User talk:Brya
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See User:Brya, but delete the de facto. Brya 14:11, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] List of confirmed Brya socks found so far
- Clyb (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
- Groosy (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
- Lodzel (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
- Doerpfel (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
More information at Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Brya.
Additional confirmed Brya sock puppets found with checkuser request:
Crambley (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
Hiplis (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
Kloppan (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
Ohawi (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
Ostol (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
Strigley (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
Urchol (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
Wedster (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
[edit] Guide
If you have found this page you are likely to have noticed that I am involved in botany and that I am not happy with some of the Wikipedia entries on plants. This has more than a few reasons: some of the more prominent are the following.
1) Wikipedia is full of very definite statements, numbers, measurements and lists of component taxa. Very often these are only conditionally true, only when viewed from a certain perspective or under certain circumstances. Plants themselves are variable and not easily described in definite statements. However, there is more to it than that. It is in the nature of plant taxonomy that botanical names are not stable, not in what they apply to. A very rough analogy would be Presidents of the United States. A statement like "President Carter was born in Plains" would be unambiguous, but "President Carter made the announcement" could have quite a different import, depending on if it happened before he was elected, while he was in office or after he left office. Of course, Presidents are easy as their term of office is 1) a matter of public record and 2) fixed. Botanical names, as well, can be "in office" or "out of office" (The statement "Euphroniaceae is a family of plants" may or may not be true, depending on where the reader stands, from a botanical point of view). However, it is more complicated than that as a taxon may have different circumscriptions (somewhat comparable to a mandate of a President, determining what he actually governs). It is not very frequent for a statement like "Species Zyxwvu tsrqp is a tree to 40m" to be either completely true or completely untrue dependent on the circumscription of the species, but is not all that uncommon, either (the name Acer saccharum applies to a taxon with two, or more, circumscriptions). For higher level taxa it is fairly commonplace for things to be true only conditionally: a statement like "This family has 437 species" will only be true from a single perspective. So, a very great deal of the content in Wikipedia on plants is only conditionally true, and the reader needs more than a good guidebook to figure things out (sometimes it helps to look up the author of a page and to establish his perspective, to be used as a decryption key).
2) In its taxoboxes, the Wikipedia Tree-of-Life Community has adopted several self-created taxa, notably Magnoliopsida sensu Wikipedia and Liliopsida sensu Wikipedia. These taxa exist only in Wikipedia and Wikispecies. In presidential terms this can be compared to appointing a "Jimmy Carter, President of the United and Confederate States of America" and reporting his exploits while ignoring the actual president. A significant part of the information on plants in Wilipedia is only true in the virtual reality of Wikipedia.
3) Wikipedia is a project where everybody can edit. This means that the content of Wikipedia is a reflection of its visitors and users. Botany is a large and complex field of knowledge, and botanists tend to know only their own part of the whole. Botanists are scarce anyway. The high-profile pages on Wikipedia suffer from too much attention ("Hey, I had this in school. I remember this, sort of. I will put it right.") Many eyeballs make for maintaining many myths. A significant part of the information in Wikipedia is not true anywhere. - Brya 05:50, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
