Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants/Assessment

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	WikiProject Plants/Assessment is within the scope of WikiProject Plants, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to plants and botany. For more information, visit the project page.
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NA	This article has been rated as NA-importance on the importance scale.

[edit] List classes

What is the relationship between List, FL, and SL (and for that matter, what does "SL" stand for?). Kingdon 01:54, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

That assessment system was developed through discussion with myself and a few other editors who wanted to distinguish between complete lists (List-class), featured lists (FL-class), and lists that are incomplete (Stub Lists--SL). Hope that makes sense. I'll explain on the assessment page. --Rkitko ^(talk) 02:32, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for adding the explanations. Kingdon 13:43, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Items to include

Hi all. I was just sorting through the new articles and was wondering if we could refine what we should include in our project. Should we be including the many articles on botanical gardens? Or how about articles on proteins that are mostly botany-related (e.g. Photosynthetic reaction center protein family). Any thoughts would be helpful. Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 03:09, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

In the latter area, Auxin and Plant hormone, for example, got a lot of attention from WP:PLANTS people, so I guess that is an argument for including them. I guess some biochemical topics would fit in Wikipedia:WikiProject Plant Evo Devo but I guess that is narrower than biochemistry, or proteins, in general.

As for the botanic gardens, at least the one I looked at first, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, didn't really seem to have much botanical content. United States National Arboretum a bit more although it is a stub. So I guess I'm a bit skeptical about taking this on. We wouldn't list any article which says "Next to the house is an old oak tree", and although I do remember a past discussion (probably in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants) about "what is a botanical garden?" even making that distinction doesn't really imply they go in the same wikiproject. The botanic gardens may belong in Wikipedia:WikiProject Horticulture and Gardening. Kingdon (talk) 13:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the input! I asked over at the hort and garden project if they'd like me to assess the gardens for them. No response yet, but it seems like it's within their scope. We do have some of the more important gardens like Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in our project scope since they also do important systematic work or are historically significant. Come to think of it, Chelsea Physic Garden should probably have a WP:PLANTS tag on its talk page, too. Evo Devo was/is really the effort of one editor and should be a taskforce of WP:PLANTS until it gains sufficient support for a WikiProject. I'm going to tag those photosynthetic protein-related articles with WP:PLANTS for now. It has an overlap with WP:MCB and can be seen as in the scope of either. If someone provides rationale as to why it's not in our scope in the future, it'll be easy enough to remove them. :-) Rkitko ^(talk) 20:58, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I've ended up discussing this over on my talk page, and I suggested bringing this over here, this is the relevant bit from my last post:

...a botanic garden can be funded by a university say, so they tend to be a distinct breed apart from "normal" gardens and parks. I'd profoundly disagree with your weasel-worded (and non-WP:CSB?) statement that "most" botanic gardens are purely for show - off the top of my head I can't think of any in the UK that aren't connected with a university or Kew, and that haven't been used for "serious" botany at some stage. And WP:PLANTS merely requires "botany" rather than "taxonomy", remember. I suspect the same applies to most of Europe - they were mostly set up in the early days when there was still a lot of "easy" taxonomy to be done - and even in the New World (I'm thinking Australia in particular) they may have been set up initially as a source of germplasm from Europe, but then made important contributions to understanding the native fauna. In fact, in the UK it goes the other way - there's quite a lot of "botany" happening outside the formal settings of the few botanic gardens, many of the National Collections of garden genera are in private gardens for instance, and there's a couple of examples of some private collections attaining such importance that they end up in some kind of "Big Botany" structure. To take a different example - not every university in the Universities Project can be a Harvard, some are almost exclusively teaching organisations, but just being called a "university" stands for something, it distinguishes them from 10,000's of other educational establishments. Since botanic gardens represent less than 0.1% of all public "gardens", I'd say that tag is a meaningful indication that some kind of botany has gone/goes on there, and that the onus should be to prove that it doesn't, rather than the other way round.FlagSteward (talk) 15:35, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Apologies for non-CSB/weasel comments. They were not intended as such. My point is that many of the articles I've seen written about botanical gardens focus on the design, layout, architecture (if any), and sometimes which plants they specialize in or display. Very little is said about what kind of botanical work is done there. It just seems to me that they, unlike the botany morphology, nomenclature, or botanist articles, are not within the scope. I could be entirely wrong, though, so I'd be happy to see what others have to think. Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 00:46, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

I think our scope is better described by the word botany than the word plants. We include articles of relevance to botany that are not actually plants; e.g. articles on botanists, herbaria, nomenclature, even some non-plantae plant pathogens. On the other hand, we tend to exclude plant-related topics not generally considered the domain of botanists; e.g. floristry, agriculture, and, as Rkitko says above, some botanical gardens. Hesperian 01:12, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

That's my impression as well. Some of the larger gardens, that include a research component and a major herbarium, are worth including as part of WP:PLANTS, but most gardens seem more to belong to WikiProject Horticulture and Gardening. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:14, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Well that's my point - in the UK, having "botanic gardens" in the name pretty much implies a link to an academic institution, and probably a long history in taxonomy (there may be the odd exception but they are exceptions). Hence in the UK, "if it has botanic gardens in the name, it belongs in WP:PLANTS" is a useful rule-of-thumb. But I get a sense (although people aren't saying it explicitly) that in other countries, probably in the New World, the term gets used more widely to include some pleasure gardens. That's your local bias, which is fine. How about amending the scope to "botanic gardens with links to an academic insitution"? That seems a fairly concise and precise heuristic.

Rkitko seems to be making a powerful argument in favour of a broad inclusion of botanic gardens in WP:PLANTS though. If most such articles are still at the rudimentary "look at the pretty flowers" stage, then surely what they need is exposure to the intellectual rigour of WP:PLANTS to fill out their contributions to taxonomy and other plant sciences? FlagSteward (talk) 10:20, 15 May 2008 (UTC)