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Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of canids/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was promoted by Giants2008 via FACBot (talk) 22:04:44 3 November 2019 (UTC) [1].

List of canids

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List of canids (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): PresN 04:18, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Back in March I successfully nominated List of felids, a list of all species in the Felidae family (aka cats); I figured at the time that the natural followup would be dogs. It took much longer than I expected, but 6 months later here is List of canids, comprising all species in the Canidae family, aka dogs and foxes. The format is based on List of felids, and is generated by an offline script to maintain consistency, while the structure is based off of the tree of life projects' favorite Mammal Species of the World plus generally accepted modern research. Unlike the cat list, this list also includes prehistoric canids, as during the development of the list a rough consensus emerged that the list belonged here instead of Canidae and I plan to backfill the felids list the same way for consistency. The format changes there because the data is frankly impossible to get for ranges and ecology, etc. for the vast majority of animals from millions of years ago, but there is at least a generally accepted taxonomy for most of the extinct species. Anyways, the list as a whole is pretty exhaustively filled in and cited, so I think it's ready to go- thanks for reviewing! --PresN 04:18, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comments on the lead
  • "as well the extinct genera Dusicyon" - isn't Dusicyon a singular genus?
  • Is it correct for Epicyon to have a capital E mid-sentence?
Further comments
  • Arctic fox has a stray comma at the end of its "hunting" description
  • Fixed
  • How come a handful of extinct canids have refs but most do not?
  • As noted in the text above the tables, the entire section is based on work by Wang et. al. (refs 5, 72-74), except where otherwise noted- which would be for species described more recently than those overview papers/books were published, such as Vulpes qiuzhudingi, which wasn't described until 2014 (though, ironically Wang was also one of the authors of that paper). I've now made that more explicit.
  • What's the source for the first three columns in the extant tables?
  • Name(s)/describer/subspecies from Mammals of the World 3rd ed., as stated above the tables; the rangemaps are from the IUCN catalog, which is cited in each row but I've now made explicit in the text as well.

Support Comments from Aoba47

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  • I have a random question about this part: "They are found on all continents except Antarctica, having arrived independently or accompanied human beings over extended periods of time." Would it be beneficial to add a note about how dogs, specifically sled dogs, have been banned from Antarctica? I believe the ban was a result of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, which said that all non-native animals, other than humans, are not allowed in Antarctica. It is probably not necessary for the list, but it was just something that I randomly thought about when reading that part about Antarctica in the lead. I will read through the rest of the list sometime tomorrow if that is okay with you to provide any further commentary. Aoba47 (talk) 00:17, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Aoba47: The Antarctica thing is interesting, but I think outside the scope of this list to give details on why dogs aren't found in the continent since it's trying to give an overview of the entire family and that's just one (important) subspecies. --PresN 01:58, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Dudley

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  • "Population sizes range from the extinct Falkland Islands wolf to the red fox, "the most widespread land carnivore in the world"." This confuses two different criteria. The source refers to the size of the area inhabited, not population size. (I would guess that domestic cats or dogs have the largest population size.)
  • That's fair, swapped out for wolves/dogs (it's dogs, incidentally, best estimate for worldwide cat population I found was ~500 million vs. dogs' 1 billion.)
  • "tribes or clades". This does not make sense. "Tribe" is a taxonomic rank, whereas "clade" links to cladistics, which is a method of classification. A genus is a clade just as a tribe is.
  • Hmm, so the issue (which you reference below) is that there are 2 tribes + a genus that is not placed in a named tribe. Easy problem to solve- now changed to say exactly that.
  • "Vulpini, which includes 3 genera and 14 species, comprising the fox-like canids". I think it would be clearer to say "Vulpini, the fox-like canids, comprising 3 genera and 14 species"
  • Done
  • "and the Urocyon genus" You say 3 tribes and then give two tribes and a genus, which is confusing. You need to give the tribe name.
  • As per above, there isn't one- reworked to make it more clear.
  • It would be helpful to spell out in the lead that the Borophaginae and Hesperocyoninae are extinct.
  • I do, right when I first mention them: "In addition to the extant Caninae, Canidae comprises two extinct subfamilies designated as Hesperocyoninae and Borophaginae."
  • Coyotes " including small to large mammals" This is rather vague. Is information available on the maximum size of prey?
  • It's vague because coyotes are super-omnivorous and will eat pretty much any animal that doesn't fight back successfully- they'll pounce on mice, and gang up on large cows (or other ungulates), though typically they stick to deer and smaller. "small to large mammals" does read strangely, though. Maybe "Preys on a wide variety of foods, including both small and large mammals, fruit, and insects"?
  • Falkland Islands wolf. Is an estimated date for extinction available?
  • 1876- added a note to that effect
  • You should link less known words such as lagomorph.
  • Whoops, got ungulates but missed that one. Fixed.
  • Perhaps have an additional symbol for sub-species which are critically endangered, such as the Chadian wild dog?
  • I'd prefer not to add more symbols/data for subspecies, due to inconsistent sourcing and varying definitions of what constitutes a "subspecies". Additionally, and possibly more importantly, for species I'm using the IUCN classifications, but they don't seem to classify subspecies in general- sometimes they'll do major population regions, and in fact for the African Wild Dog they do Global and Mediterranean, but not by subspecies and not often, so I'd have to mix data sources for different taxo levels.
  • Source review – The references all appear to be reliable and the link-checker tool shows no issues. There is one minor formatting problem: a mixture of DMY and YYYY-MM-DD formatting exists. These should be made consistent throughout; I'd suggest changing the YYYY-MM-DD ones since there are fewer of those. By my count, only refs 2, 9, and 81 would need fixes. Giants2008 (Talk) 21:11, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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