Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by UtherSRG (talk | contribs) at 21:23, 13 December 2004 (→Category and article names). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Olive family

Should an article like this be at the title Oleaceae which is now a redirect. Some of the species seem pretty far from the common understanding of an olive. Rmhermen 14:10, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

I'd say yes. While it's good to have the article title be a common name, it's not good when that common name is misleading, as in this case. - UtherSRG 14:51, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

ditto. -- WormRunner | Talk 16:04, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Technically, "olive family" is just as accurate as "Oleaceae" - note that a large number of botanical writeups write "olive family Oleaceae" at least on the first usage, which says two things; a) they're synonyms, and b) the "-aceae" names are still not quite second nature to everybody, what the computer nerds would call a "human interface"

problem. :-) But we've signed up with the Latin names. (Might not hurt to have redirs tho, "soapberry family" garners several thousand matches, 600 of them not mentioning Sapindaceae at all.) Stan 17:03, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'd say "yes" to Oleaceae. While I can understand the concern that common names are more familiar to most people, it is not the case that "olive family" should mean "all plants that look like an olive." The terms are, in essence and as notedabove, synonyms; therefore olive family means: "plants related to and sharing specified morphological characteristics with the familiar olive plant." As cladistics advance this becomes "plants related to and sharing a specified genetic similarity with the familiar olive plant." - Marshman 17:40, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

'Old' style taxoboxes

When I come across a taxobox created with the table code rather than the new ToL template I update it. I'm not sure if people are of the opinion 'if it ain't broke -don't fix it', or if its better to update them to make any subsequent updates simpler. A list of entries with the 'old' template can be found here .--nixie 02:48, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think it's good to make the changes in an ad hoc manner. No need to rush out and change all the taxoboxes at once, but if one happens upon an article and it's got an old format, update it. If one is bored they could pick an article that needs an update taxobox and start there and work up and down the tree as appropriate. I've done that with Canidae and Felidae and with some other mammals. - UtherSRG 14:56, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

! Important ! Kiwi page sorely out of date!

(Posted by new User:Fledgeling on my user page - can anyone help out? I'll have a look in HBW, but I suspect that's not up-to-date enough) - MPF 09:51, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There were tought to be three species and two sub-species untill 1995, when DNA tests on the different Kiwi populations proved otherwise. Today we know that the species formerly known as Brown Kiwi is actually three distinct species – Brown Kiwi, Rowi and Tokoeka. And the Tokoeka currently has two varieties - Haast Tokoeka and Southern Tokoeka. The Rowi was identified as a seperate species in 2003, the latest to be identified as a seperate species.--- http://www.kiwirecovery.org.nz/Kiwi/AboutTheBird/TheKiwiFamily/

I have noticed this page is sorely out of date, but since i only came yesterday i do not have the expertise, 'Wikification' knowlege, or guts to take on the task of editing such a large, prominent peice. Since you listed one of your interests as birds, i was hoping you might be interested in takling this project. You dont have to, of course, but i felt this topic should be brought up

P.S. Is there a better place to put this information?

Thanks 04:11, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Common name capitalization

Back in the spring I was working on some fish articles, and someone moved them all to title capitalization (the infamous one being Neon Tetra instead of Neon tetra). AFAICT this is not mandated anywhere in the ToL pages, and it violates Misplaced Pages standards about using normal English sentence capitalization for article titles. I was told back then that capitalizing everything was the new standard for ToL. However, from looking around, it doesn't seem like most articles follow this (undocumented) standard. Can anyone help me out? —Tkinias 18:30, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Capitalisation is the agreed standard for birds, with a mandatory lower case redirect. AFAIK there is no agreed stanadard for other groups, although there are some de facto ones, such as cetacean, which are all capitalised. I'm not the most assiduous follower of ToL, so you may be right about caps for everything asa new standard, which I would approve of. Fish in general, though, have been the bastion of lower case common nemes. jimfbleak 19:51, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Maybe this is somewhere ornithologists and ichthyologists disagree? I'm not an ichthyologist, just a hobbyist, but I've never seen all-caps for common names outside of Misplaced Pages. The OED doesn't, Britannica doesn't, FishBase doesn't, ITIS doesn't, and none of the hobbyist's references I have here do. Where does this "standard" come from? I'm just frustrated with the inconsistency, since I was forced to do something that nobody else seems to be doing, and there seems to be a one-man campaign to force capitalization. —Tkinias 20:10, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think lower case is largely American (sometimes "american"!} style. All my dozens of bird books use caps, including the NAm ones. The bird agreement was at least two years ago, so I'm not sure that I could easily track it down , althougn I'll try to do so if it's important. It may not be idea, but it seems to be the case that different animal groups have different practices as well as the NAm/other differences. I don't think in practice that standardisation is even possible. For exanmple, there are 2-3,000 bird articles, some of which have species lists with up to 3000 named species. I'm sure a similar situation applies for fish, mammals and plants at least. jimfbleak 20:19, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I'm not disagreeing on the birds, just saying that generalizing from birds to fish doesn't work. (Even if the cladists tell us birds are really fish *grin*). Oh, and don't tell OED and Britannica they're following American style... —Tkinias 20:27, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There was once a "push to generalize" out from birds to the whole of Animalia from some (including me). However others pointed out it wasn't really appropriate, particularly for fish. I think the best thing to hope is consistency across "large-ish" taxa. Caps for birds (this is an agreed standard), caps for mammals in scientific contexts but don't bother in less scientific articles (this is probably best described as a de facto standard, but I think defensible), no caps for fish (because no-one else does). Pcb21| Pete 23:51, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the clarification. I will try to keep the fish I work on consistent with that then. —Tkinias 01:14, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I disagree; I don't believe there is any reason to capitalize common names, unless they include a proper noun or adjective. As mentioned above, this is consistent with the OED and Britannica, as well as standard biology textbooks and indeed any source I've ever come across. I don't doubt the ornithology books, but this practice of capitalizing avian common names does not seem to have been embraced even by the scientific community, not to mention the larger academic community or lay publishing in general. I especially see no reason for capitalizing mammalian names in general or cetaceans specifically. In my opinion it would be simpler and more consistent, both within Misplaced Pages and without, to use lower case. The fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, admittedly a North American work, has the following to say: "8.136 Common names. For the correct capitalization of common names of plants and animals, consult a dictionary or the authoritative guides to nomenclature, the ICBN and the ICZN, mentioned in 8.127. In any one work, a single source should be followed. In general, Chicago recommends capitalizing only proper nouns and adjectives, as in the following examples, which conform to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary" (the examples given are Dutchman's-breeches, mayapple, jack-in-the-pulpit, rhesus monkey, Rocky Mountain sheep, and Cooper's hawk). Of course scientific names, except for species names, should be capitalized, as CMS also states. I of course understand that individual groups may have separate views about their field of interest, but I advocate a less complicated, more accepted approach. Furthermore, in my opinion, capitalizing common nouns (common as in not a proper noun) in the middle of the sentence looks unprofessional (for instance, "A group of Bottlenose Dolphins, apparently sensing danger to the swimmers..."). Finally, I should mention that it seems quite odd to me that there would even be a discussion concerning capitalization of vernacular animal and plant names. It never occurred to me that anyone would want to capitalize them. I admit I have not read any books specifically on ornithology; however, I have read quite a large amount of scientific literature, in addition to popular literature, and I can think of no examples of this. I know this comment is long, and it is not my inention to offend, but in short, my proposal is this: vernacular names of all plants and animals should be in lower case, unless 1) it contains a proper noun or adjective, which should be capitalized (a dictionary like the OED or Merriam-Webster can help give guidance), or 2) an authoritative source such as the ICBN or ICZN recommends such capitalization. Perhaps a bit broad, but it makes sense to me. What are your thoughts? — ] 03:17, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

(Reverting to no-indent...) Naturally, I agree with User:Knowledge Seeker. I note that, unfortunately, the Oxford Style Manual (a UK style manual) gives no guidance on the specific subject of capitalizing common names. OED, of course, does not capitalize them. ICBN/ICZN I don't think concern themselves at all (and from what I've seen avoid mentioning) common names. I note that ICZN docs on their Web site downcase anglicized versions of names of higher taxa -- therefore, "the Centrarchidae" but "this fish is a centrarchid". I've proposed a standard specifically for fish at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Fishes, but there's not been much response. —Tkinias 03:47, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Addendum: Survey of several on-line taxonomic sources: NCBI Entrez, University of Michigan Animal Diversity Web, Tree of Life Project, and Integrated Taxonomic Information System all uniformly use lower-case common names for taxa of all levels. So do the journals Nature, American Journal of Botany, International Journal of Plant Sciences (just some for which I had easy on-line access). I could not readily determine if Science has a policy on this since I didn't find any unambiguous use in their on-line number. I found no use of capitalized common names in any on-line taxonomic sources I checked. The only use I have seen is in things like bird-watcher' books and aquarium hobbyists' works; apparently capitalization is a standard in specialist ornithological works, but I don't have access to any of that. (Maybe some of our ornithologists could provide journal names which use this standard?) —Tkinias 04:24, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This isn't so much a conflict between American and British/Australian etc usage; it is more a conflict between old-fashioned (what I would regard stick-in-the-mud) dictionary usage, and rather more modern popular field guide usage, with the latter setting the recent trend to capitalisation for excellent practical reasons (as have been outlined here before on numerous occasions; look through the archives). Pretty well all field guides that I have seen, whatever the group (plants, birds, fish, etc, etc) on all continents (including North America) capitalise names, and have done so for 30-40 years at least. The dictionaries are quite simply out of date here (I can also if desired find plenty of cases of dictionaries failing to keep up-to-date usage of e.g. scientific names in their pages; dictionary compilers just don't appear to have a clue when it comes to modern sciences).

How far back field guide capitalisation rules go I don't know exactly, but my parents' old The Observer's Book of Sea Fishes (1958) capitalises all common names fully.

One excellent reason for doing so is uniformity of capitalising in a list, instead of having seemingly random or arbitary capitalisation; uniform capitalisation is on a par with uniform treatment of scientific names (Genus upper case, species lower case), where scientific conventions over-ride traditional grammatical rules.

Another is that there are a large number of cases where determining whether a species name is derived from a proper noun or not is impossible, or at the very least, extremenly difficult to know. Should, for example, Pohutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) be capitalised or not under dictionary rules? Or Koyamaki (Podocarpus macrophylla)? Do you know enough Maori or Japanese etymology to say? I certainly don't, and I don't think anyone should be expected to have to find out, either.

Third, and perhaps the most important of all, is that capitalisation helps distinguish the general from the specific. A Common Tern is a particular species (Sterna hirundo), while a common tern refers to any species of tern that happens to be common in an area (where I am, Sandwich Tern is a common tern, but it isn't a Common Tern). - MPF 14:28, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

the lack of amiguity and the standard practice in most bird and cetacean books at least, plus the impracticability of changing all the articles seem good reason for sticking to the caps standard. Isabelline and Pomarine are also descriptors which may not be obviously proper/improper names. jimfbleak 19:21, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Whistling duck

There is something of an edit war starting with User:Mario and Dario on Anseriformes, Anatidae and the various whistling duck species' pages. I posted the following on their talk page:

I noticed that you made changes to Penguin (new species) and Anseriformes. Usually we follow the taxonomy of Handbook of birds of the world (list available on-line). Where we want to show an alternative view, we normally make it as a comment in the next.

I've done this with the whistling duck, since your change makes it inconsistent with related pages and with Wildfowl of the world. I've left the penguin species for now. On the relevant talk pages, could you please indicate the sources for the proposed changes? Many thanks, jimfbleak 06:31, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi again. The problem with ITIS is that it is a bit eccentric, and, as a USDA source, strongly linked to one country. Unfortunately, the USA taxonomy is also the one most out of step with the rest of the world, which is why we settled on HBW as the standard source. HBW

Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Tree of Life

Unfortunately, their only response has been to revert my changes, which I thought were a fair compromise. Any views? Should the relevant pages be protected pending resolution? jimfbleak 06:51, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hmm...unfortunately, my knowledge of ornithology is not strong enough to be able to offer factual support to either side. However, it looks like you have good evidence for your version. What I'd recommend is for each of the pages involved, explain on the article's talk page your reasoning, including documenting your sources if possible. Then go ahead and update the article in line with your ideas, including a statement about alternate views as you did before, if its appropriate (that is, if it's seriously a controversial topic). In your edit summary, I would very briefly explain the edit and make a note to discuss changes in the talk section before making them. If that doesn't work, or if this is too much or unfeasible, then protection may be necessary. Hopefully good documentation and explanation, along with vigilance, will suffice. Also—are there any other ornithologists who can help out here? — ] 05:24, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Category and article names

I haven't found any guidelines on this in the project page or in the talk archives, but if it's there just point me in the right direction, please! *grin*

There seems not to be consistency regarding the anglicization of names for higher taxa. Since I'm working on fishes (see Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Fishes), I'm primarily concerned with them, where the family names are normally of the form Fooidae and the order names of the form Fooiformes, where both derive from the generic name Foous (or Fooa). It is common to anglicize the family name as "fooid", and (less so) the order name as "fooiform". Should articles and categories be using Fooidae/Fooiformes or fooid/fooiform? The Latin forms violate the singular and the English-language rules for article names, but in some cases the anglicized forms just look a bit odd. The plural angicized order names in particular look strange, because they look like misspellings of the Latin forms (Fooiforms for Fooiformes). In most cases, the anglicized systematic names are the only unambiguous English names available (how else, for example, to distinguish Perca, Percinae, Percidae, and Perciformes?). I'd like to do cleanup on this as I go through the taxa, but I'm not sure which to standardize on. What does the ToL community think about this?

One way to handle it might be to use (singular) anglicizations for article names and (plural) Latin forms for categories.

(On a related subject, can one anglicize a subfamily name of form Fooinae as "fooine"—e.g., can one refer to the "percine fishes" for fishes of subfamily Percinae?) —Tkinias 03:18, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm gonna take a whack at this. The preferred article title should be the common English language name for the group. Barring that, it should be the formal taxon name. The anglicized terms can be used casually through the article, and yes, "fooid" and "fooin" are perfectly acceptable casual terms for creatures classified in "Fooidae" and "Fooinae", with acceptible adjectival forms being "fooide" and "fooine". I'd guess the same could be said about "fooiform" and "Fooiformes", but since I primarily work with primates and cephalopods, I don't encounter the -iformes ending very often. Categories are less rigorous and generally less formal. For instance, look at the category tree starting at Category:Primates. On the other hand, there's way many more fish taxa than there are primate taxa, so you'll want someting more than what I've got. lso, I'll probably want to add some finer granularity if all the primate artices are created. - UtherSRG 04:41, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm basing cats on families, since there are sometimes hundreds or thousands of species in an order. (Even some families are pretty huge...) So you would advocate avoiding anglicizations (as opposed to true common names) for both articles and categories? Therefore, we should have Cyprinidae and not Cyprinid, but Black bass and not Micropterus, right?

On the issue of categories being less formal than article titles, I think that all the fish articles should have a primary categorization based on taxonomy, since the structure is quite complex. Having additional categories based on nontaxonomic groups (e.g., "salmon", "trout", "bass", etc.) might be helpful too, though. —Tkinias 18:53, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You've got it on both accounts. Looks like you've got your work cut out for you. I'll refrain from making any "swimming with the fishes" jokes. Oh, I neglected to mention that the anglicized forms (fooid, fooide, fooin, fooine) can be redirects to the article so that they can be used in other articles without having to resort to the pipe trick or being limited to a particular wording. (E.g. The Uther Fish is a fresh water fooine fish found mainly in Wiki Sea.) - UtherSRG 21:23, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Common names

I'd like to get a feeling for peoples like or dislkie for the 'always used common names' paradigm. I don't like is for a few reasons:

1. Common names aren't universal, and it irks me when an article's name gets changed to the USDA PLANTS common name especially when that plants isn't from the US or a significant agricultural or horticultural species there.
2. The same common name is applied to different species in different countries, like Mountain Ash or wood duck (there is also an Australian wood duck Chenonetta jubata).

I think a better system would be to have redirects to the species or disambiguation pages where a common name applies to many species. Since wikipedia isn't paper an integrated system of cross referencing shouldn't be a problem, nor should updating if name changes occurs. Let me know what you think, and I'll decide if I should take this on to the Village Pump--nixie 04:58, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have been in favor of this for some time. Go for it! -- WormRunner | Talk 06:03, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Um, let's have some of the plant and bird folks weigh in on this one. - UtherSRG 12:46, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'd very much like to go with scientific names for the individual articles, certainly for plants. What Nixie points out is true; it'll also promote accuracy, and add A LOT to the reputation of wikipedia as a serious reference source. Just wishing I'd joined wikipedia before the 'use common names' was settled on! It'll be a huge task to move everything now, but I'll be happy to help do so. Birds, I'm not quite so sure; even some surprisingly high-powered ornithological journals use common names more than scientific names (typically a species is referred to by both common and scientific at the first mention, and thereafter only by the common) - MPF 13:48, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Obviously, this is a never-ending story. We have agreed upon rules in the past, with in the end as golden rule : use your common sense. I agree with MPF. I use the scientific name for the title, unless the common name is really commonly known and indicates univocally the taxon discussed. Anyway, when I use a scientific name as title, I put an eventual common name on top in the taxobox. Scientific names in titles also have the advantage of easily being found by bots, linking the diverse Wikipedias. BTW, have any of you noted that our Tree of Life-articles are being taken more and more seriously by the rest of the world ? For instance, the article on the orchid family Orchidaceae, where I and several others have worked on, is mentioned as reference on On-line orchid references, in the company with the best, such as Kew, IUCN and several other great orchid sites. We have the eyes of the world upon us. Therefore we must have a correct and uniform standard for naming taxons. If the rules of the past don't agree with several of us, then the discussion is wide open again. But if we have to change the rules again, the task of changing the existing articles will be gargantuan. Better think twice. JoJan 14:40, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Certainly it would be a lot of work, but I think it would be worth it. There would still be an occasional name conflict, but far less and with a more rational way to resolve it. Birds seem to be a special case with their "official" common names, but with plants and most animals it would make so much more sense. -- WormRunner | Talk 16:53, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I agree that systematic names would be superior. It would also help sort out the conflict over capitalizing common names in article titles -- and, as JoJan notes, it will help with linking with the non-English Wikipedias. I can usually sort out (with some effort) links to the European languages (with the help of FishBase's list of common names), but there's little or nothing I can do for CJK or Hebrew, for example. We might run into quasi-official opposition, however, as the "use English only" policy is not just a ToL thing, but Misplaced Pages-wide. —Tkinias 18:38, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

As to the interwiki-links, this is done with the Spybot, operated by Andre Engels. He explained this excellent program at the Wikimeeting in Rotterdam, Holland. Through the linking of this bot, you can get an insight of what others have written about the same subject in their language. I regularly check the French, Dutch and German Wikipedias especially for additional text and eventually photos. JoJan 19:20, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)