Talk:Florida Cottonmouth
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Although I'm happy that somebody took the trouble to write this article, I'm disappointed that the scientific name was not used for the title of the page. I'm aware that my opinion is at odds with of Wikipedia's policy on this issue, but as far as I'm concerned that policy can only work for birds at best, where the American Ornithologists' Union has an officially accepted common name for each scientific name (and even then Wikipedia does not always use the same common names).
The result is that Wikipedia's naming guideline, which is to use the most common common name for every article and only to use the scientific name if there is no common name, reduces this naming process to a popularity contest.
Florida Cottonmouth is a good enough example. I used to live in Florida, but in all the years I was there I never heard anybody ever refer to this snake as a Florida cottonmouth. About half the time people would call it a cottonmouth, and other times times they would call it a water moccasin. Therefore, I seriously doubt that Florida Cottonmouth is the most common common name for this species where it actually occurs: in Florida.
Where is Florida cottonmouth the most common common name? Only in literature and on the Internet, and only because somebody decided there should be a new common name for it after it was described as Agkistrodon piscivorus conanti by Howard Gloyd in a scientific article he wrote in 1969.
So, what is the correct common name -- the most common common name -- for this article? As far as I can see, there's no easy way to tell, but if some guy in Florida kills a snake in his back yard and decides to use Wikipedia to look it up, chances are he's not going to look for "Florida cottonmouth".
Which is why in my opinion, we should be using scientific names for the names of these articles with lots of redirects and disambiguation pages for the different common names. It's much harder for anyone to argue about what these scientific names should be. And, if there is any arguing to be done, we can leave that up to the experts. --Jwinius 13:47, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
