long time ago, please provide attribution for that duplication. You can read more about the procedure and the reasons at Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia. Thank you. If you are the sole author of the prose that was moved, attribution is not required. — Diannaa (talk) 22:39, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

Bird SIAs/DABs

Having them both looks great....I was following what I thought was the only format I saw.......Pvmoutside (talk) 02:24, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Re: Aphaenogaster bidentatus

If turning A. bidentatus into a redirect will not be beneficial, I have decided to reinstate it as an article until I propose it for deletion. It is a Nomen nudum according to Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences, and all instances of the name should be removed. Is there a way to quickly delete it (other than speedy delete) or do all articles need consensus beforehand? Burklemore1 (talk) 04:42, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Since the IUCN lists the name, I think it would be helpful to have a page here about it, rather than to delete all mention of it. We have a few pages about problematic scientific names, e.g., Rubus fruticosus and Crataegus pubescens. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 14:54, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Sminthopsis84, I don't think A. bidentatus is quite the same as Rubus fruticosus, which shows up all over the literature and in relevant taxonomic databases. The ant is more like Chrozophora indica which I can't find a trace of in any reliable plant databases (it shows up in EOL, GBIF and Wikidata now, but they all seem to have gotten it from Wikipedia). I PRODed C. indica, but it was deproded and redirected to C. tinctoria (redirect target apparently based on some conjecture/original research I'd mentioned in my PROD nomination, which can be seen at Talk:Chrozophora indica). I'd still like to see C. indica deleted and I came across a similar situation with A. bidentatus a few days later. The plant is an error in a chemistry journal, the ant an error in IUCN, but they're both bogus. Plantdrew (talk) 02:28, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

I once corresponded with someone at IUCN who lamented that they don't have the money to avail themselves of the services of taxonomists. They list a lot of taxa that are now considered to be synonyms. I hope they can get that cleaned up somehow, perhaps as reasonably good databases with synonymy become available. About Chrozophora indica, there is also this list which includes Chrozophora indicum DC. (and some other dubious names). I don't know what herbarium that is, but it might indicate that the plant is a real one, though presumably a synonym, perhaps put under the wrong genus. I'll see what I can find by looking at DC. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 12:41, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Well, I think you are wise to doubt that Chrozophora indica is C. tinctoria. IPNI is missing some entries from De Candolle's Prodromus, such as Euphorbia aegyptiaca var. indica Boiss., which is here (I'll report those). Since there is at least one other candidate for what a euphorb with epithet indica might be, I think it would be best to not have a redirect. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 13:25, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

@Burklemore1: I don't think there's a quick way to delete aside from speedy deletion (or assistance from a friendly admin). That leaves PROD, RfD and AfD, which aren't quick. PROD was disputed for the plant name I found with similar problems. Looks like I should take Chorozophora indica to RfD at this point. Try AfD for A. bidentatus? Plantdrew (talk) 02:28, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

If I'm correct, any insect taxon below subspecies, or in this case nomen nudum, is not notable enough to warrant an article? The original IUCN source only lists its name, distribution (USA) and its status without providing any taxonomic or biological information. I have already repeated that any "ant database" sites I have checked do not have this species listed. I might as well nominate it for AfD if there aren't any other options. Burklemore1 (talk) 04:34, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

@Burklemore1: I agree that insect taxa below subspecies and nomina nuda don't warrant articles. If it's possible to establish some kind of synonymy with a species article, there's no harm to having a redirect. If synonymy isn't possible, I think it's best to delete. Nomen nudum covers a range of possibilities; at one end might be a manuscript name with a clear description and designation of a type written by a scientist who died before publishing it, with somebody else publishing it post mortem (a classic case for an ex author citation); at the other end is Speedius speedius from the Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner cartoons, which has the form of a scientific name but isn't intended to be taken seriously as one. IUCN definitely has some errors; if A. bidentatus is a blatant error from IUCN that doesn't exist anywhere else, it's on the Speedius speedius side of the nominum nudum spectrum. Plantdrew (talk) 06:22, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Agreed with all of those points. The fact that a well known reputable entomologist/myrmecologist also suggests its deletion does give further justification on getting rid of it too. My best guess from this is that the IUCN incorrectly spelled the name and probably intended on listing another species with bidentatus. This unfortunately led to a few consequences that you have previously mentioned. I'll prepare its deletion and will let you know once it's up if you wish to express support. Burklemore1 (talk) 02:17, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi all, sorry to break in here as an amateur (Plantdrew's page is on my watchlist), but this Google Book from 1996 lists the species. As 1996 is pre-Wikipedia, it is somehow mentioned before Wiki, even if IUCN and GBIF "stole" the info from Wiki... Just a thought and quick search, no opinions, I trust your expertise. Cheers, Tisquesusa (talk) 02:24, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Tisquesusa, thanks, I think you've found the root of this mystery. That book is what we've been calling IUCN here (well, it's the hard copy predecessor to the database we're talking about now). In the 1996 IUCN book, Antichthonidris bidentatus is listed right above Aphaenogaster bidentatus. Looks like bidentatus got scrambled around and repeated in a subsequent line during preparation of the book and some other species of Aphaenogaster was intended to be listed. I've seen another case of exactly this error in a taxonomic database; ITIS's nonexistent seahorse, Penetopteryx eques. Plantdrew (talk) 16:56, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

This is the source I have been referring to, I don't think I actually properly mentioned or cited it to you. It basically contains the exact same information found in the IUCN webpage. Burklemore1 (talk) 02:34, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

So, it seems like Aphaenogaster bidentatus is a "dord". It's still not listed in AntCat, not even as a nomen nudum. It also seems like IUCN isn't in a very good position fix this. We should ask Brian Fisher to add the name to AntCat; a fresh WP:RS trumps a dubious 20-year-old WP:RS at AFD. Plantdrew: here's another mystery for you; the [edit] links are missing from all section heading on your talk page after #Monospecific_genus_articles_at_the_English_name. jonkerz ♠talk 03:21, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

Gentiana punctata

Thank you! It's my first article on en.wikipedia, I ussualy write on cs.wikipedia and I don't know the rules. OJJ (talk) 04:09, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

No problem, thanks for writing the article. Plantdrew (talk) 16:56, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

geology

thank you very much for the response - appreciated - for me - as to whether a project is very active at a point is less of a concern for me - the issue for me is to have categories tied into an appropriate subject areas - to avoid totally out of left field word association as opposed to relatively good 'fit' - as there are few guides to where things evolved in most projects over time, your comments have convinced me all the life changes in geological context are in paleontology - thanks JarrahTree 05:18, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Daggett's eagle

I wish to protest the move of the page "Daggett's eagle" to Buteogallus daggetti. Your stated reason was that it had multiple vernacular names and was most often referred to by its scientific name. That may be true in the scientific literature, but the average reader will surely know it as Daggett's eagle (note "eagle" uncapitalized). The San Diego Zoo calls it that as well. And as for having multiple names, that is also true of the cougar, but the article isn't called Puma concolor for that reason. Will you agree to move the page back to the more sensible "Daggett's eagle"? --Serpinium (talk) 08:49, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

I'm not going to stop you if you want to move it back, but no, I'm not going to move it back myself. The average reader hasn't heard of this bird at all. The small number of people who have heard of it (many of whom are scientists) can easily find the article by putting either title into their favorite search engine. While there are standardized common names for extant (and recently extinct) birds, there are no standard common names for birds that went extinct in the Pleistocene, and species that went extinct in this era are more consistently titled by scientific names. "Daggett's walking eagle" is another name used by a handful of websites, and a substantial number of websites that give it a common name put "eagle" in scare quotes (to emphasize that it's not a "true eagle", I guess). What makes "Daggett's eagle" preferable to "walking eagle", "Daggett's walking eagle", or "Daggett's "eagle""? Plantdrew (talk) 21:54, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Check out the list of late Quaternary prehistoric birds. A few animals are listed under their scientific names, but the vast majority (many just as obscure as Daggett's eagle) have an English name. The scare quotes are just silly, and "Daggett's eagle" is preferable to "(Daggett's) walking eagle" because it's more commonly used, and closer to the meaning of the scientific name. But I can't force you—I will move it myself. --Serpinium (talk) 06:45, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Re: Marianne Horak

Thanks for patrolling and assessing the article! I wholly agree that it's a stub (hence me, y'know, stub-tagging it), but I was curious about the importance-rate for WP:Women scientists. If I'd had to assess the article myself (had it been written by someone else than me, that is), I'd probably have assigned it mid-importance, as to me "Subject is only notable within its particular field or subject and has achieved notability in a particular place or area" seems to fit better than "Subject is not particularly notable or significant even within its field of study", what with her being one of the leading experts on Tortricidae worldwide. (Admittedly, I don't think that was outright stated yet when you assessed since I was still hunting down good sources for that claim)

However, I suspect that you're probably right and I'm wrong—at least, you sure have a lot more experience assessing articles than I do—so I was curious what made you decide to assess it as low, mostly so that if I ever start assessing the importance of articles, I don't go and overstate the importance of everything. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 21:34, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

@AddWittyNameHere: Well, the ratings are ultimately pretty subjective. One issue is what's meant by "field of study"; in Horak's case is the field Tortricidae, lepidopterology, entomology, zoology or biology? Practically every taxonomist is a world expert in a particular narrow field. Horak has held some important positions for sure, but that's really the minimum for somebody to be considered notable according to WP:ACADEMIC (as an aside, I think Wikipedia has many articles on taxonomists who don't really pass WP:ACADEMIC, but I don't particularly want to see them deleted).

For WP:Women scientists, I'd consider her field to be no narrower than entomology. At the level of entomology mid-importance might be appropriate; any broader and I'm more inclined to go with low. My article assessment work is pretty much focused on organisms, with a little bit of work on taxonomists. Anything I do with assessment for tangentially related projects such as Women scientists is a total sideline, and I really can't claim good knowledge of how these projects usually interpret their assessment guidelines. The various WikiProjects under Tree of Life skew heavily towards low; typically 90+% of articles on taxonomists and organisms are low-importance. WP:Women scientists seem to be more liberal; 40% of their articles are mid-importance or better. 02:54, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, the narrowness of the field in which she's an expert is why I wouldn't have assigned it above mid, myself. I'd say either 'Lepidopterist' or 'entomologist' probably ought to be the level one looks at, but that's mostly based on gut feeling. Wholly agree that if you look any broader than that, low's quite appropriate, and while she'd obviously be of high importance on a Tortricidae Experts wiki, that's not en.wiki. Anyway, sounds like we're both thinking along the lines of "well, she hangs somewhere in between low and mid and it all depends on perspective", with you tending towards low and me slightly tending towards mid. At least makes me feel safe that I'm not massively misunderstanding or overestimating things, since your reasoning makes sense and is actually pretty close to my own. As to the WP:ACADEMIC guidelines and many taxonomist articles possibly falling on the wrong side of them, I consider that more an issue with those guidelines than an issue with the articles that exist in spite of them. Guidelines already are somewhat skewed against academics, and fields like taxonomists and phytopathologists are especially undervalued in them in my experience/opinion.

Aye as to everything on the Tree of Life WikiProjects skewing things to low, or at least for the projects I'm familiar with, but I suppose that may have something to do with the sheer amount of subjects involved. At some point it just gets easiest to decide "well, every species article is low unless there is a reaaaaallllly good reason (like huge economical impact) to decide otherwise", I suppose. Out of curiosity, I know the ratio of articles:active, involved editors is ridiculously skewed in WP:Lepidoptera. Is that a general tendency in the Tree of Life projects, or mostly one in the subjects that just happen to deal with tens to hundreds of thousands (potential) articles on species and other taxa alone? I've had more edit conflicts with myself than with others on Lepidoptera articles, for sure. (I think maybe two edit conflicts with people-not-me on those articles in total?) Oh well, on the plus side that means that with the dearth of editors and general activity, not many people stumble upon those aforementioned taxonomists to go and list them at AfD. XDAddWittyNameHere (talk) 03:53, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

@AddWittyNameHere: WP:Lepidoptera's articles:editors ratio is much higher than any of the other Tree of Life projects (about 1/3 of organism articles are leps, but certainly not 1/3 of editors are working in that area). But there are plenty of corners of Tree of Life where articles can go years between edits (aside from maybe some bots adjusting formatting). WP:Lepidoptera is unusual in having a couple editors who are very active in producing new articles; in the 2-3 years I've been paying attention to new page creation, easily 50%, maybe even 80%, of any new articles on organisms have been Lepidoptera. Tree of Life activity is low enough that conflicts are rare, and active collaboration even rarer. Plantdrew (talk) 23:40, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, there's a few prolific article creators. Sadly, we lack an equal number of prolific content builders to go along with 'm, which results in a massload of articles and no one to work on them. (Don't think there are many other non-maintenance-related WikiProjects with a relative WikiWork factor of 5.98. At least, I dearly hope so...)

I've once calculated that just for maintenance upkeep, the active Lepi-editors would have to keep track of ~10,000-33,333 articles each depending on the amount of active editors at the time (seems to fluctuate between 3-10, not counting folks who focus on a handful of specific articles or happen to do some occasional maintenance through other routes like WikiProject:Stub Sorting) and presuming no overlap on the articles they're keeping track of. No miracle there's so. much. backlog. on maintenance-related things, is it? And yeah, barring the whole "common names with or without capitalization" thing a fair while ago, I don't think there really has been much conflict in the Tree of Life on anything barring maybe specific articles here and there. *cough*WikiProject Lepidoptera still isn't fully up-to-date with de-capitalizing all common names, though we finally seem to have gotten through most of them.*cough* AddWittyNameHere (talk) 00:04, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

@AddWittyNameHere: Wikiproject Plants actually has a bigger cleanup listing report than Lepidoptera, but that's more a function of more people adding cleanup tags than fewer articles needing cleanup. Common name decapitalization isn't really complete anywhere except (maybe) birds. Title decapitalization is almost complete, but there are many articles where common names are still capitalized in the body of the article. Plantdrew (talk) 02:32, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Hm, yeah, no one actually tags Lepidoptera articles unless there is something seriously wrong with them except for the occasional drive-by tag that's by now 5-10 years old. (What is, after all, the use of adding 'more inline citations' to about 70,000 articles when even though the cites aren't inlined, the given sources can only apply to a single sentence or the infobox anyway?) The moths side of Lepidoptera seems to be reasonably far along in decapitalization of common names. I still come across some every now and then, but no longer a good half of all species with common names. Just the occasional article. (Of course, it helps that there are a LOT of moths that don't have common names to start with) I think the butterfly side is still a bit worse off, both because more of us focus on moths and more butterflies have common names, relatively speaking. Oh well, no miracle that it's still a widespread issue along Tree of Life when you have something like 8% of all articles somewhere under that umbrella (going by what you said, if Lepi has ~33% of organism articles, that's ~300,000 en.wiki-wide on organisms, plus a fair stack of other articles relevant to one of the projects under Tree of Life's banner. Let's say 400,000 total as a rough estimate, on a total of ~5.2 million articles. Wouldn't surprise me if it's a fair bit more, even.) and certainly *not* 8% of all active editors. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 03:13, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

@AddWittyNameHere: Yeah, it's a huge field with not many editors. 400k on Tree of Life (including taxa, taxonomists, anatomical terms, etc) is a reasonable estimate. The quick and dirty estimate for taxa with articles is actually 332,298 (as I write this). Plenty of stuff to keep us busy. Best of luck out there, thanks for all you do. Plantdrew (talk) 03:47, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Aye, will probably never run out of things to do. Thanks! Same to you—you certainly do a lot of good work, too! AddWittyNameHere (talk) 04:37, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

DISPLAYTITLEs

Hi Plantdrew, see Special:Diff/738219676. If a page has a DISPLAYTITLE, moving the page may cause it to be invalid. If you can, make sure to keep update these post-move. Thanks, and cheers — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 17:02, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

@Andy M. Wang:, thanks for fixing it. I know about updating DISPLAYTITLE and usually do, I just forgot to do it this time. Plantdrew (talk) 21:51, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Please review pterosaur article

If you have the time, I would greatly appreciate it if you could review Allkaruen at some point in the near future. Thank you! Lythronaxargestes (talk) 05:02, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Done. Plantdrew (talk) 15:59, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Support on Amanita basii

I see you have reviewed my work on Amanita basii. I need some help and opinion regarding it since I plan to fill the missing articles for all Amanita mushroom species (amanita manginiata, specifically in one of my sandboxes). Thanks a heap.| Democratics ^Talk| How may I help you? 13:28, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

@Democratics: I'd be happy to help, but can you be more specific about what advice you need? One thing I've noticed with Amanita basii is that you've quoted or used extremely close paraphrases of content at amanitaceae.org. As amanitaceae.org is licensed CC BY-SA, we should be able to make use of that content on Wikipedia, but it's best to fully acknowledge the source with Template:CCBYSASource (I'm adding that template to the A. basii article now). Plantdrew (talk) 16:43, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Plantdrew thanks for the help (and Peter coxhead too) in Amanita basii. These blocks of information are sure to help me in my next to-do-soon fungi articles. Again, thank you! | Democratics ^Talk| How may I help you? 12:42, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

fair enough

Re using tree of life and biol rather than paleo... I was thinking of just the paleo project tag - but when the specific title identifies extant - I would have thought that it lasted through to current, does it really live in the paleo cat ?? cheers JarrahTree 08:36, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

@JarrahTree: I was overzealous in removing project tags. I thought I was cleaning up behind Dimadick's overtagging (three Jurassic related categories showed up yesterday with WikiProject Biology tags, although it turns out Dimadick was only responsible for one of them). You're right that paleo probably isn't the best choice for these extant organisms. I'm really not sure what fits best. I see WikiProject Biology as being a place for meta-discussion and a dumping ground for articles/categories that don't really fit into one of the child projects. There's really no precedent for mass-tagging articles and categories with WikiProject Biology (Wikipedia has more than 400,000 biology related articles, but only 3,000 with the biology banner). WikiProject Tree of Life is also basically a place for meta-discussion (with a core set of tagged articles related to taxonomy). Tree of Life probably is the best fit for these categories though, so I'll restore that banner (WikiProject Evolutionary History might be another possibility). Plantdrew (talk) 19:59, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I understand the problem with tracking who is doing what, at the best of times. Maybe paleo can sit with extant items, if in fact they have been discovered to have existed in geol time. JarrahTree 23:00, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for all your help at RfD

I am not very good at throwing buns and stuff, I edit longhand in the plain text editor. But I wanted to say thank you for all your expert advice you give over at WP:RFD. I know a bit of Latin and I know that poor old Carl Linne was a bit sex-obsessed, I think "orchid" wsa one of his wasn't it because it just means "testicle" in greek doesn't it, which is rather bizarre anyway. With the Neelix redirects obviously first I am lazy and don't look everything up, second I don't have the resources you might to look things up, third even if I looked them up that would not help. To take the third first: what we are doing (or at least what I think we are doing) is to build a self-consistent encylopeadia. So it doesn't really matter what the WP:RS say if what we say is bollox.

I deliberately don't look up references because I try to stand outside and say "Were I a reader and typed in this term, where should I find myself?" (I look up references when I am translating things from WP:PNT, for example, because then it is a different hat on.) That is where things like the poor old leafless tongued-orchid (I made that one up) go awry, because they add, like it or not, a kinda legitimacy to usage, people will say "No that is fine, it is on wikipedia" (with a chuckle usually for the reliability of Wikipedia — even though Wikipedia itself essentially says "don't believe Wikipedia, look it up in something reliable" — but they will actually believe it.

I used to like twisting the WP:DYK noms to make them them absolutely correct but rather cryptic. I think one year I had two people tying each other together in bondage (getting married). that is about the only time that links should be a WP:SURPRISE. Rs shouldn't be. I don't thik I got past Oman when some fascinating fact had been added and to go to DYK, that "Did you know, that Oman is an island, according to Donne." Can't win them all. (I think it is "No man is an island surrounded unto itself" but is usually misquoted, it is just tickling enough to get about 2000 clicks that day).

Thanks again for all your help and expertise. My knowledge of Latin though sparse is probably a curse because the taxonomy is not exactly kinda good in Latin is it, some things make no sense in Latin. I think Orwell has an essay somewhere, "In praise of the woolworth's rose" which was really a eulogy to his then-dead wife, I hope he might like to know that the roses he planted in 1936 in wallingford are still blooming and their house there has not been fortunately turned into "Ye Olde George Orwell General Stores" or some crap like that, just a house with his rose bushes still blooming, I lived near there for many years. How we would possibly classify his roses when he said "the chief delight was that they were almost never what they said they were on the packet", or something like that, "and you might find that you have a new variety and you can name it [I Forget what made up name he used but some name] Bartholomew Purdey". You should look up that essay, In Praise of the Engish Rose I think most anthologies have it as. Si Trew (talk) 07:47, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

It is in As I Please, here. here. I am sorry I am a little sad, because me mum died last week and she loved her garden, just normal nothing exotic just petunias here, crocus there, a bit of wisteria climbing up the fence, but if I said I like your snapdragons she would say oh the antirhynumms. (Have I got that spelling right? Probably not). Orwell in As I Please kinda campaigned to keep proper WP:COMMONNAMEs for plants: really it was part of his larger campaign for just good plain English. My mother was in the battleground because somehow she thought the Latin made them, or her, legitimate. She was a great gardener, one summer she even managed to get a fencepost to take root. She would say when you gave her a cutting or plant "well it has two chances" (which intensely annoyed me, it had one chance with two outcomes. mum, your father-in-law was a bookmaker). She so loved her garden. I am not talking about acres here, it was hardly larger than a postage stamp. But she loved it all the same. Si Trew (talk) 07:54, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Well il faut cultiver notre jardin, we must dig our own garden, Pangloss said. I always thought the better translation would be "we must plough our own furrow". Si Trew (talk) 17:38, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

@SimonTrew:, thanks for your dedication to cleaning up redirects. Sorry to hear about your loss. Best wishes.

Orchid does indeed mean testicle. I think you'll see why from the picture above. I think I've said it before, but sometimes it is just best not to look for meaning in Latin. Scientists (not just taxonomists, anatomists too) have repurposed the language for their own use in the last few hundred years, and use Latin words in ways that would leave a Roman citizen utterly mystified.

The Orwell piece was a nice read. The thing about common names, is that most people with any interest in plants manage to happily plug away with a mixture of vernacular (do look to Latin for the meaning of that) and scientific names, without even realizing when they're using scientific names (e.g. wisteria, crocus, petunia). And we're more disconnected from nature than ever before; there are many vernacular names out there that some people might recognize as a plant that their grandmother talked about without having any idea what it looks like. These names are sadly being lost. Most plants are small generally uninteresting things found in remote regions that can only be distinguished by people who've spent some time studying them.

Using common names in any consistent fashion means that invariably, many plants will have common names coined by scientists, often by translating the scientific name into English and which will still be generally unrecognizable to the public. And there are various standards (promulgated scientists) for formatting common names. Who knows what a "large tongue orchid" is? It might be Orchis macroglossa, in which case (using two common standards), it might be "largetongue orchid" or "Large-tongued Orchid" (and Wikipedia insists the latter be "large-tongued orchid". Or "large tongue orchid" might be Glossorchis grandis and rendered as "large tongueorchid" or "Large Tongue-orchid". And a Glossorchis grandifolia might be "bigleaf tongueorchid" or "Large-leaved Tongue-orchid" or perhaps several other variants, but there's no need to follow Neelix down a combinatorial explosion rabbit hole and start inventing new variants that don't appear anywhere outside of Wikipedia. Of course, the common name isn't always a direct translation of the scientific name: "Johnson's Tongue-orchid", "red-flower tongue-orchid", "(a/A)lpine tongueorchid" (where the capitalization of the "a" depends on whether it occurs in the Alps specifically or another mountain range) or even "Lake Baikal Wood-orchid" could conceivably be scientist coined common names for any of these hypothetical species. And a typical person has no idea when the scientist coined common names either: deploy a hyphen, omit a space, or apply a capital letter. But if a typical person is not searching for a name exactly as they've seen it written, I think it's by far most likely that they'd search for separate lower case words: "large tongue orchid". Any decent external search engine will handle that search just fine and pick up the Wikipedia article where a close variant is mentioned (and Wikipedia's internal search might take two clicks in the absence of a redirect). Plantdrew (talk) 02:37, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

In "A good word for The Vicar of Bray" Orwell suggests planting a walnut. "Nobody ever plants a walnut these days. If wou plant a walnut, you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who gives a damn for his grandchildren?" I agree all you said qbbout matters taxonomical: excuse typos weird layout (belgiqn french) Si Trew (talk) 04:54, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Isn't it wistaria anyway? Not wisteria. Going through the Neelix redirects, there are loads and loads of these. What I tend to do is check in the infobox and if it has a source there (or of course if it is in the lede) I will keep it. Obvious nonsense I WP:X1. Boundary cases I bring to RfD and that is where your expertise is absolutely invaluable and much appreciated by at least one editor. Unfortunately another editor tends to keep a lot of them and does not mark them as {[tlx|R from other name}} or {{R from common name}} or whatever so well that is only doing half the job. Every single redirect I give a cursory check to. Nobody can reasonably expect me to ut RS etc on every single one when I am doing hundreds a day, but at least I do a sanity check before going WP:X1, keep, or RfD. That takes a bit longer. WP:NOTFINISHED. Si Trew (talk) 00:46, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

Trigonidiinae

Hi. I've noticed you going around and fixing certain insect-related articles as part of enforcing the WP:COMMONNAME policy. There's one that I just came across, and think it falls into this category: the cricket subfamily Trigonidiinae, which has at least three "common names" in use - sword-tail crickets, winged bush crickets, and trigs (see, e.g., [3]). This appears to be largely, if not entirely, a matter of British English versus American English, and I was under the impression that in cases where these schemes were at odds, it was preferred to use the scientific name for the WP article. For example, the name "trig" is not even listed under Trig (disambiguation), despite its widespread usage. Would you agree that the Sword-tail cricket article should be renamed, accordingly? Dyanega (talk) 23:13, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

@Dyanega: I'd absolutely agree to renaming accordingly. "Sword-tail cricket" has 831 reported Google results, "Trigonidiinae" has 8,220. "Winged bush cricket" has 3,250, but is polluted with non-trig results (e.g., "short-winged bush cricket", Hapithis brevipennis). WP:GOOGLETESTs for article titles aren't exactly encouraged, but I'm not sure how else WP:COMMONNAMEs insistence that we follow a "significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources" is to be determined. I'm being deliberately provocative by citing WP:COMMONNAME in my rationales when moving from uncommonly used "common" names to scientific names. At this point, WP:NCFAUNA is more strongly worded against scientific names than WP:COMMONNAME; I read NCFAUNA as potentially recommending "King tyrant lizard" as a more appropriate title for Tyrannosaurus rex, but I don't see that WP:COMMONNAME would support that interpretation. Use of scientific names versus "common" names at Wikipedia is pretty messy. Trigonidiinae is the better title in this case, but I can't move it by myself. I'll add it to my list of articles to take to a requested move. Plantdrew (talk) 04:37, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Seems an excellent case to me, so I've been bold and made the move.

WP:NCFAUNA is not consistent with WP:COMMONNAME. It says: The article title should usually consist of the common (vernacular) name that is most common in English, following WP:Article titles#Common names. However, this doesn't "follow" WP:COMMONNAME, since it mistakenly equates "common name" meaning "vernacular name" with "common name" meaning the most common name. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:22, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

@Dyanega: on investigating, I don't think that the usage is as country-dependent as the article suggested. This Hawaiian website uses "sword-tail cricket"; this Florida university website puts "sword-tail cricket" first with "trig" (in quotes) second; this Canadian website uses "trig" and "sword-tail cricket". So I've altered the article to just list the three English names, with an academic ref for the first one. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:06, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Perfectly fine; "bush cricket" is more often used for Eneopterines and Hapithines (which used to be grouped together), but "trig" is certainly a commonly-used name. Thanks. Dyanega (talk) 22:28, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Lady with an Ermine‎

I couldn't agree with your edit more. Ceoil (talk) 16:09, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Taxobox colours

I think it's best to sort out the detail between us – no-one else seems interested – before making a wider proposal.

I've a version at {{Taxobox/sandbox}} which behaves in the following way. It searches upwards through all the rank parameters from |phylum= through |domain= to |virus_group=. It stops as soon as it finds a rank value for which {{Taxobox colour}} has a colour. It then uses this colour as the taxobox colour. So you get the behaviour shown here:

{{taxobox/sandbox |name=Test |domain=Bacteria |unranked_superphylum=Plantae |unranked_phylum=Animalia }}

Test Scientific classification Domain: Bacteria (unranked): Plantae (unranked): Animalia

and if you swap the rank values around, the lowest rank with a colour "wins".

It works in all the tests I have – both via made-up taxoboxes and by going to randomly chosen articles with taxoboxes, changing {{Taxobox}} to {{Taxobox/sandbox}}, and then pressing preview – with the exception discussed below. Could you please test {{Taxobox/sandbox}} too? It's easy to miss problem cases, as I've already found.

incertae sedis

The exception concerns a value of "incertae sedis". The problem is that when working up the ranks the incertae sedis colour should be saved in case no other colour turns up later, when it should be used. Because the template language doesn't allow loops or recursion or templates to return multiple values, this logic is tedious and inefficient to code. So initially {{Taxobox/sandbox |regnum=Animalia |phylum=incertae sedis}} produced the incertae sedis colour and not the animal colour. (The same problem will arise when I try to allow the automated taxoboxes to cope with multiple colour-determining taxa.) The simplest solution is to stop "incertae sedis" defining a taxobox colour. Then in the very few, if any, cases where no colour-determining ranks have any value other than "incertae sedis", the error colour is produced and a taxobox colour has to be set manually. I think this is a price worth paying; trying to automate the handling of every rare case is often counter-productive. So this is what the current sandbox version does. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:24, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Looks great to me. I've played around with it some, but am not quite sure what exactly to test; if any problems turn up, I expect it will be in groups I'm not very familiar with taxonomically or in terms of inconsistencies in Wikipedia's handling of them (i.e. "protists" and enigmatic fossils). Scrapping "incertae sedis" support seems fine; I'd like to see hard-coded colors deprecated as far as possible, but it's not worth spending the effort on difficult coding for a handful of exceptional cases. I'm not sure it's worth keeping phylum as a color-determing rank over the long terms; right now it's needed for Choanozoa and Amoebozoa, but I suspect User:Deuterostome might target those groups for cleanup in the near future.

Glad to know you didn't find any problems; I think you're right that it's obscure groups that will cause problems. Once the code is more logically organized, it will be much easier to remove a level in the hierarchy, like phylum, if that becomes appropriate.

I'm reluctant to deploy this code until I'm clearer about the need for at least one extra colour. I set up a tracking category, Category:Taxoboxes with the incertae sedis color, which will only fill slowly, as is usual with categories created in templates. Looking at what is there so far, they seem to fall into two groups:

1. cases like Ediacara, where it really is unclear what they are
2. taxa that are known to belong to a higher taxon, but one that doesn't determine colour at present

The largest group without a colour defined are organisms that are in domain Eukaryota but not in one of its subgroups defined in {{Taxobox colour}}. It seems to me that as we have colours for the two domains Bacteria and Archaea, we should have a colour for Eukaryota, to be used when no subgroup colour applies. I think such a colour would dramatically reduce the number of incertae sedis cases.

I'll let the category fill over at least another day, I think, to see what else emerges. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:51, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Eukaryota color is a good idea. Maybe rgb (240,54,240)? That was the former color for Rhizaria and in the 2015 color selection discussion, people were trying to get a set of colors that had the right contrast ratios and were as distinct as possible from each other. 240,54,240 is one of the most distinctive of that set. Category:Haptophytes looks like it might be the one of the larger groups (in terms of articles) that doesn't determine a color (and not all Haptophytes are in the category). Plantdrew (talk) 14:36, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

The colour you suggest is very saturated, and I find that text doesn't show up well on it. My preferred colour is at the top of {{Taxobox colour scheme}} – purplish, because this is different from the others, but paler. (I had to add it to the live template for proper testing.) What do you think? Peter coxhead (talk) 23:18, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

"text doesn't show up well on it" is what I understand to be the major concern driving the 2015 discussion about taxobox colours, but I don't really know how the contrast ratios were calculated. Without understanding the specifics, your preferred rgb(240,210,250) seems to be a a good complement to the current taxobox palette. Plantdrew (talk) 05:45, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Colour and taxon bolding

Hi, {{Taxobox colour}} removes wikilinks from a taxon name when looking to see if it determines the taxobox colour, but not bolding, so it doesn't work with taxon names that have been manually bolded. You only usually notice this when the taxobox target is the colour determining taxon, since it seems natural to bold yourself rather than allow the wikimedia software to bold self-links.

The more I study it, the more the taxobox colour determining code appears to be a series of sometimes inelegant kludges! Almost any change I try seems to make something else go wrong. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:23, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

To illustrate, Plant now works without explicitly setting the taxobox colour; on the other hand, Amoebozoa doesn't work automatically right now, because the presence of |regnum= means that the old version of {{Taxobox}} doesn't ever look at |phylum=Amoebozoa, and no colour is defined for |regnum=Protozoa (as opposed to |regnum=Protista, which would turn it yellow). This is fixed in the sandbox version, not yet live – I don't want to release it until I have time to keep monitoring for taxobox errors appearing, which I don't today or probably tomorrow. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:59, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

New article

Hi Plantdrew. I recently ran across someone who has described dozens of beetles and didn't have an article, so I created Harley Brown. Just mentioning this in case you have time to take a look and improve categories/assessments/ or anything else. Thanks. MB 18:32, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

@MB: I've touched up a few things. Thanks for creating the article. Plantdrew (talk) 20:03, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Taxobox colour in lower animal taxa

There are still quite a few articles using the automated taxobox system in which the taxobox colour is not being set correctly. The reason is almost always that the taxonomic hierarchy encoded in the taxonomy templates is too deep to be processed properly. I've added some documentation at Template:Automatic taxobox/doc/Taxonomy templates#Depth limits.

Coelurosauria is about the deepest that it works (although the page is in the hidden Category:Pages where expansion depth is exceeded, which someone will eventually complain about), and this is after User:Wikid77 has hardcoded some parts of the hierarchy to reduce the depth – see Template:Taxonomy/Coelurosauria, where the downward arrows now show the parts hardcoded in the taxonomy template below.

It's simply not possible to keep on adding clade after clade while the Wikimedia software limits the depth of processing allowed. (It's possible that recoding some of it in Lua might be a real solution; I need to find a friendly Lua programmer!)

If you find a low-ranked taxobox not showing the proper colour, the current solutions are set out at Template:Automatic taxobox/doc/Taxonomy templates#Depth limits. I'm happy to try to fix any problems if you alert me to problem articles. Peter coxhead (talk) 23:13, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for all your work on the color issue. I guess you saw my edits to animal earlier today? I noticed some animals with bad colors (e.g. Drosophila), and realized the animal taxobox wasn't set up the same as the other color determining taxa and wanted to see if I could fix it. Expansion depth limits certainly isn't an easy one edit fix. I still don't understand why animal doesn't have |color= set like other color determining taxa with automatic taxoboxes do (e.g., Fungi, Eukaroyes), but if it works as is (expansion depth aside), I guess that's fine.

I intend to write up an explanation of how the taxobox colour determining system works, but as I'm still working on it, it's not stable enough yet. However, |color= in a taxobox has nothing to do with the colour of the lower ranks – it only affects that taxobox. Colour is determined in an automatic taxobox by the following processing (a quite different system is used for manual taxoboxes, which is another problem):

• work up the hierarchy coded in the taxonomy templates
• look for the only taxon in the hierarchy that is in {{Is reg()}}.

The name of this template, short for "is regnum", offers a clue to current problems with the system. As designed by User:Smith609, the system assumed that every organism would belong to one and only one regnum that would determine the taxobox colour. In practice, the taxon put into {{Is reg()}} doesn't have to be a regnum (indeed its rank is irrelevant), but there must be only one taxon in {{Is reg()}} in any taxonomic hierarchy.

So actually Fungi didn't need |color=, but eukaryote taxoboxes do: right now we can't add "Eukaryota" to {{Is reg()}} because then all plants, animals, fungi, etc. would have two colour determining taxa. What should happen is that only the first colour found should be used, and I have a sandbox version that does this, BUT (and the capitals are justified!) the extra processing required to pick the first colour increases the expansion depth and causes yet more taxoboxes to fail. I'm still working on trying to get round the increase in expansion depth. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:47, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

I've been kind of annoyed by the taxobox at human taxonomy; it's the only place on Wikipedia where |nanophylum= |microphylum=, and the links displayed at those ranks are rather fishy (pun intended here). I'd been considering switching over to an automatic taxobox there, but with 40 plus ranks to get down to Homo sapiens, I gather expansion depth would be a problem. Plantdrew (talk) 00:20, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

I agree with your annoyance; it's been said repeatedly in various ToL WikiProjects that taxoboxes should summarize the main ranks, with at most 2–3 minor ranks/clades above the target taxon.

I shortened the taxonomic hierarchy upwards from {{Taxonomy/Homo}}, so Homo doesn't now generate an expansion depth error. So you should be able to use an automatic taxobox at Human taxonomy. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:47, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

More thanks ....

for cleaning up so many plant taxoboxes. I've noted the changes for future articles. Gderrin (talk) 21:48, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

@Gderrin: Just to let you know what I'm up to, I'm working through a report of parameter names used in taxoboxes. It turns up a lot of stuff where a badly formed parameter name prevents the parameter value from displaying. The last couple of days I've been changing parameters that use a space instead of an underscore (e.g. |status system= to |status_system=. While the spaced versions usually display properly, they're very rarely used on Wikipedia (maybe 0.4% of articles with taxoboxes use any spaced parameters), and they clutter up the report I'm working off of.

There are a few other things I look at changing while I'm editing the parameter names in the taxobox. One is consistency of spacing in parameters. I don't have any personal preference for "| status_system = Foo" versus "|status_system=Foo" (or any other variant along these lines), but if the article is using a mix of styles I standardize it to whichever style is predominant. The issue of space versus underscore is often one of consistency as well; taxoboxes that have a spaced parameter name usually have some underscored ones as well.

I've also been deleting extraneous ranks. I thought you might disagree with this and welcome feedback. Taxoboxes usually omit minor ranks that are more than one major rank above the subject of the articles. Species articles might show ranks between genus and species (subgenus, section, etc.), but usually not ranks between genus and family (subfamily, tribe, etc.). In some cases a minor rank really might help somebody (with a decent botanical background) contextualize the placement of a species in a family. Fabaceae subfamilies, Poaceae and Asteraceae tribes might be worth including in species articles. I'm not familiar enough with orchid taxonomy to be sure whether including subfamily or tribe is more helpful in a species article, but I do think including three minor ranks (subfamily, tribe and subtribe) above the genus is overkill; people who want that level of detail can find it in the genus article. Plantdrew (talk) 01:33, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm cool with all of that. I like writing plant articles rather than the sort of stuff you do but I will try to help by watching for the things you've mentioned in future articles. I do appreciate your work and your note to me.Gderrin (talk) 07:02, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for all the work you do creating articles. You really do a very good job. Plantdrew (talk) 22:31, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Hymenonema, Paeonia, Frederick Stern

Hi Plantdrew, thank you for your past assessments of articles. Recently I've created or substantially edited several articles that you may wish to reassess. In particular I think the current quality classification may be outdated for Hymenonema, Hymenonema graecum, Paeonia algeriensis, Paeonia broteri, Paeonia clusii, Paeonia corsica, Paeonia daurica, Paeonia sterniana, and Frederick Claude Stern. Thank you in advance, Dwergenpaartje (talk) 15:20, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

@Dwergenpaartje:, sorry it took me a couple days to get around to it, but I've looked over them now and raised the assessment ratings. Plantdrew (talk) 22:44, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! Dwergenpaartje (talk) 14:53, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Great work...

...you've been doing with taxobox clean-up. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:06, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead:, thanks. I'm getting pretty close to wrapping up with this effort. There's still a lot out there that needs fixing, but it's getting increasingly repetitive and less enjoyable to work on. I do have a couple questions.

Is there any point to filling |name= with a scientific name? I've mostly been leaving it alone unless it breaks title italics (in which case I find it easier to delete the name parameter than add {{italic title}}), but as far as I can tell the only functional effect it actually has is to break italics.

Is there any reason for a species or monotypic genus article to use {{automatic taxobox}} instead of {{speciesbox}}? It's difficult or impossible to get the standard display format (with an abbreviated form of the binomial displaying at rank "Species") with automatic taxobox. I'd swear I had made it work at one point, but I can't remember what I did now (or whether I actually did get it working right). In a few cases, there are taxonomy templates for a species with an automatic taxobox (e.g. Template:Taxonomy/Gryllus_bimaculatus). Are species level templates intended to be supported by automatic taxoboxes, or is creating them bad practice? I assume I should just change automatic taxoboxes to speciesboxes in these cases. Plantdrew (talk) 02:43, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I see no point in |name= with a scientific name, but it doesn't do any harm. (There is a point in |taxon= when it's the same as the page name, by the way, because expanding {{PAGENAME}} uses up some expansion depth, and I found one article right on the edge that exceeded the expansion depth without |taxon=, but worked with it.)

I think it was agreed that there should only be taxonomy templates with species names if they are linked to sections within the genus, rather than to the genus. So in the vast majority of cases, species and monotypic genera should use {{Speciesbox}}, which as you say, displays the abbreviated species name properly. So I agree with changing the template.

An unexpected side-effect of the changes I made to the taxobox colour code is that bad taxoboxes are flagged more freely. I've been surprised at some I've found: taxoboxes used for nature reserves, for plant structures, or for other non-organisms. I got a bit bored fixing them, but I've done nowhere near as many as you! Peter coxhead (talk) 14:19, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Category:Taxoboxes with an invalid color, for example, is currently full of fish articles with taxoboxes having no high level ranks, so which previously just got no colour, but now get the error colour. I could turn this check off, but I guess they should be fixed... Peter coxhead (talk) 14:31, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: I've been adding |taxon= when I've noticed it missing; good to know it has a benefit. Speciesbox documentation mentions that using |genus= and |species= takes less processing than |taxon=; is that also an expansion depth issue? Leave the fish with missing kingdoms flagged as errors; I'll work on fixing them. Plantdrew (talk) 18:22, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Ok, thanks! The fish taxoboxes I've looked at need both |regnum=[[Animal]]ia and |phylum=[[Chordate|Cordata]] added.

I haven't yet updated {{Speciesbox}} to the new approach to taxobox colour determination – I wanted to sort out any problems caused by the changes to {{Automatic taxobox}} and {{Taxobox}} first – so I haven't checked expansion depth issues in that template. String-handling is now coded in Lua, so splitting up the value of taxon into genus and species may be more efficient than it used to be. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:28, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Another oddity of fish articles is that the monotypic genera are mostly at the species name, not the genus name as per policy – see Category:Monotypic fish genera. And if there were a reason why the article is at the species name, the monotypic category should be on the genus redirect. That looks a lot of work to sort out! Peter coxhead (talk) 10:25, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Yeah, the situation with monotypic fish genera is rather daunting and I don't have the motivation (or the move permissions) to fix all of them. For the fish articles with invalid taxobox colors, there are usually several other taxobox problems besides the missing |regnum= and |phylum=. |genus= and |species= are often absent (and when present, species usually isn't in bold). |name= usually has a nonitalicized binomial+authority (and italic title may or may not be present). Status parameters are usually in the middle of image parameters. Sometimes higher ranks aren't linked. Taxonomic categories are typically absent and the article body is a mess. Missing |genus= and taxonomic categories are probably the most important to fix. Plantdrew (talk) 21:36, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it looks as though a few users created a lot of articles by copying a very poor model. Sigh... Peter coxhead (talk) 09:40, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Speciesbox

I've now released the updated version of {{Speciesbox}}, as you have probably seen. Tests show that it makes no difference to the expansion depth whether |taxon= or |genus=/|species= is used, but it is best not to fall back on the page title. I'm still not able to reliably predict the effect on expansion depth of changes I make, which depend the internal operation of the Wikimedia software, so have to rely on tests, which makes work slow. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:40, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Help

Hello Plantdrew, could you check the activities of this user: 112.201.166.11 (Crepidium) please. Thanks and greetings. Orchi (talk) 16:21, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

@Orchi: I've restored the articles that user had converted to redirects. I do think that super short stubs aren't very useful, but they did have photos and a native range, so the IP users complaints about them having no information beyond the taxobox weren't correct. Redirecting to species to genera is, in my opinion, an extremely bad practice (better to just delete the article than have a redirect to genus). Plantdrew (talk) 21:23, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

....I thank you. Regards. Orchi (talk) 10:32, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, Plantdrew. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Animals at high altitude?

Hi, Plantdrew. I noticed that you downrated Animals at high altitude. Did the merge make the article substantially worse, or was the article overrated before? Thanks! —hike395 (talk) 04:27, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

@Hike395:, it is certainly much better after the merge. But I don't think B-class was/is appropriate before or after the merge. The articles seems to me to be more a random collection of facts about randomly selected groups of organisms that live at high altitudes than a coherent article about high altitude animals. I don't know if including "adaptations" in the title would lead to a better article, but a title with "adaptations" might better reflect an article that is (as I see it) a poorly structured collection of facts. Plantdrew (talk) 04:52, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

I see what you mean about the article being random collection of facts. Let me think about how to improve it: I don't think changing the article title will make it any better. —hike395 (talk) 05:42, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

"Siberian onion" and other English names of Allium species

Hello! You have undone my edits, but the names that "appears to be made up for Wikipedia" were in fact not made up for Wikipedia. In fact, they are from the book <English Names for Korean Native Plants> published by Korea Forest Service and Korea National Arboretum. For example, Allium ochotense is on the 347th page. --Diospireiro (talk) 04:53, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

@Diospireiro:, sorry, I didn't realize you'd added these common names quite recently. I've reverted my edits to Allium ochotense and Allium macrostemon, was there anything else you edited that I'd changed? You really should be adding a citation to "English Names for Korean Native Plants" where you're adding the English common names. I did a Google search for the common names you added and I saw that "English Names for Korean Native Plants" was published after the Wikipedia creation date of articles for the two Allium species I edited. Not realizing that you'd just added the names to Wikipedia, I assumed that "English Names for Korean Native Plants" was drawing the names from Wikipedia and that the names had been in the Wikipedia all along. I was wrong in this case, but "appears to be made up for Wikipedia" is a real phenomenon; Wikipedia is sometimes the original source of common names that are later picked up by other sources. Plantdrew (talk) 05:15, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

@Diospireiro: can I reinforce the point that citations are needed for English names, or they will eventually be removed. You've found a useful source! A suitable reference to be added is:

<ref name=Kore15>{{Citation |mode=cs1 |last1=Korea National Arboretum |date=2015 |title=English Names for Korean Native Plants |publication-place=Pocheon |publisher=Korea National Arboretum |url=http://www.forest.go.kr/kna/special/download/English_Names_for_Korean_Native_Plants.pdf |accessdate=2016-11-26 }}</ref>

where |mode=cs1 is for articles with full stops between items in citations and should be changed to |mode=cs2 for articles with commas between items in citations, and |accessdate= should be changed as appropriate, both for the actual date and for the style in the article's citations. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:18, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

@Plantdrew and Peter coxhead: Hello! Thank you for your replies, advice, and also the format. Today I've also read the article "Wikipedia:No original research" and now I understand that there are cases that people put the names they invented in Wikipedia articles. I'll cite the book in the pages I edited. I'm still learning the Wikipedia grammar, and when I edit something I often visit other similar articles to see how they were written. Before I added the English names of Allium species, I visited several pages such as Allium fistulosum and Tree onion, where the English names were just there, without references, so I thought names might not need a reference. Are there any rules about what names require references and when? Thank you. --Diospireiro (talk) 16:10, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

@Diospireiro: yes, English names are often present in articles without sources, but WP:OR is clear that "a reliable source must be provided for ... anything challenged or likely to be challenged—but a source must exist even for material that is never challenged". So I think it's good practice always to provide a source for an English name, since there are a number of plant editors, including me, who will challenge names that don't appear to be "real" English names, such as those that are translations of the Latin name, e.g. "long-stamen chive" for Allium macrostemon – does anyone actually call it this? Peter coxhead (talk) 19:24, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Merger discussion for Perilla

An article that you have been involved in editing—Perilla—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Diospireiro (talk) 10:37, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Trivia/popular culture

G'day! Watching the current outbreak of activity in curtailing pop culture sections and trivia in species articles, I was wondering if there had been any recent developments in the respective policies (or best practice)? To clarify, I'm all for chopping out most of that stuff - but I have not in the past felt confident to do so, following a few spats and barely avoided edit wars. Has there been some discussion or change in practice that prompted you to step up the pace here? The last thing I'm aware of is a failed RfC from June of this year. Cheers -- Elmidae (talk · contribs) 11:58, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

@Elmidae: No new discussion or change in practice; I just decided to be bold. For what it's worth, I've been thanked 4 times so far for making 46 of these edits; that's the highest thanks/edit ratio I've had for any task I've done on Wikipedia, and I haven't been reverted once yet. I've only been doing this on articles about organisms, by searching for articles that have a taxobox and the phrase "in popular culture"; there were around 230 articles that matched these criteria (out of 300k with a taxobox). And I didn't entirely cut the IPC sections in all the articles I looked at. I left roadrunner alone, as I think the cartoon character is probably better known than the actual bird. I just took out people and things named after weasels in that article, but left actual pop culture mentions of weasels as animals alone. Plantdrew (talk) 17:05, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Right on, thanks :) I'm sure we can all do without twenty instances of rockhopper penguins in cartoons and as band mascots... --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 17:36, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

@Elmidae: Exactly. I don't really think the stuff I left in the weasel article really belongs on Wikipedia either, but I do know that weasels are significant characters in The Wind in the Willows. It's the "a weasel is one of 40 playable characters in video game Nobody Plays" and "a weasel appears for 5 seconds in the background of Season 2 Episode 14 of TV show Nobody Is Watching" stuff I'm primarily focusing on. Plantdrew (talk) 18:31, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Inserting Taxonbar, deleting other links

Hey, I appreciate your work inserting the Taxonbar into several bacterial species articles. This is great. What I don't understand is, why you are deleting the BacDive-Links. Of course, BacDive is linked within the Taxonbar, but in my opinion, the Taxonbar reduces the provided links to their taxonomy content. Since taxonomy data is only a part of the provided metadata, this gives the user not sufficient information about data that they will find with the link. Therefore I would kindly ask you to leave the BacDive links at the external links section, when you are inserting the Taxonbar. Best L.C.Reimer (talk) 13:17, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

@L.C.Reimer: OK, I'll leave the BacDive links alone in the future. It does seem redundant to me to have it linked in the Taxonbar and independently though. Plantdrew (talk) 17:16, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Popular culture/trivia

I won't keep thanking you for each edit, but I do wholeheartedly support your efforts to remove trivia from organism articles. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:40, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Agreed: this swath of desperately needed destruction is a symphony in my watchlist.--Mr Fink (talk) 14:38, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the thanks. I've finished a first pass through articles that have one of the taxobox templates and a Popular Culture section. I think I was being fairly conservative, as I usually left alone items that had an inline citation. I'll probably due a second pass in a few weeks to check whether the inline citations are to appropriate and reliable sources. And there are some other section headers where similar material accumulates (e.g. Cultural References) that I haven't looked into yet. And there are some articles with well done popular culture sections. Dinosaur IPCs are usually well written. Velociraptor really should explain that the popular culture "velociraptor" is Deinonychus, and that is done in the IPC section. Plantdrew (talk) 18:31, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

The problem sometimes seems to be that a sensible Culture section was created initially, but it then attracts unsourced trivia. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:58, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Use of Taxobox norank entry template

When {{Taxobox norank entry}} is used, as at this old version of Dermocystida, the taxon is never used to set the taxobox colour, since there's no way of knowing that it's a rank that can determine colour. So if the taxon should set a colour, then it has to be included via some such parameter as "unranked_regnum". In this specific case, I think it should be the Opisthokonta colour. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:06, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Sorry, that was my last edit before bed and I was getting tired and sloppy. I didn't notice that there wasn't a color determining rank present. Thanks for cleaning up after me. I'm inclined to consider Taxobox norank entry as deprecated; automatic taxobox seems to be a better way to include unranked taxa/clades, and the norank template is only used in 30 articles. Do you see any advantage to the template? Plantdrew (talk) 17:38, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Well, I can see that editors don't like making up 'ranks' like "unranked_subdomain" or whatever, but {{Taxobox norank entry}} has serious problems (I note that its history shows it has never been edited by any of the usual automated taxobox editors).

Although the layout used in the taxobox implies something like the expected list of rank parameters, actually it works by appending the unranked taxon information to the value of the preceding taxon parameter. So in the case of say Cabozoa, it actually says that domain has the value [[Eukaryota]]{{Taxobox_norank_entry | taxon = [[Bikonta]]}}{{Taxobox_norank_entry | taxon = '''Cabozoa'''}}, i.e. [[Eukaryota]] (unranked) [[Bikonta]] (unranked) '''Cabozoa''' (plus some table layout stuff). So it's impossible to do any processing based on the taxon, such as finding the taxobox colour. Also you can only use the template after a real rank parameter. I've seen taxobox errors caused by editors trying to write something like:

{{Taxobox
{{Taxobox norank entry |taxon=[[Bikonta]]}}
|...
}}

but there must be a real rank value first for the string generated by {{Taxobox norank entry}} to be appended to.

I would prefer to get rid of it altogether. Certainly it should be strongly deprecated. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:12, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Taxobox color parameter

Looking at your continuing sterling efforts to clean up taxoboxes, I'm very tempted to make the code ignore |color= altogether. I think that almost all taxoboxes where it is currently used will get the right colour without it, and the few that don't can then be fixed since they should show up in one of the tracking categories. What do you think? Peter coxhead (talk) 09:14, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead:. Sounds like a great idea to me. I don't have the energy to remove 3000 instances of "lightgrey" (or even 300 of "lightgreen"); 50 is about the limit of my enthusiasm for fixing/removing a bad parameter value before tedium sets in. I'll continue to remove color parameters from bacteria, viruses and plants if I'm editing to fix something else though. I'll finish removing hardcoded colors from almost everything else in the next couple days. Plantdrew (talk) 22:43, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Ok, well, there don't seem to be many editors around at present interested in taxoboxes or taxonomic issues (c.f. the lack of response so far to my post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds#Inconsistent taxonomies, which I advertised elsewhere as well), so, as you and I agree, in the next day or two I'll try making the code ignore |color= and see what happens. If the error-tracking categories start filling rapidly, I can revert and wait for the thousands of instances to get fixed. :-) Peter coxhead (talk) 23:09, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Sorry for butting in, Plantdrew & Peter coxhead, especially as I haven't been active in the discussion, but I agree as well. I'd be willing to actively search them out and remove them if either of you could get a list of all relevant pages somewhere, though it'll be in between my other mass-scale repetitive drudgery like categorizing moth genera and such. If such a list isn't possible, I'll just remove if/when I come across them. (On a tangentially-related note, either of you have a clue what's causing the title of the speciesbox on Phobolosia duomaculata to show up as '?) AddWittyNameHere (talk) 00:26, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

@AddWittyNameHere: I've fixed this page by explicitly adding |taxon=, but it must be a bug I've introduced while working on the automated taxobox system. I'll look into it. Thanks for the information. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:54, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead:: It happens. Thanks for patching around it until you can solve the underlying issue (and for stating what you did, so that if I come across more such pages I know how to fix it). AddWittyNameHere (talk) 07:56, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

@AddWittyNameHere: now fixed. But it's always good practice to explicitly add |taxon= or |genus= and |species= when using {{Speciesbox}}. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:49, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Thanks again! Yeah, I kind of vaguely knew that, but I'm less instinctively familiar with {{Speciesbox}}/{{automatic taxobox}} than {{taxobox}} (I can handle either, but one requires thought due to little experience with it, and the other doesn't) and I had only noticed it just before I jumped in to this conversation, so I figured I might as well ask to make sure I wasn't just overlooking something blatantly obvious. (It doesn't help that I've been editing on barely an hour and a half of sleep just prior to asking you, with another two hours of sleep about 15 hours before that. (Curse you, insomnia!) Makes me more likely to overlook things and I know it, so I tend to be a bit more cautious when not a hundred percent certain of the course of action I'm taking. Explains why ~25 pagemoves, only two of which round-robin, and the subsequent post-move article clean-up took me around three hours today, I guess) But I suppose I'm sort of holding Plantdrew's talkpage hostage with my exhaustion-fueled, probably-barely-coherent rambling (sorry, Plantdrew! :( I'll shut up soon, I swear), so I'll hop off the page unless/until it goes back to the actual on-topic subject again and you folks decide you could indeed create a list and would appreciate my help. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 09:41, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

@AddWittyNameHere: Sorry for the delay getting back to you. Hope you caught up on sleep. You can see a list of all the articles that had a taxobox color parameter as of December 1st here, the Template Data Error Report. That list only updates once a month, so it includes some articles where I've recently removed the color parameter. Alternatively, you can search for specific color values in the article source code; this is the approach I've been following (having previously made a list of list of color values I've seen). Here is a search for color=lightgrey, one for color=violet and one for color=lightgreen. These searches are a little crude, and occasionally turns up articles that have a color parameter in a template other than taxobox (if you know something about regular expressions you could probably refine the searches, there's some advice on that at Template:Template_usage), but the results are updated in real time. Lightgrey, violet and lightgreen still account for about 3800 of the 4200 instances of hardcoded taxobox colors on December 1. I've cleaned up up most of the other 400, but am still working on color=rgb(211,211,164) (these articles are mostly cephalopods missing kingdom and phylum) and color=lightblue. There's probably a few more color values I've missed, but they should show up in the Template Data Error Report in January (the report only shows individual parameters values when there are less than 50 different ones, but I'm pretty sure I have the colors under 50 now).

If you'd be interested in a more Lepidoptera focused cleanup of Taxoboxes using the Template Data Error Report and source code searches of parameter values, there are a bunch of leps that have "cohort=Myoglossata". There are two problems there. Firstly, taxoboxes shouldn't display a ton of minor taxonomic ranks. Cohort is a minor rank between family and order, and while it is appropriate to include it in family articles, it's mostly clutter in genus and species articles. Secondly, "cohort" isn't even recognized by the taxobox template. The recognized parameter is "cohorto". Where it is desirable to display this minor rank, it's not happening because the wrong parameter name is used. The invalid parameter isn't displaying as clutter to readers, but it is clutter for editors. Either the invalid "cohort" parameter needs to be fixed to "cohorto" or (my general preference) deleted outright. The articles with "cohort" also usually also have unrecognized "subcohort" (not "subcohorto") and "zoodivision" (should be "zoodivisio") parameters. If you're interested in purging minor ranks between order and family at article below family, also check out the entire [TDER and look at the "cohorto", "subcohorto" and "zoodivision". Plantdrew (talk) 03:33, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

A day and a few hours can hardly be called a delay on anything not of the highest urgency (and this hardly is that urgent), especially when my original response was made at a time you were away from Wikipedia for a few hours. Besides, it's not like either of us is lacking in other things to do on Wikipedia, is it?.

I'm willing to tackle however many of them I can find the energy to deal with before I start repeating those actions in my very dreams. (Purely hypothetical/symbolic exaggeration, of course. There's absolutely no way that earlier this month, during my Category:Lepidoptera genera diffusion to Category:Butterfly genera burst, I actually had a minor nightmare that a trolling LTAer had reversed all my diffusion work while I was sleeping. Nope. Not at all. /whistles innocently, then pauses. What, obsessive, me? Naaah...) I know a little about regex, though not overly much, but a slightly crude search isn't really an issue anyway, as long as it mostly finds the articles we're looking for. (If you consider it sufficiently good enough to work with, I'm probably going to think the same of it) Probably not going to bother dusting off what little regex knowledge has made itself at home somewhere in the back of my mind. Doesn't really matter if it's Lepidoptera focused, either, though the clutter in Lep-taxoboxes is something I'll probably tackle at some point as well if no one else gets there first, so it's good to have that link. :) AddWittyNameHere (talk) 04:45, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh, and just to make doubly-sure: Are there any cases in which the taxobox on articles that fall in the domain Bacteria should remain lightgrey? I've looked at several of your edits and far as I can tell from those, the answer is 'no', but probably doesn't hurt to make sure. Same with the other colors, but light grey is specifically mentioned in taxobox/doc (in that it mentions a lot of bacteria infoboxes are light grey, without saying anything about 1. why or 2. if this is a relic of prior times or something that is occasionally justified) and the most common, so especially wanted to make sure for that one. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 07:08, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

@AddWittyNameHere: I added the comment re lightgrey to the table showing taxobox colours, because it seemed to me that actually more bacteria taxoboxes were the 'wrong' colour than were the 'right' colour, and I wondered if there was any support for changing to lightgrey as the standard. But it seems that there is not, so no, none should remain lightgrey. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:18, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Makes sense, then. Well, not that such a large portion is wrong, though it's sadly not uncommon* either in Taxo-Wiki-Land, but where that note came from. Thanks for letting me know. :)

Not uncommon: Or, as I started muttering to myself after the umpteenth time I moved a monotypic moth genus from specific to generic title:

The Work goes ever on and on

Down from the stubs where it began

Now far behind on what's to be done

So I must fix it, if I can

Editing with bleary eyes

Until the issue's gone away

But yet more work in waiting lies

And whither then? Another page

— Tree of Life Work Goes Ever On, a parody of The Road Goes Ever On

Figured either of you might get a smile out of it.AddWittyNameHere (talk) 07:53, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Well, I did. I'm not sure about not that such a large portion is wrong – there are over 3,000 taxoboxes with "color lightgrey" – search for hastemplate:Taxobox insource:"color lightgrey". Peter coxhead (talk) 08:39, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Ah, that's my unnecessarily complex sentences causing misunderstanding. The 'not' was aimed at '[t]hat makes sense' not at 'is wrong'; ergo, such a large portion being wrong isn't what makes sense; rather, your explanation does. (Or, more fully: "Your explanation makes sense, I now understand why that comment was there. What doesn't make sense is why such a large portion is wrong, but that's Tree of Life for ya") AddWittyNameHere (talk) 08:55, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

I like your Tree of Life Work Goes Ever On. The lightgrey bacteria are largely the work of one very prolific editor who is utterly unresponsive to feedback about their editing practices (they do good work overall, but have a few nonstandard idiosyncrasies such as the color issue). Plantdrew (talk) 17:38, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, figured either of you would be likely to appreciate it. Ah, I should have figured it was something like that, I know of a few folks like that myself, both off and on wiki (admittedly, on wiki mostly through page histories, as the majority of such people on Leps have long gone dormant, often since well before my time. Most of who's left is at least moderately responsive to feedback, I think, not that much of it occurs to be responsive to), and there's something about entomology, and quite possibly taxonomy in general, that disproportionally attracts prolific workers with some eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, just in varying degrees of adaptability and responsiveness to feedback, at least if I go by the various (amateur) Lepidopterists that visit my father. Or rather, used to, he's been too busy with other things (and tensions in Dutch Lep circles didn't help) to do much moth/butterfly-related things the past few years, though he's still subscribed to at least four entomological/Lepidopterological journals from top of my head (Vlinders, Entomologische Berichten, Tijdschrift voor Entomologie & Phegea). I know that I myself sure do have some eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, though they're more present in my communication with (from time to time, like now I suppose, better described as 'rambling—with sentences longer than the average moth-stub and plenty of asides—in the vague direction of') folks than in my actual article editing. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 18:44, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

All the top level taxobox templates now disregard |color=, and I haven't seen any more errors in the tracking categories for some time, so this seems to have worked well. It means that taxobox colours will be consistent in future. Ideally occurrences of |color=value would be removed, but there are a lot of them! Peter coxhead (talk) 08:15, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Great news! I have been significantly more busy in real life than I had presumed when I offered to work on removing them; however, that should settle in a day or so again, and rest assured that I will work on removing them once more. :) AddWittyNameHere (talk) 07:43, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Euonymus fimbriatus

Thank you for your edit. The article is much better than before! Pkbwcgs (talk) 12:55, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

You're welcome, thanks for creating the article. Plantdrew (talk) 17:38, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Tricky ranks

Hi, I saw your edit re the rank of "series". There is now code that checks for rank anomalies in taxonomy templates. Initially there were several hundred entries in Category:Taxonomy templates showing anomalous ranks, i.e. taxonomy templates whose target taxon appeared to be at a rank inconsistent with taxa higher up the hierarchy. A very large proportion of these were birds, where the problem was caused by the well known inconsistency between "dinosaur" and "bird" classifications. I've managed to get rid of all of the anomalies now, but this did involve two evasive moves:

• "Series" and "subseries" simply can't be checked for the correct ordering, since there are three different uses in different areas of biology. The only solution would appear to be to use the approach adopted for "divisio", where we use "divisio" for the botanical sense and "zoodivisio" for the zoological sense (or at least one of them – see Template:Taxonomy/Carabus div. Multistriati). So we could perhaps have "series" for the botanical sense, "lepidoseries" for the lepidopteran sense, etc. Whether this is worthwhile I don't know. In the automated taxobox system I don't check for any "series" group ranks, which does mean they could be used inconsistently in a given hierarchy.
• "Grandordo" and "mirordo" are used in two ways, as noted at Order (biology)#Zoology. The McKenna & Bell approach now appears to be the minority usage. Currently the automated taxobox system checks the order using the other approach, i.e. magnordo – grandordo – mirordo – superordo. I'm playing with "grandordo-mb" and "mirordo-mb" for the McKenna & Bell sense. Neither rank is currently implemented in the manual taxobox system as they don't appear in {{Taxobox/core}}.

Peter coxhead (talk) 08:46, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

I updated Template:Automatic taxobox/doc/taxonomy pages#rank to show the ranks currently checked. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:39, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Well, I'm not sure how much effort should be spent accounting for ranks that are rarely going to be used (let alone displayed) in the automatic taxonomy hierarchy. Looking at the report for series, it looks like there are 14 salticid spider genera that attempt to have Entelegynae as a series above the family level. The spiders all start with A; it looks like somebody started working through salticid genera alphabetically and perhaps gave up when they realized the minor ranks weren't working right. Aside from the spiders, there's one moth family where I just went ahead and removed a red-linked series, and the wasp "series" Spheciformes. All the other instances of series are plants. I'm inclined to just remove the extraneous minors ranks from the spiders, but I'll hold off for now in case you want to convert them to automatic taxoboxes (let me know if you do). Spheciformes is a little tricky as the article subject itself is being treated as a series, so series can't be removed as a minor rank (but the parent and sister taxa have automatic taxoboxes, so switching from manual is pretty straightforward). Plantdrew (talk) 16:03, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Re Spheciformes: the article doesn't actually say anywhere that it's a series, and there are no sources quoted saying so. Rather the article says that it's a paraphyletic group. So I think treating it as "unranked" is ok, which is what I've changed it to; alternatively Spheciformes could be treated as an obsolete name and the taxobox removed. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:23, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

As series is rarely used in automatic taxoboxes (4 lepidotera, 3 plants), I agree that it's not worth bothering with. I'll look at the spider cases; I've generally converted all spider taxoboxes to automated ones, because the classification is still changing, and it's easier to fix that way. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:22, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

I've now fixed the spider articles here. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:42, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for taking care of them. Plantdrew (talk) 23:17, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Season's greetings

Hope you're enjoying this time of year, and thanks for all your help at WP:RFD over the year (I call on you too much, but you always respond wisely: I was a little worried looking back over the last month that you've started contributing to other RfDs too ACH! ACH! WARNING! WARNING! GET AWAY WHILE YOU CAN!). We had a very light white Christmas here in Budapest. I don't want to worry you unduly, but you are aware of Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Eubot 3, I hope? It's about taxonomic names and let's create every scientific name in existence. Si Trew (talk) 14:10, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

@SimonTrew:, happy holidays to you too. It was unseasonably warm here, so no white Christmas. I've been looking in on RfD fairly regularly over the last few months, but rarely weigh in on anything that's not related to biology.

I wasn't aware of Eubot 3's scientific name redirects, thanks for letting me know. There are likely problems with a few of them (e.g. some should point to a different title, some should be articles not redirects). The bot's owner expressed awareness of potential issues ("One complication is that some binomials have been used for several different species"), but relied on Wikipedia having already caught the problems in some form. Where information was lacking on Wikipedia, errors may have slipped through. Anthemis sancti-johannis as an example (created by a different editor) of the kinds of problems that might result from the bot. Plantdrew (talk) 03:07, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for edits and advice

Thank you, Plantdrew, for your edits to the MBARI pages, and for giving me a little more information about editing articles. It's good to know I can update my own links without it being considered a conflict. Obviously I am new at this; I appreciate your help. Happy New Year!--Nsbarr (talk) 16:25, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Need your support

Dear Sir Hope you are fine, referring to the biograghy of Bilal Abdallah Alayli, i need your support to prevent removing this biograghy because it is not poorly sourced. Best regards and happy new year. --Mharfouche (talk) 17:24, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

@Mharfouche: I'm sorry, I don't think I can be much help. I tried searching for sources, but didn't have success finding anything relevant. I suspect there may be sources in Arabic, but I can't read that language. There may be English sources that use a different spelling/transliteration of his name, but again, I don't have enough familiarity with Arabic to know what the likely alternate English spellings are. It doesn't look like the biography is in any danger of being removed; it just has a banner requesting better sourcing, not a deletion notice. Plantdrew (talk) 17:47, 30 December 2016 (UTC)