Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants/Archive11

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Archives for WP:PLANTS edit
1 2004-10 – 2005-07 Ericales; example article; Orders; food/poison; plant stubs; monotypic genus redirects; cacti; Carex
2 2005-07 – 2005-11 Acer; peer review requests; common names; headers; WikiProject Fungi proposal; stub proposals
3 2005-11 – 2006-01 Hyphenated species names; common names; article titles; tropical fruits
4 2006-01 – 2006-03 silver leaf tree; flower resource; article content/taxonomy; Poa; Wikipedia 1.0 Project
5 2006-03 – 2006-05 APGII; template botanist; flora article; article titles; common names; synonyms
6 2006-05 Plant article naming conventions; common names; categories; NPOV
7 2006-05 – 2006-06 lists/categories; Cornus; tomatoes; Horticulture and Gardening WikiProject; FA candidates; hortibox; range maps; Trifolium
8 2006-06-28 userbox; project banner; plant infobox; naming conventions
9 2006-06-28 – 2006-06-29 Taxoboxes for flowering plants; APGII
10 2006-06 – 2006-07 Original research; taxoboxes; APGII; italics
11 2006-07 interwiki cleanup for moss; illustrations of plant articles
12 2006-07 – 2006-11 Maples; citrus; photos; flora common name convention; capitalization; Vinca minor
13 2006-11 – 2007-01 Biographies needed; common names; APG and taxoboxes; species templates; image quality; microformat

Contents


[edit] Interwiki clean-up needed for moss etc

I have today been trying to sort out the iw-links on Swedish Wikipedia for various articles concerning mosses, and to my despair found that the existing state of iw-linking is to put it shortly a mess. The problem is of course made worse by the fact that this category of plants is undergoing reevaluation. I think that English Wikipedia is also in urgent need of attention on this matter (or soon bots will start messing up Swedish Wikipedia again *smile*), so I thought it might be appropriate if I shared my experiences here with you.

Basically what we now have on Swedish Wikipedia is three articles (though the content still needs to be shuffled around between them):

sv:Mossor
covering what is traditionally referred to as moss in Swedish, though it no longer has taxonomic standing, that is what is common for Bryophyta "plain" moss, Anthocerotophyta (hornwort) and Marchantiophyta (liverworts)
sv:Bladmossor 
covering the current understanding of Bryophyta, that is excluding hornwort and liverworts
sv:Egentliga bladmossor 
covering the class Bryopsida within Bryophyta

Apart from many articles quite simply being wrongly iw-linked, there is the additional problem of many languages choosing to treat Bryophyta and Bryopsida together, usually without mention of the six other classes of Bryophyta, as well as some languages treating hornwort and liverworts according to classic taxonomy as part of Bryophyta.

What I tried to do when cleaning up the iw-links was as follows (regardless of article name)

  • if the article covers Bryophyta, Anthocerotophyta, and Marchantiophyta link it to sv:Mossor
  • if the article does cover Bryopsida, then link it to sv:Egentliga bladmossor
  • if it only covers Bryophyta, then link it to sv:Bladmossor
  • if I cannot tell (like Japanese), then don't link it

I am not sure this was the best way, but it was the only I found feasible. Let me also note that the redirects between these various names are abundant! --Sannab 14:29, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Illustrations of plant articles

Over on Apple, a couple of new users (or perhaps they are a single user) decided to remove a fair number of "superfluous" images. I called for a moratorium of any more image removals on that article until there was a clear sense among the editors of what types of images a plant article needs. I've noticed here and there some other similar disagreements, so I would like to start a discussion here of appropriate illustration of a plant article.

I'd like to start with some general principles, and then a list of the types of images an article could contain. I'm hoping that this might eventually evolve into a set of guidelines.

All of this is of course for discussion; feel free to modify the list below.--Curtis Clark 15:52, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] General principles

  1. Images with detailed captions that bring out an aspect of the subject that adds to or amplifies the article, and images with thin captions that illustrate subjects or features explained in the text of the article, are both desirable, and are to be preferred over images with thin or no captions that have no direct connection to the text.
  2. All other things being equal, a higher-resolution image is preferable to a lower-resolution image, because it provides more detail to a reader who clicks through, and because it is more flexible in page layout (there is no chance of resizing it above its native resolution).
  3. All other things being equal, an image from Wikimedia Commons is preferable to an image from en.Wikipedia, because it can be directly used by editors in the same article in other languages.
  4. Editors should always evaluate images to make sure they are of the correct plant.
  5. Image galleries are best "themed"—e.g., used for comparison of species or organs—rather than being random collections of images.

[edit] Types of images

[edit] By source

  • Photograph
  • Illustration (classical—e.g. out-of-copyright—illustrations are used in a number of articles)

[edit] By subject

  • Whole-plant (in some cases, such as Welwitschia, the appearance of the plant is diagnostic; in others, especially at low resolution, it "looks like just another tree")
  • Organs
    • Stem (not useful for many plants, but bark, armament, and branching can all be diagnostic)
    • Leaf (leaf shape is useful for many plants, as is indumentum)
    • Root (not usually available except for root crops)
    • Reproductive structures
      • Flower (it's useful to have enough detail to be able to distinguish at least some of the individual flower parts)
      • Fruit (obviously important for fruit crops)
      • Strobilus (obviously important for conifers, especially the seed cones)
      • Seed (useful for seed crops and when seeds are distinctive)
  • Habitat/Cultivated setting (these are often of little value at low resolution)
  • Distribution maps
  • Unprepared and prepared agricultural products alone or in market or industrial settings (some of the photos removed from Apple were from this category; an image showing processing, comparing processed to unprocessed product, or showing unusual ways of harvest, transportation, storage, or marketing seems more useful than a generic picture)
  • Pests and predators
  • Chemical formulae of active principles
  • Iconography (a number of these were removed from Apple)
  1. All seems sensible to me, codifies some of the rules I had been using informally. I would strengthen the first general principle into saying that each picture beyond the "main" one *must* have something unique about it, and this unique contribution must be mentioned in caption or running text. Stan 20:07, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
  2. I do not see anything to object to in the general principles outlined above. I am all in favor of using plenty of pictures where available: a good picture says more than a thousand words. I understood the problems at apple as some users being worried about pictures making the page too slow to load. My impression of the apple page is that is too long anyway and could benefit by splitting. Apples are a really big topic which deserves more than one page. Brya 15:50, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
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