User:Jwinius
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My name is Jaap Winius, I was born in 1963 in the United States and have lived in the Netherlands since 1976. I'm an IT consultant (systems administration) with a passion for Linux and Open Source software, but my main contributions have not been in that area.
I'm something of an amateur herpetologist with an interest in snakes. I used to collect and breed snakes, but that was a long time ago; now I just like to write about them and continue to acquire many books on the subject for reference material. I guess I'm responsible for creating/writing several hundred articles here at Wikipedia, almost all on this same subject. Most of these are in Viperinae / Category:Viperinae, but now I'm also working on Crotalinae and snake taxonomy in general. A few examples would be Atheris, Bitis, Bitis arietans, Bitis gabonica and Daboia. There are many more in various states of completion.
Since I started writing these articles, certain issues have become very important to me:
- Never assume anything. Don't just write what you want because it's probably correct, but research the subject properly and quote (without plagiarizing) from a reputable source.
- Cite your references. At least one reference should be cited (using the footnote system) for every bit of information in the article. Readers should be able to tell where the information came from, or else why should anyone trust it? If there are no references it also decreases an article's research value. Obviously, this means no original research, or else you can't cite any references.
- Follow a single taxonomy. If you don't, you'll eventually run into conflicts and your synonymy won't work either. For vipers and other snakes, I use McDiarmid, Campbell and Toure's 1999 checklist together with the ITIS online database. Still a work in progress, this is widely considered to be the most authoritative taxonomy available for those of us interested in snakes.
- Use scientific names instead of common names for article titles to avoid confusion. This is against official policy, but I choose to ignore that because I believe it prevents me from improving the collection of articles I work on. See below for further information on this (unfortunately) divisive issue.
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[edit] Subspecies articles
Not all natural history editors at Wikipedia support the idea of maintaining articles for subspecies. One argument against it is that there is so much less that can be said about any particular subspecies. Another is that it needlessly increases the number of articles that need to be maintained. However, I am in favor of creating articles for all subspecies as a concrete rule, mainly for practical reasons:
- There is more to say and more room to say it. While most of our subspecies articles on snakes have so far been relatively short, it's possible to say a lot more about them than most people think. Without separate articles to accommodate such growth, I don't see that happening very quickly, if at all. For example, in Gloyd & Conant (1990), their complete description of Agkistrodon piscivorus leucostoma (western cottonmouth) is over 14 pages long, so I would guess that there is plenty of information available on most subspecies if you know where to find it.
- Easier to find information. If all of the information on each subspecies is concentrated in a single article, it becomes harder to spot. For example, with nine subspecies, Crotalus durissus (South American rattlesnake) would be a case in point: some of these have very different appearances and live in very different habitats. It would be more confusing to lump all that information together. Similarly, it's more accurate to link more specific names to more specific information: if a reader fills in the name of a subspecies, one of its synonyms, or a common name associated with it (all of which should have redirects), I can only imagine that it would be somewhat disappointing to end up in a general article for the species. In particular, there is the danger that the first things they would see in such a general article would not have anything to do specifically with the subspecies they were looking for.
- Name separation. When you consider the sheer numbers of taxonomic synonyms and common names that can often apply to a single subspecies, that becomes another reason to associate them with separate articles. This makes it much easier to show which names apply to which subspecies.
- Image separation. Again, Crotalus durissus is a good example. If we have several images for each of the six subspecies, it's easier to spread them out over six articles than to include them all in one article, which could become "image heavy" as a consequence. Yes, you could dump many of them in a gallery section, but I'd consider that something of a compromise.
- Less controversy. If all of the information on all of the subspecies is to be found in a single article, which subspecies is to be featured in the taxobox? Which names are to be mentioned first in the lead section? Which subspecies is to be described first? With some people even arguing that no subspecies are any more representative of the species than the next (which disagrees with our own article on Subspecies), these decisions would become completely arbitrary and thus subject to individual preference. At Wikipedia, that sort of thing has often led to controversy and edit wars. I believe that the formula applied to this series of articles works to prevent that.
Finally, some editors advocate a grow and split approach: if an article like Crotalus durissus becomes too long, only then do you split off a number of subspecies articles. In my view, however, that represents more work and less certainty. For example, how should articles be organized before a potential split? What should they look like afterwards? When do you split? If you split, should all of the subspecies be split off, or just some of them? This all involves too much uncertainly for my taste. I would much rather work systematically and according to clearly definable rules. Actually, I would prefer that the species articles be fleshed out properly before any subspecies articles are created, but in cases in which a subspecies is well known and many images are already available it, in my view it is not worth it to avoid creating a separate article for it at an earlier point. Besides, if you know that an article is eventually going to split anyway, postponing the inevitable is only going to mean more work in total for the sake of temporary appearance.
[edit] Counterpoint
A number of people have pointed out to me that the species/subspecies article structure outlined above does not reflect current scientific thinking. First, it seems to give the nominate subspecies a special status, even though it has none. The nominate subspecies is no more representative of the species than any other subspecies and is, in fact, really only an artifact of nomenclature -- an indication that this form was described first. It says nothing about which subspecies is the principal form, which is most differentiated, or which is derived from which.
Second, current taxonomic thinking is sceptical about the concept of subspecies and its usefulness. Nowadays, most taxonomists look for evidence whether sets of populations are on an independent evolutionary trajectory or not. If so, the population is treated as species, or else they are not give taxonomic recognition.
Third, a very large number of recognized subspecies are either sets of populations recognized on the basis of some superficial feature of color pattern and scalation, which do not withstand analysis with more comprehensive datasets, or they are entities that would under many currently applicable criteria be considered as separate species. Every phylogeographic or in-depth morphological analysis seems to result in various subspecies being relegated to synonymy, or else being elevated to full species -- a trend is continuing apace.
If this is the case, then the current article structure is a better reflection of past trends in taxonomic thinking no matter how well it works. I suppose the challenge will be to come up with a new article structure that does not place so much emphasis on subspecies, but is equally well organized.
With special thanks to Caissaca for supplying a detailed explanation.
[edit] Alternative lead section
In the summer of 2006, I developed and began to apply a new lead section style that lists one or more common names separately a few lines above the main introduction (e.g. Vipera berus). I'm aware that this is a departure from WP:LEAD, but it is meant as a solution to a number of problems. I started out following WP:LEAD, but so many snake species have so many different common names (or share the same ones), that this often results in a confusing mess of common names and bold type face. In addition, the new method addresses the concern that some people have with using scientific names for article titles: that a common name cannot be found quickly enough if it must be searched for in the introduction, whether bold type face is used or not. This new style, which has been dubbed "snakeskin", is an attempt to address both of these issues. It also has several other advantages: it avoids elevating one common name over any others as much as possible, something that tends to invite pointless debates about which name is more important, and it keeps the introduction more to the point. In my view, not mentioning common names in the text is also a good way to prevent repetition, as well as yet more petty squabbles regarding exactly which common names should be used over and over again in the text. Finally, this approach has been quite successful: despite being different, four such articles have so far been given GA status: Vipera berus, Bitis arietans, Bitis gabonica and Daboia.
[edit] Scientific names vs. Common names
When I first became acquainted with Wikipedia's approach to organizing its natural history articles, I was immediately disappointed. Even though latinized names and scientific classification (taxonomy) have been used successfully for 250 years to ensure uniqueness, organize the tree of life and show how individual and groups of organisms are related, Wikipedia's general advice on this topic (WP:TOL) is still as follows:
"In cases where there is a formal common name ..., or when common names are well-known and reasonably unique, they should be used for article titles, ... Scientific names should be used otherwise."
I find this advice very unfortunate, because even though Wikipedia hopes to become an encyclopedia for all human knowledge -- and by extension to describe the entire tree of life (an very ambitious undertaking) -- it encourages people to create natural history articles in an ad-hoc manner that invites duplication and ignores taxonomic classification. By and large, the evidence for this failure is overwhelming. But how can we expect these articles to become organized if we do not even attempt to point editors in the right direction?
Nevertheless, the usual argument in favor of using common name article titles is one of presentation. This is understandable, but especially in light of the scale of our undertaking it is obvious for many reasons that this approach is far too problematic:
- Common names are often not unique, and even when they actually are, there is no regulating body to ensure that this remains the case. However, since all Wikipedia articles titles have to be unique, this frequently leads to conflicts and compromises, not to mention an inconsistent set of names.
- Not all species have (unique) common names. Therefore, when scientific names are used in their absence, the result is an inconsistent collection that is perpetually difficult to organize.
- Common names invite conflicts when one name applies to more than one species. In such cases, one article gets the "good" name and the others have to be, um, different. Disambiguation pages are arrived at indirectly. How is all this good for presentation?
- Common names also lead to conflicts when more than one name applies to the same species. This leads to heated debates between editors; ones such as Siberian Tiger vs. Amur Tiger and Puma vs. Cougar are sadly all too common. Part of the reason for this is that there's nothing scientific about selecting one common name over any others based on which one gets more hits in a Google search; that's completely arbitrary.
- Selecting one common name for a species over any alternatives may give people a false impression that it is more important or more official, though this is almost never the case. One notable exception is the AOU, which regulates the common names for birds, but they only do this for North American species and even our editors are not following their lead.
- Common names make category overviews rather useless. For instance, compare Category:Viperinae with Category:Sharks. With the latter, you can't see which species are related (belong to the same genus); you only know that they are all sharks.
- Common names are not very effective for teaching readers more about how the organisms are related.
- Common names are often localized; people in one (English speaking) country may not be familiar with the common names used in another. If a redirect to it does not exist for the correct scientific name, the reader may not find the article.
- Because they are not guaranteed unique, common names are a poor choice for promoting continuity when linking with other articles inside and outside of Wikipedia.
- Readers add articles to their watchlists -- rarely redirects. So if someone creates a set of new common name articles and starts changing the scientific name redirects, the odds are that fewer people will notice.
On the other hand, in my opinion there are a number of excellent reasons why scientific names are better suited to Wikipedia's needs:
- Scientific names are guaranteed to be unique by two international regulating bodies: the ICZN for animals and the ICBN for plants. They are therefore perfectly suited for organizing Wikipedia's myriad articles.
- Scientific names offer the only naming standard for natural history articles that is both consistent and complete.
- Because they are unique, scientific names by themselves prevent both conflicts and duplication. In addition, once the decision has been made to follow a particular taxonomy, it is no longer necessary to debate which names to include in any series of natural history articles.
- Using scientific names for article titles allows for a total separation between these names and the redirects for the common names. This makes both sets of names much easier to organize. Example: Category:Viperinae and Category:Viperinae by common name.
- Scientific names are an excellent teaching tool: they are designed to show how species are related.
- Scientific names are international: no matter what language is spoken by the reader, if they know the scientific name, they will find the article.
- Because they are unique, scientific names are best suited to promoting continuity when linking with other articles inside and outside of Wikipedia.
- Readers add articles to their watchlists -- rarely redirects. So if the articles go by their valid scientific names, if anyone tries to make changes to the taxonomy, the odds are that this will not go unnoticed.
Although I recognize that many people dislike scientific names, mostly because they are not familiar with them, that doesn't mean that articles with such titles are necessarily inaccessible to the uninitiated. I think that's just a question of formatting. For example, in Vipera berus, the common names for this species are listed just below the title and there are redirects for all of them. Within the article itself, I try to use the title name as little as possible and prefer to use more general terms instead. All of the articles that I've worked on are written this way. Take a look around and let me know what you think. Category:Viperinae or Viperinae are good places to start.
