Talk:Mushroom hunting

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Contents

[edit] VfD

  • Rules for mushroom hunting - Wikipedia is not guide to safely. If this article remains there must be a disclaimer at the top of this article. Mintguy 23:23, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • IMO, this article mostly consists of warnings anyway, doesn't it? I don't see it telling you 'Do this'. Morven 00:03, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • Seing as how most of the pages about edible mushrooms talk about how to identify and collect them (often with little respect for cautionary notes and similar species - I did my best to fix this in the past few days), I felt that it would be irresponsible to not put corresponding warnings. As an example, the Chanterelle page was talking about how there's no risk of misidentification and things of that sort - I'd like to see whoever wrote that after accidentally eating a Jack-O-Lantern mushroom. Seing as most professional mushroom hunters use a code of safety similar to the one I listed, it only seems responsible.
    • As an alternative that I could throw out there, I could make it instead an encylcopedia page about mushroom hunting or mushroom hunters in general. It's quite a serious topic that's been neglected. Rei 19:21, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
      • An article on mushroom hunting would be good. It could include information about what people do, what experienced people recommend that people do, and what codes of safety are in fact used. However, I don't think articles should tell people what they should or should not do. It contradicts the spirit of the Neutral point of view policy. -- Oliver P. 01:22, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • There's too much good info in this article to just delete it. I agree that a general article on mushroom hunting would be best (and I certainly encourage Rei to work on it), but I'd rather have the current article than nothing at all. --Camembert 01:31, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
    • I changed it to a general purpose enyclopedia page on mushroom hunting, and covered other aspects of mushroom hunting. I also changed it to make it more of a neutral point of view presentation. Is this good? I think its more well rounded.  :) Rei 11:48, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Terminology

You don't "hunt" mushrooms, you go pick them. Besides, unless you like taking risks, there's not much adventure in regular mushroom picking. How about moving the package to "mushroom picking"? David.Monniaux 22:50, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks

This seems more like a manual and not an encyclopedia article. It should be moved to Wikibooks.

[edit] Webcaps?

What is a webcap? Is that a cortinarius? Please use latin name so that others could understand.

Thanks.

--PiKeeper 02:14, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Yup, webcaps are in the genus Cortinarius.

129.177.121.50 13:59, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Rule 11

Rule 11 says: Novices should start with more easily identifiable and less dangerous groups, such as boletes and bracket fungi, completely avoiding standard agarics. Is that sane advice since the edible Fistuline hepatica is easily confused with the very poisonous Hapalopilus rutilans? Of course, if he follows the earlier rules, especially the one which states only eat mushrooms you can positively identify, he's safe, but then we could say the same thing about agarics.

Michaelll

[edit] Protection

I think this page as well as all mushroom related articles should be protected or semi protected as flase information put on by vandals can be fatal for readers if not caught in time Pseudoanonymous 01:02, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

This is an interesting suggestion, and I am not opposed to it on principle. I am not sure however, whether how it would interface with the idea of no disclaimers besides the general ones. That idea is enumerated here [1]. I made the template:mycomorphbox and was told that my warning about using it as a guide for identifying mushrooms alone was in violation of the above guideline. My two cents. Debivort 02:16, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Why not both? First you don't want false information, second you don't want people using it as a real guide, but rather just reading it as an article. If it is good enough to be used as a guide it should be protected anyways because with a disclaimer people don't know what to trust; they can't tell which paragraph is vandalism and which ones are legitment. I generally oppose protecting pages on priciple, but not for these pages; because I don't want some kid reading it after it has been vandalised, then goes off to pick death caps to eat not knowing what a disclaimer was(we are lucky that hasn't happened so far). However such malicious vandalism has already happened, on the article about testing the spore print of mushroom [2]. Luckily someone caught that, but if this happens again someone could die; or at best we will lose credibility. I don't think that a disclaimer is going to be enough; we're not a tobacoo company so I think we should be more responsible than just some disclaimer. Pseudoanonymous 03:30, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, like I said, I am not opposed to protecting it or addding a disclaimer. But having been the recipient of critiques when I used a disclaimer myself, and not knowing how important these philosophical issues are, I don't have a strong opinion. Of course, it's all kind of moot since I don't have the administrative previleges anyways.
Wikipedia has a risk disclaimer, see Wikipedia:Risk disclaimer.--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 13:23, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
It's because of that page that individual pages are not expected to have disclaimers or receive special attention because of potentially risky content - right? Debivort 18:55, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Is this true?

"Do not mix known edibles with other species while gathering. Keep them in separate containers. A single poisonous mushroom can poison a whole basket, if this occurs, throw everything."

  • I haven't heard this before. Debivort 01:12, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

> I've heard it several times before, it's menioned on "Soppforeningen i Bergen" (Bergen mushroom society) webpage, google yields a few results, and it is also mentioned in several mushroom books I've read. mic 10:53, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

    • Huh.. Well, don't want to argue with sources, but I would guess this is an example of being conservative for the sake of liability. I mean, one can taste a small (i.e. 1mm by 1mm) piece of even the deadliest amanitas and not experience any problems, so unless you threw the amanita in and really shook it with the other mushrooms, I doubt it would poison them. That said ... people might throw them together and really shake them, so I am fine to leave this the way it is.

[edit] Wikipedia is not a how-to guide

Thus, the "rules" section is unencyclopedic. Instead of describing it in an encyclopedic summary style, it goes into indiscriminate detail.--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 12:57, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestions

Here's my thoughts on edits, major and minor, for this page:

"This is popular in most of Europe, including the Nordic, Baltic and Slavic countries and the Mediterranean Basin[citation needed]" -- Okay, in principle everything should be verifiable. However, I can imagine that it will be very hard to find a primary source on this. Do we really need a citation? Why is this tagged? It seems like "common knowledge" to me.

The section on identification should, I think, describe the two major ways mushrooms are identified: folkloric knowledge and identification using keys and micro- and macroscopic characteristics. I would like to see some detail on the process of mushroom identification. Is there a page in Wikiproject Fungi that already covers that information? If not, I think that would be a great thing to include here! I am not an expert on the folkloric knowledge, but I'm sure someone could add some information on how that is normally taught. I can add a section on identification of mushrooms using keys and morphologic characteristics.

"Only experts, however, collect from dangerous groups..." Not true. What is considered "easily identifiable" and "dangerous" is highly cultural. Amanita caesaria is commonly collected in Italy by non-experts with only folkloric knowledge - but the knowledge is plenty good enough to keep them safe in their area.

However, that brings me to one of the major changes: I propose that we move the mushroom hunting safety rules to Wikibooks. I have created an empty Wikibook Mushroom_Hunting for the purpose. Unless someone can offer a good reason why we should not do that, I think it should go into a Wikibook with a link over here, and a simple note which says something like, "Mushroom hunters often follow a set of safety rules to prevent poisonings." The safety rules could be replaced by a short section on the major risk behaviors: namely, hunting with inadequate knowledge and *especially* people that move from another part of the world and assume that the "rules" they learned as children will apply to the new fungal species.

Regional importance: Is mushroom hunting really all that much more popular along the Pacific coast? I ran into quite a few other hunters in Ohio, too!

I think we should add a section on environmental considerations in mushroom hunting. These vary by country - from the US, where the major threat to most species is habitat destruction, to the NL, where chanterelles have apparently been hunted to extinction and nearly everything that is edible or interesting is considered threatened. The comments about radioactivity, global warming, etc. can go here too.

The section on Russian edibles is great! I have been thinking about adding a similar section on Pacific Northwest edibles to the "Edible Mushroom" page. I think perhaps the solution is to make pages with regional lists of edible mushrooms. I propose moving the list at the bottom of this page to a page, "List of edible mushrooms in Russia" and creation of a page "List of edible mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest." These pages would then be linked off of both Edible_mushroom and Mushroom_hunting.

I will have some time in the next few days to make these kind of changes. Anyone have any thoughts before I start?Revdrace (talk) 15:45, 30 April 2008 (UTC)