Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants/Archive6

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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] Plant article naming conventions

Let the discussion begin!!! Alan Liefting 10:38, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comments

My comments:

  • The use of binomial nomenclature names makes Wikipedia inaccessable for the majority since categories will give lists of the scientific names and not the common name. See Category:Trees of New Zealand as an example.
    • This is a misuse of the category tag. It is possible to do, for example, [[Category:Flora of California|Coast live oak]] even if the article were Quercus agrifolia.
  • Use the binomial name if no common name exists.
  • If a plant is endemic the common name should be used.
    • Disagree. Many plants have only "constructed" common names, often a translation of the scientific name. These should never be used as article names unless the name is used in official lists, e.g. of endangered species.
  • If more than one common name exists for a plant the most common one is to be used.
    • See what happened with Cytisus scoparius. The most common name in western North America is a slur in Scotland.
  • Indigenous names, if not the same as the common name, should be redireted to the main article of the species as well as being noted in the article.
    • If it is an English indigenous name, it is the common name, for the purposes of Wikipedia. Non-English indigenous names should only be used (and only as redirects) if they are known in English usage.
  • If there is more than one common name only the commonly used common names should be redirected to the main article. Disused names should be noted in the plant article but not redirected unless notable.
    • Agree.
  • Pages that discuss plants in a genus should use the binomial name but a common name should be listed in the article as well. If there are numerous common names this rule does not apply. In this situation the article name would be the binomial name and all the common names mentioned in the article and/or redirected to it.
  • Plant names for invasive plant or introduced plant articles should be named after the name used in their country of origin. Names used in other parts of the plant's current range, where diffeent to the counrty of origin, should be redirected to the main article.
    • This is a prime example of the value of using a scientific name. Cytisus scoparius is a good example.

I think the category rules, although they too need to be addressed, are not germane to this discussion:

  • Cosmopolitan plants should not not be allocated to any category for a country's flora unless notable. This would clutter up the main article. An example is bracken which is found on every continent except Antarctica.
  • If a plant is found in less that about three countries it sould be included in the appropriate flora categories for those countries. If common names differ for the same species between the countries the appropriate redirect page for the common name should include the flora category. For example Wineberry (New Zealand) should be in Category:Trees of New Zealand rather than Aristotelia serrata.

--Curtis Clark 04:48, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Indigenous names

Here in New Zealand indegenous names and English names are sometimes used interchangeably. There has been a trend over the past 50 odd years towards using the indigenous names rather than the English names. My preference for article naming convention (which I have been using) is to:

  • use the most common name, regardless of whether it is English or Maori, for the article name.
  • redirect the alternative (English/Maori) name to the article.

I also include the alternative name in the article. Alan Liefting 10:08, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Endemic plants

Many plants have only "constructed" common names, often a translation of the scientific name.

Once again here in New Zealand we have many endemic plants with common names. The common names are generally Maori but they are used by Pakeha. Therefore we should remove English from your stategy that reads Plants that are restricted to a single region and that have only a single English common name in wide use in that region.

Alan Liefting 10:08, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Garden hybrids

Any thoughts on these? I've just renamed an article to Lilium "Stargazer". Other possibilities would include Stargazer Lily, Lilium 'Stargazer'. Imc 19:26, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Categories in redirect pages

I have placed categories within redirect pages. See Kotukutuku for example. It seems to work but I am unsure if it is recommended. It is a useful trick to get certain article names into a category. Alan Liefting 10:38, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

I did that to a couple redirects today, but I'm worried that this will create a serious nightmare. See another discussion on this [here]. I'm worried that having every name for a plant (which often have numerous common names, and often competing scientific names as well) will simply make a huge mess out of the categories. SB Johnny 16:28, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
On second thought, maybe making the mess is what will move this issue foreward? SB Johnny 17:07, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
What I am proposing will not create a mess. Wikipedia must serve the specialist and the generalist. For plants this means using common names and scientific names. The Wikipedia:Category system can be used to categorise articles using scientific and common names. What needs to be done, and is not done for plant articles, is to place an appropriate category in the redirect page. The common name and the scientific name can then both be used for classifying plants in a parallel but interlinked manner. With a combination of categories in the redirect pages and the article pages a system of classification can be made as:
  • Flora by country using common names,
  • Order/family/genus categorisation using the scientific name.
Alan Liefting 11:45, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
Ignore my comments above. It will not work as I envisaged. Alan Liefting 12:29, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
OK, I've been adding category tags to BN redirect pages. However, I've noticed that some tags are for families, others for orders, etc. If there is no category for the family, should I just create one? I think I remember somewhere that categories are supposed to be debated first, but if so, debated by whom? Also just trying to stick to the taxonomic categories rather than the "praxis" categories such as "flora of here or there", garden plants, or "invasive plants". SB Johnny 15:53, 27 May 2006 (UTC)


[edit] How to be botanically NPOV!

If a plant is native to more than one counrty it may be advisable to use the binomial name as the main article and redirect all common names to it. An exception would be if it is notable in a global sense in one particular country. Alan Liefting 11:05, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

I would say "native or naturalized" since invasive species are often given different names outside of their native range. -Rkitko 14:52, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Even within one country there may be numerous common names. Weedy plants in particular often have long lists of regional names. (In some old herbals, these are actually called "country names" (meaning rural, not national). The linnean structure was created in part to create a neutral language... shouldn't we try using it? SB Johnny 11:36, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
To some extent the Linnaean system has been a failure, in that even after 200+ years, nonscientists have only partly adopted it. Try talking about Bellis or Aquilegia, even in your neighborhood nursery, and you'll get a puzzled look and a search for the resident expert. Of course, plenty of other names are current - around here you'll always see Euonymus or Clematis rather than any English names. (As I mentioned above, the real litmus test is whether it seems reasonable to use the Linnean name throughout the article's running text, not just as title.) Stan 14:53, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Yes but your comment there definitely has a regional POV (no offense) :). Around here, everyone says Aquelegia... the puzzled looks would arise if you said "Columbine". I don't think Linnaeus really intended it for the use of non-scientists, so that's not really a failure. It's really that when people look up something on wiki, they're seeking knowledge about the thing, and an important part of that knowledge will be it's scientific name (which allows them to research further, etc.). As I've said elsewhere, it really doesn't matter much... as long as the end user gets to the information they're looking for, who cares what the name (ie. URL) of the page is? What naming the page using the scientific name does is allow the editors (you and me) to get around easier and make the articles better. SB Johnny 16:18, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Good point about regionalism! Actually, Linnaeus did intend for general use, because in his day science was largely an amateur part-time activity, and for instance it was not unusual for educated persons to engage in a bit of plant and animal collection while on trips and such. (He chose Latin because it was the usual second language of educated people.) Keep in mind that allowing editors to "get around easier" is very much a secondary mission, versus allowing general readers to get around easier - but in practice, I think most common names will end up being disambiguators, as people collect all the random names that have been used (fish people have it easy, they now have a multilingual database of common names used for each species). Just today I was in a confused conversation where "bird of paradise" meant completely different genera to the participants. Stan 19:03, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Some thoughts

I'd support putting all plants at scientific names, with the exception of important commercial species, which would have two pages, one at the scientific name discussing the botanical aspects of the plant and one at the common name discussing cultivation and use (some already do, e.g. Coffea arabica, coffee); the two pages would of course be cross-linked. This follows the example of the New RHS Dictionary of Gardening (a four-volume plant encyclopaedia).

Reasons -

  • I think mixing common names for some species and scientific names for others (particularly within in a genus, but also on general principle) looks very odd, and is very confusing. Yet of course almost every genus has at least some species with either no common name or else a confusing or unsuitable one. Giving every page the sci name title keeps everything neat and tidy.
  • Another big advantage for scientific name use is en:wiki's senior position among the wikipedias generally. Because of the dominant position of the English language, vastly more species have pages in en:wiki than in any other wiki. This I consider leaves us with a clear responsibility to others to make our work easy to find globally. When someone from e.g. Greece wants to find out about e.g. Juniperus oxycedrus and finds there is no Greek wiki page on it, en:wiki is the wiki they are most likely to turn to; a person in that position will almost certainly know the scientific name, but not the English common name.
  • As per SBJohnny's comments above (re Aquilegia), for most plants, the scientific names are as well-known or better known than 'common' names. If anyone doubts the ability of people to use and memorise scientific names, ask any dinosaur-interested 8-year old child to name a few dinosaurs: they'll all be scientific names, and very likely written without typos, too.
  • On indigenous names - most of these are not well known globally. To take Alan's New Zealand example, while I personally like the Maori names (they're much better than most of the Pakeha names for the same species!), to most people outside of NZ, they are unfamiliar. I'm pretty good on knowing diverse common names, but there's only 2 or 3 of the Maori names I can reliably remember what they are without looking up; one of these (Kauri) is the only one I would say is really well-known outside of NZ, and is so well-known that it now refers to the whole genus Agathis as well as the NZ species A. australis (so becomes a disambig page). But for the rest - outside of NZ, Libocedrus bidwillii is far more helpful than Pahautea (I just had to look up to check I got the right name!), and Podocarpus totara more so than Totara.
  • Also on indigenous names - several genera have very wide distributions, so indigenous names for different species derive from different languages. Seeing "Huililahuán" (Mapuche, Chile) and "Totara" (Maori, NZ) together on the same page gives no indication of what they are or that the two might be related; conversely, Podocarpus nubigenus and Podocarpus totara does (actually, they're so closely related as to be difficult to distinguish if planted together!).
  • Categories in redirect pages. That this is now possible (it used not to be) is very helpful; it means that every common name redirect (and disambig) could be put in one or more categories, to make categories like Category:Podocarp family common names, Category:New Zealand plants by Maori names, which common names can be looked up in. The Kotukutuku example shows how well it works. BTW, "It seems to work but I am unsure if it is recommended" - since it has been made to work, we may presume it is recommended, or at least permitted.

MPF 01:05, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

MPF's comments have caused me to rethink my belief that it would never be possible to use scientific names primarily. The separation of botanical articles from economic articles (as the coffee example above) will take time; at least two of them (black pepper and saffron) are featured articles, and it will take some consensus-building among their editors, but a similar split was made in Ephedra (even though the article on medicinal uses still refers to the generic name).
Indigenous names are at least straightforward in Aotearoa, but here in California we had linguistic diversity that rivaled the Caucasus and other noted linguistic patchworks. Only because most of the languages are sadly either extinct or ignored is there no longer an issue (we actually have more Nahua indigenous names in use for the California flora than local indigenous names).
I was unaware of categories of redirect pages. That changes everything, and removes another objection to listing all plants by their binomials.
I have revised my proposal on Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants.--Curtis Clark 03:56, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

MPF's comments on categories in redirect pages makes me realise that this can be a very powerful feature. WP can be loaded with every common name, binomial name, notable historic name and indigenous name and they can all be redirected appropriately and catagorised appropriately. Alan Liefting 10:15, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

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