Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants/Archive4

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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 1 non-biologist needs help! 2 Flower Resource 3 Article content 4 Poa = Parodiochloa? 5 Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 project

[edit] non-biologist needs help!

Hi, the main page currently contains a link to the 2006 Table Mountain fire (under the news items), which according to this source has destroyed between 40 and 50 percent of the world's silver leaf tree population. This fact is noted in the fire article and thus it contains a link to the silver leaf tree article (which I created). Unfortunately, my knowledge of trees is VERY limited so the article in its current for is an unsatisfactory stub. Given that the article is only 2 links deep from the main page I think it needs to be expanded... Help will be much appreciated. Mikkerpikker ... 23:56, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Expanded it. Also moved the page to the scientific name, as various references I looked at gave a choice of four different common names, making a NPOV common name title difficult. - MPF 17:36, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot MPF, I've seen your changes & appreciate the input! Mikkerpikker ... 20:53, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Flower Resource

The Wikipedia Help Desk has been approached by the Flower Expert website [1]. It looks like a useful resource for people writing articles on flowering plants. Capitalistroadster 07:57, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Took a look at it - it doesn't appear to me to have much (if any) useful content that we don't already have. Actually, a lot of their info looks like it is copied off wikipedia, but old page versions from some time ago. - MPF 13:28, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article content

As I suggested at Talk:Malvaceae, I think it would be a good idea for this project to define what is the appropriate content for articles about specific plant taxa. For instance, compared to, say fishes, for which the families are generally stable and agreed-upon, plant families seem somewhat chaotic and ill-defined. So there is going to be part of the article that is complicated because it has to describe the chaos, but there is some general material that is straightforward ("cactaceae have areoles usually with spines") and that connects the technical botanical material with what most people are familiar with. Agreement will also help both in fixing up existing articles and adding new ones, and reduce time spent debating what is and is not appropriate for each. Stan 18:36, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Plant families seem "chaotic and undefined" because systematic botany is currently in the middle of a major (and exciting!) period of upheaval. Due to a growing emphasis on cladistic methodology, combined with numerous phylogenetic studies (primarily molecular, but the best of these incorporate morphology, biogeography, and other characters as well) at all different taxonomic levels that have been published in the last decade or so, many families are in the process of being re-defined and re-circumscribed; some are being split, others are being merged. Many of the affected families (e.g., Scrophulariaceae, Liliaceae) were already acknowledged to be unnatural and heterogeneous but there are few families that are completely unaffected. Until the dust settles there is no good solution other than discussing the "chaos" itself, and the reasons for it. My own compromise has been to primarily limit the discussion to comparing and contrasting the Cronquist system and Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification, which are two of the major systems in current usage. However, even the APG system has been modified since its relatively recent publication. Most of the proposed changes make perfect sense to those of us inside the field of systematic botany, but I don't doubt that to those outside the field it looks like a train wreck in progress! MrDarwin 19:00, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. Systematists could think of WP as an opportunity to explain what's going on to a nonspecialist audience. It could even help adoption of new organization; the impression I get from literature is that some of the current mess comes from people proposing systems in the past and getting only partial "buy-in" each time. WP reaches a far wider audience than a random specialist journal, so good distillations of the current state can be influential. Stan 03:19, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

One thing I have been trying to do, and would strongly encourage others to do, is to refer to and cite the original literature, and provide links to those references if they are available online. There is far too much unverified, and sometimes erroneous, information in many plant articles; providing references allows the user to not only verify the information that is presented but get far more information if he or she needs it. This is especially important for groups that are undergoing rapid (and sometimes contentious) changes. 14:53, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I've been a bit flustered a few times by this as well... personally I'd like the taxonomists to settle things first before putting the newest and most exciting change here on wiki. At the very least, perhaps the taxonomical disputes could be discussed at the bottom of the page rather than the top, so that the beginning of the article is about the plant, rather than about arguments that are about the plant (i.e., discourse before metadiscourse).

Additionally, I think it would be a good idea to preserve the old names in the old genera until the more practical-minded get used to the changes (i.e., preserving the name Aster novae-angliae on the Aster page, rather than just deleting it and moving it to a page of the current (unpronouncable) genus. SB Johnny 13:30, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Poa = Parodiochloa?

Does anyone know whether genus Poa and genus Parodiochloa, both of the family Poaceae, are the same thing under two different names, or two distinct genera? According to List of the vascular plants of Britain and Ireland 8, the common name of Poa flabellata is Tussac-grass, but there is an article Tussac Grass that says the species in question is Parodiochloa flabellata. If the two are in fact the same thing, the two articles should be merged. If they're different, then List of the vascular plants of Britain and Ireland 8 should be corrected. Thanks! Angr/talk 19:34, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Poa and Parodiochloa are not the same thing. Poa is a large genus and Parodiochloa seems to be a recent segregate from it. But the two names you ask about are one and the same species: Parodiochloa flabellata is a recently published new name for Poa flabellata, although I don't know how widely accepted this name, or the genus Parodiochloa, might be. A good source for nomenclatural and taxonomic information on plant genera and species is the Missouri Botanical Garden'sTropicos. It's not nearly complete, but for the names it does include there's a lot of good information. MrDarwin 19:47, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

So what you're saying is, yes, Poa flabellata and Tussac Grass should be merged as both articles discuss the same species? Angr/talk 19:58, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

That depends. Is "Tussac Grass" a unique common name that refers only to this species, or is the name a spelling variant of "tussock grass", which can refer to any number of species? I'm probably the wrong person to ask, as I have little patience for "common names" and I'm an advocate for creating articles under the botanical (scientific) name, with common names redirecting to that article (or having a disambiguation page, as I suspect this one would need). MrDarwin 20:12, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't know, I'm not a biologist. But there is a different article Tussock Grass. But the point is, the current content of the article Tussac Grass (regardless of whether it should be called that) is about the same species as the article Poa flabellata, and we shouldn't have two articles on the same topic. Angr/talk 20:26, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I checked out both articles and it looks like you're right. I would suggest merging them under Poa flabellata (with a note about the name Parodiochloa flabellata). I don't know what to do about "tussac grass" (I'm no grass expert) but I suspect it's a variant or misspelling of "tussock". I just did a Google search on the "tussac" spelling and found several articles, all apparently referring to the Falklands species so this may indeed be a spelling unique to that region. I would suggest keeping it as a redirect it to the Poa flabellata article, and maybe include a link under the article "tussock grass" as well. MrDarwin 20:46, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Okay. But I would prefer leaving it to someone who does know something about plants to do the merger. I'm just a translator. Angr/talk 21:26, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Done.--Curtis Clark 04:46, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 project

Hi, I'm a member of the Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing using these criteria, and we are looking for A-class, B-class, and Good articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Can you recommend any suitable articles? Please post your suggestions here. Cheers, Shanel 20:16, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I would guess you are two years too early in looking for great articles on plants. Wikipedia has great potential, but as yet it is unrealized where plants are concerned. Brya 21:01, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments anyway - but I hope you may be proved wrong! In 18 months I watched WP:Chem go from an inactive project to a very lively place with several FAs and about 25 GAs. It will probably take us a year to produce a large-size print/DVD version, as it happedns. Keep plugging away, please! For WP1.0, thanks Walkerma 05:10, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

What kinds of plant articles are you looking for? Perhaps the article on Utricularia would qualify? I'll be keeping my eyes open. NoahElhardt 05:47, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, we're looking for both high-quality articles to add to the listing of A-Class articles as well as important plant articles, regardless of shape, for listing in the science listing of assessed articles. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 06:57, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

I think that articles on each of the major groups of plants would be desirable for inclusion in such a project, but I'm not sure that any of these articles merit more than a B at this point. For land plants, the relevant articles are: Marchantiophyta, hornwort, moss, bryophyte, vascular plant, Lycopodiophyta, fern, spermatophyte, Pinophyta, cycad, Ginkgo, flowering plant, monocotyledon, dicotyledon, though others would undoubtedly consider other articles to (eventually) be worth adding to this list. Perhaps one or more of these articles should be nominated for the Article Improvement Drive. --EncycloPetey 14:18, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. I have done my best to assess these, but I'm know very little about botany so could you please check/adjust my assessments here? I judged Bladderwort to be A-Class, is that OK? I also thought that cycad looked close to A, would it just need a section on life cycle and some more wikilinks to be A? I did find some of the articles to be full of technical terms (as I would expect), and words like allopatry can benefit from wikilinks. The articles seem to have lots of nice pictures and references, something many articles lack. Please edit my amateurish assessments. Thanks, Walkerma 03:30, 10 May 2006 (UTC)