User talk:Attenboroughii

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Welcome!

Hello, Attenboroughii, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  --Mgiganteus1 (talk) 14:10, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Could anyone clarify the meaning of the figures in green or red (e.g. +353, -18) that appear in my Watchlist? I see that they correlate with my edits and additions, versus those that people have had to alter, but I haven't managed to locate a page that explains this system. Thanks!

Welcome to Wikipedia, Attenboroughii! :) As explained at WP:AORC, green simply means that content has been added to the article by the last person who edited the page. Red means that content has been removed. Best wishes and happy editing, Firsfron of Ronchester 15:02, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] IPA pronunciation

Wow! Very nice additions to the Nepenthes articles. Is there any chance you could also add IPA pron. to the named natural hybrids? That would be great! Regards, Mgiganteus1 (talk) 03:10, 22 November 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Invitation to join WikiProject Carnivorous plants

Hello, Attenboroughii and thank you for your contributions on articles related to Carnivorous plants. I'd like to invite you to become a part of WikiProject Carnivorous plants, a WikiProject aiming to improve coverage of carnivorous plants and related articles on Wikipedia.

If you would like to help out and participate, please visit the project page for more information. Thanks! Rkitko (talk) 19:56, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Hey Ryan, it would be my pleasure; thanks for extending the invitation. Good work on this project, by the way; it's come along leaps and bounds in the last two years - certainly of far greater value than it used to be, though there's plenty more to be achieved, Nepenthes no exception! Take care, Attenboroughii (talk) 23:20, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for joining us! I look forward to more of your excellent contributions on CPs. I love your navbox, by the way. Fantastic icons. Oh, and if you weren't aware of it, we also have a WikiProject Plants. Let me know if I can help you out with anything here on Wikipedia. And again, welcome! Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 23:40, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing it out; I've already read through the WikiProject Plants blurb and am happy to see the green chaps getting the attention they deserve. I was a member way-back-when, but it's been so long that the system is barely recognisable to me. All encouraging though, and I appreciate the offer. Does that extend to knitting? I'm a sometime serial scarf-maker near Christmas time, but much beyond that and it all goes to hell! G'night, --Attenboroughii (talk) 23:51, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
Ah, excellent. Well, of course let me know if you need any help navigating WP:PLANTS or WP:CPS. The offer of help could indeed extend to knitting, but I must confess I've never been good at it and I, too, can only accomplish scarves and perhaps a small blanket. Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 00:04, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] pronunciation

Hi,

In your edit to Nepenthes × ferrugineomarginata you said that <g> is always /g/ in Latin names, but you have one as /g/ and one as /dʒ/. kwami (talk) 08:41, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Kwami! Yes indeed; this is an unfortunate concession; in botany, the stem ferrugi- is pronounced with a /g/ almost universally, and /dʒ/ in standard English. This is not the case for margi- (margin, marginate etc.), though it's technically correct with /g/, if less pleasant on the ear. The important thing to bear in mind is that the IPA included in scientific names is just a guide. All references (Stearn, 2004 is a good example) dealing with Latin pronunciation go into this as I'm sure you know, and concede that it's better to offer the most technically accurate pronunciation that remains pleasing (or logical, if you prefer) to the ear. Attenboroughii (talk) 08:51, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I didn't see your comment on [əʊ]/[oʊ] before I made the latest change. No, [oʊ] isn't GA. For some reason, perhaps because of the sources that Wikipedia editors have chosen, [əʊ] has come to be associated with RP, and [oʊ] with GA. But I speak GA, or something pretty close to it, and my pronunciation is clearly closer to [əʊ]. There was a minor discussion on this point when we (RP and GA) developed the help key, and we decided on [oʊ] as an orthographic compromise between [əʊ], [ɜʊ], [ʌʊ], [ɔʊ], [oʊ], [oː], and [o], most of which I've seen in descriptions of both GA and RP, as well as being somewhat more intuitive for IPA novices who might have difficulty accepting that /o/ is a diphthong. (Aussie also played a role in there somewhere.) As we worked it out, /r/ and /h/ are written overtly (just drop them if you don't pronounce them), but most of the vowels are closer to RP, since RP makes more vowel distinctions than GA. In particular, I thought we should have e.g. /eɪr/-/ɛr/ by analogy with /eɪ/-/ɛ/, and so on for all vowels before /r/ (easier to predict by sound rule, and graphically redundant, which makes it easier to read), but the RP'ers insisted that /ɛər/-/ɛr/ etc. was more intuitive, and we went with that. So no, no GA hegemony. (The whole chart could have used more discussion, perhaps - sometimes I wish I'd stuck out for /eɪr/ etc.! - but this had already languished in edit space for years, while readers were complaining they couldn't make heads or tails of the IPA.)
As for the Nepenthes edits, I was just trying to bring them in line with the IPA key. A lot didn't (and still don't) show stress in the species, [ɹ] is used for /r/, etc. The latter, of course, is a mere detail, but a lot of people aren't familiar with the IPA, and I don't want to scare them off any more than we have to! kwami (talk) 09:26, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
No problem, and I certainly appreciate the mire of a background to any current confusion/discrepancies; it's more reassuring than anything to know that you know what you're doing, and that you care about it so much. I certainly appreciate any input. As for the intonation, I'll run through the list and see which ones are missing stress indicators. Attenboroughii (talk) 09:37, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
Edit conflict! I'd just written:
BTW, I appreciate your work here. Several editors have objected to including pronunciation guides for technical terms, because of the variation in the degree of anglicization, and say that people should just learn Latin. It seems to me that, after personal and place names, this is where our readers need it most.
Yeah, I've done a rush job on IPAing a lot of things I know nothing about, sometimes just in the hopes that my transcriptions won't be as grossly wrong as the ones I find, like someone who's put an English respelling in brackets and called it the IPA. But there are still 3000 articles linked to the main IPA page (down from 17,000, though a lot of that was transclusion through templates, and easy to remedy), and I just don't have time to do the research necessary for a careful job on everything. The frustrating thing is when I make a mistake, and someone reverts it to something that was even worse, rather than taking the time to fix it. kwami (talk) 09:49, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Images

Stunning images of rare species! I'm blown away. :) Just one thing: I would suggest uploading images to Wikimedia Commons. A repository of free Nepenthes images can be found here. The individual species galleries can be linked from the relevant articles, allowing users to get a better understanding of the plants' morphology and ecology. In addition, images uploaded to Commons can be used on all language editions of Wikipedia, as well as on Wikipedia's sister projects. If it's okay with you, I can reupload the images in your gallery to Commons using the Move-to-commons assistant. Mgiganteus1 (talk) 18:28, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

That's very generous of you to say. I don't object to this, but will the move affect the gallery page I've set up in any way? If not, I'd prefer to finish uploading before you work your magic and copy them all across in one go.Attenboroughii (talk) 18:35, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
It would not affect your gallery in any way. However, I can only copy the images over one-by-one, so it would be easier if you could upload the rest of your images directly to Wikimedia Commons. You could then arrange the images in a gallery over here just as with the current images. Mgiganteus1 (talk) 18:48, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
Ah, well, I'm done in any event; I can't have uploaded more than 2 or 3 between this message and last! Thank you very much for your help with this. I've uploaded all my images are under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Attenboroughii (talk) 19:19, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
No worries. I have uploaded your first image to Commons; it can be found here. I have also added it to the species gallery here. Mgiganteus1 (talk) 19:37, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
I must second that. Fantastic images! I just clicked through your whole gallery and am thoroughly impressed. It's just too bad you're not out in the field in Australia—I would bribe you for Stylidium photos like those! Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 06:48, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Nepenthes mantalingajanensis

Hmmm... In this case, I would suggest removing the sentence in question. The correct year of discovery/first collection can be added when it is published. Alternatively, we could state that the describers of the species first came across it in 1998, or something to that effect. What workaround did you have in mind? Mgiganteus1 (talk) 23:57, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

I haven't seen herbarium sheets referenced in Wikipedia articles as you describe. However, you make a good point with regards to accessibility. I'd say go for it. Hopefully in a few months' time we'll have more solid references. Mgiganteus1 (talk) 20:06, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Geography categories

Thanks for correcting those! I was apparently geographically challenged the day I did that and never got around to correcting them all. You have a better grasp on the geography of that region than I do anyway, so I'm glad you took it on. Thanks again! Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 18:57, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

So it was you! No worries, it's really a minor thing, and some of them are, of course, in Oceania. I forgot about the hybrids, mind; I'll try to do those immediately. There isn't a Nepenthes stub is there? Perhaps that would be useful too. Cheers, Attenboroughii (talk) 20:07, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Ah, yes, User:EncycloPetey and I were just discussing a Nepenthes stub. Seems like you already discovered it! Thanks for stub sorting those. If you ever do have repetitive edits like those that you'd rather not do, the bot I run, User:BotanyBot, can most likely take care of it. Let me know if BotanyBot can ever help :-) Best, Rkitko (talk) 15:42, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: N. khasiana

I've uploaded this blank map with country borders. Let me know what you think. Regards, Mgiganteus1 (talk) 14:27, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that - it's perfect! Are you happy with the modified version? I considered cropping it closer, but doing so would make the region in question less obvious to people not familiar with that part of the world; not something we should take for granted... Cheers, Attenboroughii (talk) 21:09, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
Looks good! I decided to include most of the Indian subcontinent in my original upload for this very reason. Your cropped version is a nice compromise. I'll add it to the article. Mgiganteus1 (talk) 06:59, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Great, thank you! Attenboroughii (talk) 08:46, 30 November 2007 (UTC)