Talk:Vipera xanthina
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[edit] Requested move
- The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
Vipera xanthina → Montivipera xanthina — According to IUCN and NeMys, this species now belongs to the genus Montivipera. --Resubmitted because nothing on the talk page now fixed --Eleassar my talk 14:35, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
- Hold your horses. Don't you think it would be better to ask for an explanation first before suggesting such a radical change? Allow me to explain. The names (titles) of these articles and their synonymy all follow a single taxonomy: that produced by McDiarmid et al. (1999) and available on-line through ITIS (see Cited references). This is widely recognized as the most authoritative taxonomy currently available for snakes. By contrast, the IUCN does not offer a taxonomy of its own for anything or even follow one consistently; they only maintain a list of endangered species.
- As for Montivipera, herpetologists have been suggesting ways to split up Vipera for almost 200 years, yet there is still no consensus on how to do this. I'm sure that eventually some brilliant herpetologist will write up a paper on the subject that most will be able agree with, after which someone in Dr. McDiarmid's position will weigh the arguments, note that a consensus has formed and then adjust their taxonomy accordingly. That's the way this works, even though it's sometimes a very slow process. In the mean time, we shall just have to wait. Besides, we can't rename one of these Vipera articles without renaming them all, and we can't rename them all without good reason. --Jwinius 22:05, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
It was requested that this article be renamed but there was no consensus for it to be moved.--Stemonitis 20:54, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
- The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.
Regarding my previous statement, I should add that herpetologists have successfully been splitting up Vipera for some time now. If you browse through Category:True vipers - Synonymy, you can see that in the past the experts lumped just about all of the older viperine species together in this single genus. It would therefore be more accurate to say that they're now arguing about how to split up the 23 species that are now left in Vipera, just as there are also debates on how to split up Bitis and move certain other species to Daboia. --Jwinius 21:48, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
