Talk:Salamander (legendary creature)

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Ant - if you don't care to justify your position that salamanders are "legendary creatures" and not real animals in the discussion pages, please do not insert that bias into the article. If you can't be bothered to argue your position in discussion when it's challenged, you shouldn't be altering the content in order to make it.

The splitting of salamander in my opinion is a POV fork. See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view.

Main article: Wikipedia:Content forking

A POV fork is an attempt to evade NPOV policy by creating a new article about a certain subject that is already treated in an article, often to avoid or highlight negative or positive viewpoints or facts. This is generally considered unacceptable. The generally accepted policy is that all facts and major Points of View on a certain subject are treated in one article. Tarchon 20:25, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't consider this a POV fork at all.

Why do you think it's my position that salamanders are not real animals? Of course they are! And there's an article that treats them as such. But there is a clear distinction between the zoological salamander and this. I can't agree with your statement in Talk:Salamander#Fork_Mythology /Zoology, "This distinction between a "real" salamander and a "mythical" salamander is something you've created (and I suppose that makes it "original research")." Or that you've added to the article, ".. and in recent times some have come to identify a legendary salamander as a distinct concept from the real organism." This distinction is well established and widely held.

In the Collins English Dictionary, "salamander" has the following definitions (among others): "1. any of various urodele amphibians... 2. (chiefly U.S. and Canada) any urodele amphibian 3. a mythical reptilian creature supposed to live in fire. 4. an elemental fire-inhabiting being. ..." The first two senses of the word are what's covered in the salamander article; the latter two are what's covered here. Yes, the latter derive from the outrageous descriptions of the former, but that doesn't mean they're the same thing. (A unicorn is not a rhinoceros!) Hence, separate subjects demanding separate articles.

The other consideration that prompted the split was the "popular culture" references. The majority of these were references to the legendary salamander, with no direct connection to the zoological one. That the legendary creature spawned so many references where the zoological one did not added weight, I thought, to its being treated as a separate subject.

Given that this article treats salamander the legendary creature (and elemental) rather than salamander the urodele amphibian, it then seems very strange to begin this article by talking about the subject of the other one. That seems contary to good Wikipedia practice and that's why I made the changes I did at 17:04.

You clearly know your Pliny and you've made significant contributions here. I'm certainly not going to engage in a revision war. Even though I'm convinced that this should be a separate article, I wouldn't loose sleep if you were to merge it back into the original article as you've suggested elsewhere. But if it does stand as a separate article, it does need an opening sentence that starts by talking about the legendary creature. I hope that you can accommodate that.

--Ant 00:35, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

The first problem I see with the scheme you've proposed and executed for these articles is that you've put all "salamander (other)" stuff in this article, given it now two different names which don't really cover the contents very well, and kept only what is clearly the more restrictive notion of "salamander (biology)" in the main article. Logically, it should be the other way around if anything. This should be the main article and salamander (biology) should have the introduction which says something like "this is only about the biology of urodelans which are commonly called salamanders in English."

Your schema here would also imply things like having a separate article for George Washington (legendary) that covers chopping down cherry trees and tossing coins over the Potomac. As I said before, more accurate vs. less accurate isn't a good article dichotomy. How are you supposed to tell when something in the legendary article is too real to belong here? That's why all the legendary, pop culture, and heraldic material should be in the main article, especially considering how thin the biology article is. Next time they revise the taxonomy, do all the obsolete taxa get moved into the legendary article?

I will accept that some people have attempted to pull these ideas apart, as in the dictionary definition, but I think the material I've cited clearly shows that this separation is founded more in ignorance of the nature of historical development of the concept than in any real dichotomy. Is the wikipedia mission to merely adhere to the most casual level of knowledge, no deeper than a dictionary definition? Which imaginary salamander is the true imaginary salamander then? The dictionary only mentions a fire-dwelling "reptilian" - what about the "satyr in a washtub" or the tree-dwelling serpentine salamanders illustrated in the Aberdeen Bestiary? The set of all verifiably stated ideas about salamanders is very large and diverse - modern Urodelan biology is just one slice of a big conceptual pie - but they all demonstrably and verifiably derive from a single tradition.

You should also note that even if these ideas can be separated, Wikipedia policy still dictates that they should be in a single article that explains the dichotomy, which is exactly what I've been trying to do here. You can't get a complete understanding of this topic unless you get the idea that the name salamander has been applied to several Urodelan species since antiquity; a lot of fanciful ideas sprang up around them, especially in the Middle Ages; and then as science evolved, many of the mistaken beliefs were discarded or refined by biologists, while a lot of the more appealing ones were adopted by occultists (who do seem to actively try to make them resemble salamanders as little as possible). In Western culture at large, among people who aren't biologists or occultists, I haven't seen much evidence that the ideas have ever really diverged. That's why logos with little flaming salamanders look like natural salamanders with flames. It's not about legendary vs. natural; it's a natural thing with a lot of legend. Tarchon 03:00, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I still disagree - the salamander is less George Washington and more rhinoceros/unicorn.

But once you've merged these... good luck merging the unicorn and rhinoceros articles! :-)

--Ant 09:20, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

With rhinoceros/unicorn, there's still some question whether unicorns were originally inspired by rhinoceroses. The other difference you have to remember with this case is that many of these people actually lived in areas where salamanders were relatively common, and the fire salamander is a large, distinctly marked, and particularly noticeable type of salamander. Pliny obviously knew the real animal. Cellini and his father knew it, as did a lot of Renaissance woodcut artists who could come up with a pretty reasonable salamander. There are other things that I haven't cited like one with Corvinus where he actually tossed a salamander into an oven (it swelled up, popped, and put out the fire), which show that many people knew exactly what a salamander was and could identify them, even if some of their more ignorant contemporaries couldn't. If this was wholly a mythical, literary animal, there wouldn't be a continuous, albeit hazy, tradition in Europe between the first century and the present when any person knowledgeable of natural history could see one and say "hey, there's a salamander." They might go on to say totally absurd things about it, but they knew what it was. Europeans couldn't do that with rhinoceroses, which is probably why the legendary unicorn concept completely lost its anchor to reality.Tarchon 20:12, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Salamanders and Dragons

I finally just took out the part about people confusing dragons and salamanders. I tried to clean it up conceptually to defend it, but issue was taken with the lack of source (even if it's pretty obvious). The key problem is that dragons were not commonly associated with fire until comparatively recent times, but I don't really have time to search through stacks of dragon books and find some author who happens to explicitly write about this obvious idea, that two lizard-like things associated with fire are occasionally confused and co-influential. If anyone wants to look, feel free to put it back in.Tarchon 21:38, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Woodcut from Hall

It seems disingenuous to include this illustration and then explain at length that it most likely doesn't depict a salamander. It was carried over from the ==Mythology== section of the original Salamander article. If it isn't actually a salamander why include it? If it is kept, then it's probably best to move it (and the discussion) further down the article, rather than include it in the opening paragraph. Just a thought. --Ant 00:40, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not really sure what to do with it. The problem is that Hall says it's a salamander and it is is an extremely significant work (as far as the occult goes). I think that illustration is a lot of the reason people look at salamanders discussed in the occult and think "oh, that's clearly got nothing to do with a real salamander." Thanks to its being posted on wikimedia and in these wikipedia articles, it's also now very common on the internet, so I think it's especially important for us to make up for the mistake of earlier contributors by pointing out that the attribution is utterly wrong. This kind of erroneous information involving images is extremely viral nowadays. Tarchon 01:50, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Arms-dudley-mbc.jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 07:09, 2 January 2008 (UTC)