Talk:Spinifex Hopping Mouse

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Note: Further discussion on some of these issues may be found at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (fauna).

The capital H and the hyphen are surely wrong. -- Zoe

I agree: "hopping" is an adjective, so "hopping-mouse" is like "green-frog". The stress is wrong and it's not good English. (Cf. "hunting leopard" or "flying fox"). Jacquerie27

Fixed. --mav

The capital H is certainly right. The hyphen, however, seems to be a matter that varies between one expert and another. I am largely following two standard works:

  • Peter Menkhorst & Frank Knight A field guide to the Mammals of Australia, Oxford, 2001
  • Ronald Strahan (Ed.) The Mammals of Australia (rev edn.) Reed New Holland, 1995.

Menkhorst is an eminent scholar in the field, more recent, and uses "Spinifex Hopping Mouse" . On the other hand, Strahan is a major work, not just a field guide (over 700 pp in hardback and over $100 a copy) and a yet more eminent scholar: now retired, he was, amongst other thgings, director of Taronga Park Zoo (the main one for Sydney), Research Fellow at the Australian Museum, curator of the Australiam Museum photographic wildlife library, and so on. Mammals of Australia an official publication of the museum.

Although I started doing these without the hyphen, after a while it occured to me that the hyphen helps set these aside from other mice, which is surely appropriate, as they are very different little creatures. Alas, there are none within a couple of hundred miles of here.

Both, of course, use the capital "H". Tannin

Oh, for the love of Mike, give me a chance to set out the bloody evidence before you go on a revert war.Tannin 08:16 Apr 26, 2003 (UTC)

I've spent two solid days researching and writing those pages. Sometimes this place really pisses me off. Tannin

But the captial H is spurious - it is not always used (about 50/50 from my search) so our convention on the matter states that we use the lowercased version. --mav
Huh?! 50/50? You are dreaming, Mav. The proportion is more like 95/5. Nothing like 50/50. In general, the very few publications that don't capitalise correctly are also highly specialised ones that hardly ever use common names anyway. So, for them, it's not an issue. I should imagine that in fields where common names are often not used (i.e., microbes, which often don't have common names) the conventions may be different. However, in fields where common names are used, the convention is abundantly clear. Notice that in the case of birds, the common name is completely unambiguous. The very few remaining bird common names around the world that are not specific to one particular species are being changed. Tannin
I agree that it's annoying when people switch w/o discussing it, but I definitely think "hopping-mouse" is wrong. It's a question of English, not of biology. "Hopping-mouse behavior" would be okay, but that's using "hopping mouse" as an adjective. Jacquerie27

Nonsense, Mav. From Wikipedia:Naming conventions

  • Convention: Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper noun or is otherwise almost always capitalized, do not capitalize second and subsequent words.

The name is almost always capitalised, because it is a species name. Refer to any field guide or reference work for exampes. Ask the people who actually do the work in the species accounts. How many species write-ups have you done this month? Tannin

No it isn't. Just search for the term (I'm the one that added the hedge BTW - before it read "unless it is otherwise always capitalized"). And species names are not capitalized in normal English. --mav

Britannica neither uses the capital nor the hyphen. And this is the standard we have set for all animal names throughout Wikipedia. -- Zoe

Even if it was the standard (which it isn't - see the cite from Wikipedia:Naming conventions above) that is no excuse for getting things wrong. Tannin
Wrong is in the eye of the beholder. -- Zoe

A while back I had this same discussion elswhere and grabbed the first half-dozen references I had handy on the shelf:

  • Michael Morecombe: Field guide to Australian birds, Steve Parish Publishing, 2000.
  • Slater, Slater & Slater: The Slater field guide to Australian birds, Lansdowne, 1989.
  • Jim Fleg: Birds of Australia, New Holland, 2002.
  • Pizzey & Knight: Field guide to the birds of Australia, Harper Collins, 1999.
  • Higgins & Peter (Eds.) Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic birds (Volume 6), OUP, 2002. (This is the official source for information on Oz, NZ & Antarctic birds.)
  • Allen, Midgley & Allen, Field guide to the freshwater fishes of Australia, Western Australian Museum, 2002.
  • Menkhorst & Knight: A Field guide to the mammals of Australia, Oxford, 2001.
  • Ivan Holliday, A Field guide to Australian trees, Reed New Holland, 1974.

Every single one of these uses capitalisation for the common names of species. Tannin

The first page of searching that I did with google had both upper case, lower case, hyphen and no hyphen. -- Zoe

Tell you what, I have maybe 30 or 40 books on birds and mammals (plus the odd thing on flora and fish) here. What say we count them up and go with the majority? Tannin

It might be better w/o the capital here, if that's what the conventions say, but I understand why Tannin is annoyed -- changes should be discussed first. Jacquerie27
Species names have been discussed ad nauseum on the Wikipedia, and it has been established over and over again not to use capitals except for the first word. -- Zoe

So why is it that the people who actually do the work on the species accounts - people like me and Jimfbleak and KingTurtle - almost unamimously agree that we should use the correct capitalisation?

The only reason it gets discussed over and over and over again is because a small number of people here, who as a rule are not significant contributors to the species accounts in any case, want to do it the wrong way. If we just relaxed and did it right in the first place, then the subject would disappear without trace. Tannin

Ther are certain people who feel like, because the write the articles originally, they have proprietorship over them. Nobody owns an article. -- Zoe

Common noun (Gram.), the name of any one of a class of
     objects, as distinguished from a proper noun (the name of
     a particular person or thing).

Proper noun (Gram.), a
     name belonging to an individual, by which it is
     distinguished from others of the same class; -- opposed to
     common noun; as, John, Boston, America.
    n : a noun that denotes a particular thing; usually capitalized

Got it? Specialized publications almost always overcapitalize terms that are used by the specialists that read them. This does not mean that that capitalization is correct (in fact most of the time it is not ; I capitalize Transit Village while at work but I know that the correct capitalization is transit village). --mav

Read the list of authorities above. Are you saying that they are wrong and you are right? Well, no need to answer that - you are saying that. Fair dinkum, I've had a gutfull of this silliness. I'm not talking about "owning articles", and it's unfair of anyone to suggest that I am.

I am talking about being sick and bloody tired of this constant intereference via unhelpful edits. I welcome useful edits that add to the entries I am working on. It is this business of zooming into a page that one has not worked on, has no intention of working on, and quite possibly has no expertise in, and buggering up somone who is doing something useful. And note well: I am far from being the only one. Nearly all the regular contributors to articles in this area feel the same way. Tannin

I've felt the same when people have switched articles I've started. Why not just set up a redirect page for "Spinifex Hopping Mouse" and add a note about disagreements over the name? Jacquerie27
Thanks for the suggestion, Jacquerie. As for the first part, I do that as routine. (At least when I remember, which is quite a lot of the time.) But the hit and run editors are not always content with that - they often go and bugger up the text as well as the title and the links.
As for the second part, there is no dispute over the name, aside from the "Hopping-mouse" vs "Hopping Mouse" question, which I don't think anyone is too fussed about in any case. They are just alternative forms, neither one of them ambiguous. This sort of thing is as common as mud. For example, there are three subfamilies of bird in Maluridae. Their official names, according to the RAOU, are fairy-wren, emu-wren and grasswren.
Note that these names are not capitalised as they are not species names - i.e., you would write: there are some fairy-wrens in that bush about some wrens of unspecified species, but there are some Splendid Fairy-wrens in that bush when reffering to an exact species. There are set conventions for these things, which for some reason incomprehensible to me, some people in the 'pedia do not/will not understand. There is no dispute (aside from this silliness on Wikipedia) about the correct capitalisation. Nor is there any dispute about fairy-wren, emu-wren and grasswren: the first two are pretty much always hyphenated, the latter is not. I have no idea why, that's just the convention that has become established. In the case of the hopping-mice/hopping mice, I imagine that one or the other way of writing it will become the norm eventually. Tannin
"Hopping-mouse" is starting to look better the more I see it, because it's starting to become less "a mouse that hops" and more just the name for that special kind of mouse. I also think if you do the main work on an article you're entitled to some kind of priority, even if you don't "own" it. As a general point of English, tho', I think the pronunciation is different: Hopping mouse = "hopping MOUSE" and hopping-mouse = "HOPP-ing mouse". "Fairy-wren" etc are a bit different: "fairy" and "emu" aren't adjectives in the same way as "hopping". Jacquerie27
And the authorities are an excellent source of information on these subjects - but those publications are not a useful source of information on English grammar as it relates to our unique circumstances on Wikipedia. BTW, just because the top transportation planners in the United States write Transit Village with caps does not mean that that capitalization is correct. These experts are experts in their respective fields whose subjects in this particular case are mammals, not grammar. So for our naming needs the references we should use are dictionaries, style guides and other encyclopedias. Encyclopedias have different naming conventions and needs than do specialized publications. --mav
You still haven't dealt with the ambiguity problem I raised months ago. This is why anyone who knows anything about birds (or mammals) writes species names with the correct capitalisation. No-one has yet suggested one single sensible reason for us to abandon the normal conventions here. Tannin
I think you should use all capitals in titles but I don't like it in the body of the article. But if an article is meant to be scientific rather than popular, it should follow the scientific convention, whatever outsiders might think. Jacquerie27
In a wiki what is in the body of article becomes the page title when it is linked. Wikipedia is also an encyclopedia and not a specialist publication - therefore our audience is far larger than the scientific community. --mav
As KQ noted I did address that "problem." The "normal conventions" here are downstyle. --mav
Where? I looked but could not find anything that appeared to address the ambiguity problem. Tannin

Personally, I'm not all that fussed about the titles, Jacquerie, though (of course) I'd prefer to see them done correctly. In the body text, however, yes, it can look a bit off sometimes, but there is an important reason why it's done: that's because it is often the only way to avoid ambiguity. For example, consider the following:

  1. We have 3 brown rats in the area.
  2. We have 3 Brown Rats in the area.

Sentence #1 means that we have 3 rats in the area (which might be any of several dozen species) and that they are brown in colour.

Sentence #2 means something quite different. It says that we have 3 rats of the species Rattus norvegicus in the area. It doesn't say what colour they are. That's why common names are always capitalised: otherwise you just don't know what the writer is actually trying to tell you.

Lest anyone think that this an isolated example, let's do some more:

  • A bush rat is any rat that lives in the bush. (Australian for forest or countryside.) A Bush Rat is Rattus fuscipes. (One crawled into the nice warm egine compartment of my car and chewed through my fanbelt the other night. Cost me $215 for a new fanbelt, damnit! That one was a bush rat and a Bush Rat - a Rattus fuscipes living in the bush.)
  • A hopping mouse is a mouse that is jumping up and down. A Hopping Mouse can be jumping, sleeping, swimming, or on the inside of a cat being digested, but it's still a Notomys species.
  • A prehensile-tailed rat is any rat with a tail that can be used for gripping things. A Prehensile-tailed Rat is Pogonomys mollipilosus and no other.

Tannin

From the Audobon Society: There are rules governing the capitalization and hyphenation of birds' names..... It might be helpful to go over a few of the general rules of written bird names. When writing your own name you always capitalize your first and last names, e.g., Sam Spade or Lucy Brown. When writing the English name of a bird species, you should always capitalize its first and last names, e.g., Scarlet Tanager or Winter Wren. This avoids confusion with other modifiers in the sentence. For example, "the secretive, tiny, Black Rail..." If you are referring to unspecified birds use lower case letters, e.g., "those herons over there," or "that sparrow on the ground." If a species has a three-word unhyphenated name, all three words are capitalized. For example, "the graceful American White Pelican..." Many birds have compound or hyphenated "first" or "middle" names. Only the first letter of the compound name is capitalized: Red-throated Loon, or Long-billed Curlew. However, if a bird has a compound "last" name, then both parts of the compound name are capitalized: Eastern Screech-Owl or American Golden-Plover. Tannin

This sounds reasonable to me and even if WP isn't for specialists, specialists are probably going to be writing some of the articles, so they might as well use the conventions of the specialty unless it's going to cause big problems for non-specialists. But I'm not sure about "the secretive, tiny, Black Rail...". ;) Shouldn't it be: "the secretive, tiny Black Rail..."? (As opposed to "the secretive, tiny, black rail (of unknown species)...") Jacquerie27
Ha! Good pickup. Indeed it should. :) Tannin

You have made a good case for capitalisation, Tannin, and I, at any rate, can see the point. I didn't have an opinion before reading this page but I can now see that species names are proper names, not English phrases and therefore should be capitalised throughout. I would suggest that the next thing to do is to add a section on species names to the Wikipedia naming conventions and make it clear that they should be capitalised. You have my support for that. -- Derek Ross

I think I have presented a good case for the opposite on the mailing list. Check it out here [1]. --mav
Mav, I'll take a look at your argument since I respect your opinions but I gave up on the mailing list a long time ago. It was filled with so much irrelevancy that I couldn't justify the time wasted wading through the rubbish by the few relevant posts on it (even in digest form). If an argument doesn't appear on the Wikipedia itself, it won't normally influence me. -- Derek Ross
I've proposed a compromise. So if you like then only read this. --mav

Okay, I've read my way through the conversation "from the coalface" and "this". I'm afraid that I still agree with Tannin as I think that the definitions which you give for common noun and proper noun are flawed. Ford Mustang is a proper noun which refers to a class of objects, for instance. That's why the dog breeds and the aircraft are capitalised and why the species should be too although only when they are being used in a technical sense. For instance I should write "He uses a hoover to clean carpets." when I mean a generic vacuum cleaner but "He uses a Hoover to clean carpets." when I mean one of Hoover's vacuum cleaners.

I like your compromise solution though. It's similar in function to the suggestion that I made on the Village Pump last week for estate car/station wagon. Some users pointed out problems with it but one made a good suggestion (#SYNONYM) which would allow what you suggested without affecting ordinary redirects. I think that that would be a good way forward.

In any case whatever the solution, content should rule over style. Many users may well be unhappy about poor style but even more will be unhappy about poor content. -- Derek Ross