Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Human Genetic History

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[edit] Founding discussion

Archived at Wikipedia:WikiProject Human Genetic History/Proposal. Please do not edit that page but feel free to continue discussion here of any of the points that came up. Jheald (talk) 16:15, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Project banner

I've created a first cut at a project banner template:

Thoughts and discussion about tweaks/changes probably best carried on here, until we're all reasonably happy. Jheald (talk) 20:17, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Articles tagged

I've tagged most of the articles in Category:Genetic genealogy and sub-cats with the project template (excluding Category:Genealogy software and Category:Human MHC haplogroups.

See Category:WikiProject Human Genetic History pages. Note that clicking on Related changes there can be used to get a list of all recent edits to any of the associated talk pages. -- Jheald (talk) 23:30, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi all. Great work in starting things off! I just wanted to ask for feedback about the scope of tagging. For example, in articles that have a section discussing DNA ancestry (one of which I edit frequently is Palestinian people), do people think it is appropriate to add a tag for the project? In other words, should any article that mentions genetic history be added to the project, or only those devoted to the subject itself. Thanks. Tiamuttalk 19:33, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Side issue re that Palestinian people article. If I remember rightly, most of the studies currently cited only looked at 6 markers. But that's not enough to reliably separate the different subgroups identified eg by the Haplogroup J project. Some very different lineages can appear very similar, at only 6 markers; while some much more closely related lineages can appear much more distant.
Are the conclusions from studies like Nebel's still safe, when we consider more detailed haplogroups defined with more STR markers? Or should they be carry a heavy health warning? Jheald (talk) 20:31, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Yes, go ahead and tag them; that's what importance assessments are for. ;-) – Swid (talk · edits) 20:05, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Even if we end up claiming the entire territory of Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups? I can see both sides here. It would be nice to be able to generate two separate listings really -- articles where we would see this as the primary, most associated project; and articles where we do have an association, but a lesser one. "Importance" (FWIW, I prefer "Priority") doesn't quite do that: some "low priority" articles, will definitely primarily associate here. Other articles, eg some for which Molecular Biology is probably the primary association (eg "Allele") nevertheless are still far from low priority for us.
I just fear that tagging all sorts of articles for us, will make it harder to spot eg high-traffic articles for which we would see ourselves as being in the first line of responsibility. Jheald (talk) 20:31, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Ah. I see your proposal in more detail below, in the "WP 1.0 Assessments" thread. Still not 100% convinced though. Jheald (talk) 20:40, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
In your case, it sounds like the bot-assisted sorting of tagged articles would be very helpful; just ignore anything that winds up in the "Low-Priority" or "Unassessed" categories. :-P On a serious note, while the overall potential overlap with WP:ETHNIC is quite large, for the short- to intermediate-term future, most ethnic groups won't have any published genetic data available. Also, tagging ethnic group articles where there is data available helps remind people in other projects that we're another available resource. – Swid (talk · edits) 20:58, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm just bothered it might really clutter up the recent changes and recent changes to talk pages lists. Jheald (talk) 23:00, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia 1.0 assessments

Now that we're live, I want to get things started. Shall we start doing some article assessments and set up organization by the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot? Once we do that, we can start using the Igor tool that I've been developing to manage things pretty easily. – ClockworkSoul 16:08, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Sounds a good idea. The talk page template would need to be updated - I only created a very basic one; code would need to be copied from more advanced ones, to add a field to display the assessments.
I'm never quite sure with the "importance" field - is that supposed to be "importance" (priority) for Wikipedia Version 1.0; or importance/priority to this WikiProject ? Jheald (talk) 15:25, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
From what I've gathered, "importance" started as an assessment for the former, but is now most commonly seen as an assessment for the latter. Since the guidelines mention having a consensus on an importance scale before going out and tagging things, here's a quick-and-dirty attempt at an assessment scale for this project:
  • Top - Human genetic history is the main topic of the article and provides wide-ranging information (examples: recent single origin hypothesis, main mtDNA and Y-DNA pages)
  • High - Human genetic history is the main topic of the article (examples: individual haplogroup pages)
  • Mid - Human genetic history is not the main topic of the article, but is important to its understanding (examples: general articles on SNPs, STRs, RecLOH)
  • Low - Human genetic history is not the main topic of the article, and does not play a major role in its understanding (examples: ethnic group pages)
– Swid (talk · edits) 20:21, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Are all haplogroups really high importance? Even the really rare ones? Are they really of higher priority than some others of the more trafficked articles? I'm not convinced -- at least not 100%. Jheald (talk) 20:37, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Ideally, yes. If nothing else, I'm very uneasy having this project state from the outset that "all haplogroups are important, but some are more important than others". I know that a wide gap exists among haplogroups in terms of the amount of published information available, but just because a group is rare or hasn't attracted much research interest, that shouldn't mean that it isn't important to us. I see nothing wrong with having articles tagged as high-priority and as stub- or start-class. – Swid (talk · edits) 21:13, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Hmmm. I still can't see Lewis surname DNA project or 100% English or even Jefferson DNA data coming in ahead of Genetic drift or Haplotype. And what about articles like Origins of the Kurds, Ukrainian LGM refuge or Sub-Saharan DNA admixture in Europe? Is STR lower priority than List of DYS markers? But maybe the only way to go is to try it and see... Jheald (talk) 21:40, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
It appears I've failed to take my initial description to its logical conclusion. Genetic history being the sole topic of an article has to go hand in hand with usefulness/interest to a general audience; I'm sorry I didn't make that assumption explicit. In addition, by "individual haplogroup pages" in the original priority description, I meant articles named "Haplogroup <letter> ([Y-][mt]DNA)". – Swid (talk · edits) 21:51, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
I like it. It's a good start and we can add different layers of understanding to the ranking system as the need arises. Tiamuttalk 00:45, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Article hits for February 2008

I've put up a list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Human Genetic History/articles of articles currently tagged for the project, ranked by hits for Feb 2008 from Henrik's site, [1].

It gives us some idea of what readers are interested in - or, perhaps more accurately, what they're most easily led to at the moment; so articles we should make sure are of a reasonable calibre.

The Related changes link from there can be used to bring up a list of all recent edits to the project's articles. As noted above, a similar list of all recent edits for the corresponding talk pages can also be pulled up, here. Jheald (talk) 15:34, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Automated PMID to WP templated citation converter

Here. A useful resource for automatically generating WP templated citations, and for improving the production quality of existing cites. Jheald (talk) 23:17, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Genetics of the Ancient World

Might be worth keeping an eye on this apparently new article. The creator has run into some accusations of article POV and POV-forking in the past. Jheald (talk) 12:22, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Updating Y-DNA articles

There's going to be a lot of work to do in once the article below (press release) becomes publicly available:

Karafet, T.M., Mendez, F.L., Meilerman, M.B., Underhill, P.A., Zegura, S.L., and Hammer, M.F. New binary polymorphisms reshape and increase resolution of the human Y-chromosomal haplogroup tree. Genome Research. doi:10.1101/gr.7172008.

– Swid (talk · edits) 23:24, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Need help with protected template

A have noticed that Template:Infobox Ethnic group has no genetics information tab. Probably it would be a good idea to add such tab, so the participants of our project(and others if interesting) can provide the information about frequency of haplos(and other notable genetic info) for each ethnic group. Sasha l (talk) 23:50, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Some suggestions/comments

I've just noticed this project now from the imbalanced article cline (population genetics). The first thing I notice is that the title should be Human genetic history (we don't capitalize unless needed here). Secondly, the project is not nested in WikiProject Biology where it should be, which makes navigation difficult. Surely it's obvious that this isn't just a science project but specifically a biology project. But more importantly I think a project on genetics in general is much needed. Projects like medical genetics and this one could then be subprojects or task forces.

I've moved the category for this project into WP BIOL, though it would have been nice to hear of this there earlier. I'll mention it now. Richard001 (talk) 10:30, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

There is a proposal at the WikiProject Council for an all-encompassing Genetics WikiProject. It has been suggested that this project and WP:MEDGEN can be incorporated either as descendant WikiProjects or task forces. Feel free to leave comments there. Cheers. – Liveste (talk • edits) 01:24, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New Article Collaboration?

Hello, all. I started a new article Genetics of the Ancient World which was intended to be an intro discussion on archaeogenetics followed by an annotated bibliography of relevant articles, but another editor said this format is unacceptable on Wikipedia...so it has now been changed. Is there anyone else out there who might think it worthwhile to start an annotated bibliography of genetics articles? A list of relevant genetics articles with a short summary is highly useful for those of us who are or plan to be involved in research in genetics. Thanks for your thoughts. regards Hkp-avniel (talk) 11:44, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I think your article is problematic. To begin with, archaeogenetics is a stub. Why not begin with expanding that instead of creating a new article under the artificial title of "Ancient World"? The ToC and scope of your article seems ... heterogenous, and raises concerns of WP:SYN. The article necessarily turns out to be in summary style, and it is difficult to see how a collection of summaries on various regions will be useful. Also, many of your {{main}} articles tellingly are in turn problematic (classical rambling {{essay-like}} "ethnic" writeups like Origin of the Nilotic peoples). dab (𒁳) 17:06, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal to move Haplogroup E1b1b (Y-DNA) to Haplogroup E-M215 (Y-DNA)

The new tree-form names in Haplogroup E are particularly unfamiliar, unwieldy, hard to remember accurately, and likely to become subject to ongoing change.

I therefore propose that we switch the article title for what was Haplogroup E3b to the YCC's SNP-form nomenclature, ie E-M215; and use the SNP-form name as the primary name for discussing sub-haplogroups of it, ie E-M35 rather than E1b1b1, and E-M78 rather than E1b1b1a. (Although always with an explanatory mention of each subgroup's current tree-form name, and where appropriate past tree-form names, when first introduced).

I'm aware this marks a new departure from our current article-naming convention, but I think (at least in Haplogroup E; and possibly also for other groups where the top-level haplogroup is deeply branched, and our article is about a subgroup quite far down that structure) that this is the right way to go.

Discussion at Talk:Haplogroup_E1b1b_(Y-DNA)#Requested move. Jheald (talk) 11:54, 19 May 2008 (UTC)