Talk:Ovis

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Contents 1 Breeds and species - can you help? 2 Anyone read Hebrew? 3 Sheep vs Domestic Sheep problems 4 Wilson and Reeder (1993) classification 5 IUCN/SSC - Caprinae Specialist Group (2000) 6 So where's species no. 8? 7 Sheep --> Ovis move

[edit] Breeds and species - can you help?

Please see this comment and comment on this page or that page as you see fit. Thanks Donama 05:47, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Anyone read Hebrew?

If you check out the Hebrew equivalent article, it has a lot of information about the species other than O. aries. If anyone can read and translate Hebrew, it would be valuable to have some of it here. Donama 02:25, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

You could try posting it to Wikipedia:Translation into English, or post a message to one of the Hebrew-to-English translators. -- Ian ≡ talk 04:36, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

A transation of the Hebrew article headings thanks to User:Woggly:

I think we can see from this we almost have it covered between the Sheep and Domestic sheep articles. Donama 11:32, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sheep vs Domestic Sheep problems

The recent interwiki links in the Sheep article may be okay, but they appear to be duplicated at Domestic sheep. Considering, domestic sheep and generic O. subspecies sheep have gone into two separate articles I suggest we include a summarised paragraph about Ovis aries on this page and put all the interwiki links there. Perhaps it makes sense for the interwiki links to be duplicated on the Ovis aries (domestic sheep) article too? What do you think? Donama 01:41, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wilson and Reeder (1993) classification

Here, for what it's worth, is how Wilson and Reeder [1] sorted out the species in 1993:

• Ovis ammon: the argali
• Ovis vignei: the urial
• Ovis aries: the domestic sheep and the mouflon
• Ovis nivicola: the snow sheep
• Ovis canadensis: the bighorn sheep
• Ovis dalli: the Dall sheep

--Cam 04:37, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IUCN/SSC - Caprinae Specialist Group (2000)

I distilled the following classification from this page:

• O. aries: the domestic sheep
• O. gmelini: the mouflon
  • O. g. gmelini: the Armenian mouflon
  • O. g. anatolica: (a Turkish mouflon, may belong in O. g. gmelini)
  • O. g. isphahanica: the Esfahan mouflon
  • O. g. laristanica: the Laristan mouflon
  • O. g. musimon: the European mouflon
  • O. g. ophion: the Cyprus mouflon
• O. vignei or O. orientalis: the urial
• O. ammon: the argali
• O. nivicola: the snow sheep
• O. canadensis: the bighorn sheep
• O. dalli: the Dall sheep

--Cam 16:36, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] So where's species no. 8?

Count again, it's not there. - Samsara (talk • contribs) 09:34, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sheep --> Ovis move

Initial contributions gathered from User talk:Lambiam#Sheep --> Ovis move and User talk:Donama#Sheep --> Ovis move. —Lambiam^Talk 10:56, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Lambian, I'm a bit unhappy that you moved Sheep to Ovis without any kind of discussion first. I think Ovis is the latin word for sheep, or only the scientific genus name in English. Most people looking for an overview of sheep will go to "Sheep", not "Ovis". Domestic sheep are still at the article of that name anyway, so I'd really prefer we move Ovis back to sheep. Have you changed any of the redirects yet. If you have it's probably not worth moving it back straight away without starting a discussion about it on the talk page first. — Донама 02:50, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't know that this Sheep was one of your pets. Usually when I post something on an article's talk page there are about 2 reactions per decade. See for example the vivid discussion at Talk:Ovis#Sheep vs Domestic Sheep problems. I did the same shuffle before with Goat and Capra (genus). My reasoning was that most people looking for information on goats or sheep are looking for information on the domesticated species, and will look up Goat or Sheep. I am firmly convinced that they vastly outnumber the people who want an overview of different species in the genus (from which they arrive one click away). Most don't probably even know there is more to it. The situation I created is very similar to how Cow goes to the domesticated beasties, not to Bos, same again for Cat which does not go to Felis, and so on. I'm not quite clear why you think that is sub-optimal for Sheep, but if I am correct in understanding that you want Sheep to exceptionally lead the reader to the genus and not the domesticated species, then all you need to do is to change that redirect page.

I tried to adjust all links into Sheep to go to Ovis if more appropriate, but found only one case, at Bighorn Sheep. All other links, previously going to the genus page, were actually meant for the domesticated fuzzies. Lambiam^Talk 03:40, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

There are now nearly 100 unfixed redirects. I agree with the above (that is, Donama's contribution — L.), and it should go back to the english name. I'll fix it later, but wait for further comments. jimfbleak 05:05, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean with an "unfixed redirect". Wikipedia:Redirect#Don't fix links to redirects that aren't broken states emphatically: Most especially, there should never be a need to replace [[redirect]] with [[direct|redirect]]. So an example is the article Llama. It has a link "[[sheep]]" in the context "In fact, llamas were used in place of the horse, the ox, the goat, and the sheep of the Old World." I assumed, in the context with the other domesticated animals, that here the domesticated species was intended by the author, rather than the European Mouflon. In other words, this was a link that was fixed by the redirect [[Sheep]] → [[Domestic sheep]]: apparently the author of the text naturally assumed that [[sheep]] would resolve to [[Domestic sheep]]. I may have misinterpreted the authors' intentions in some cases, and overlooked some links, but the only links that need to be fixed are those that say "sheep" and mean (any individual of) "the genus Ovis (L.)".

As to what should go where, please help yourselves. It looks like [[Sheep]] is unspoilt, and you can just move it back. All I did was what I thought would be the most helpful approach to the readers, and consistent with the treatment of other ambiguous names (domesticated species vs. genus) to boot. I do not understand why "sheep" should be singled out, but in light of all that ails Wikipedia I consider this a rather unimportant issue, so I hope you don't mind too much if I leave the further discussion to the regular visitors of this talk page. Lambiam^Talk 11:39, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Lambian, I do understand your move of the page was well thought out and you thought it helpful, etc. Mostly I'm just concerned that there was no prior discussion. Thanks for starting it here, if belatedly.

I hadn't noticed the changes to the goat, cat or cow, etc. I personally still think an article about sheep (of all kinds) should go at "Sheep". To me that is intuitive. I'm not sure about the other animals. What do others think? — Донама 02:27, 5 May 2006 (UTC)