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Nikkimaria ( talk) 03:09, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
Pursuant to our discussion at Wikipedia talk:Article titles, I have created an essay Wikipedia:Consistency in article titles, and would welcome your input into that essay. I believe that it should quickly be refined with whatever additional points are needed to fully reflect our practices with respect to consistency, and moved to guideline status. Cheers! bd2412 T 21:22, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
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Why don't we just solve this via a general RFC at WikiProject Agriculture, rather than stringing out a bunch of split arguments across many articles. It would be easiest for all involved to discuss the issue in one place. Steven Walling • talk 03:46, 21 September 2014 (UTC)
All that said, attempts to resolve these matters centrally are attacked as trying to force a one-size-fits-all view, an external rule, a style cabal straightjacket, [insert something else histrionic here]. Meanwhile, attempts to resolve them one article at a time are attacked as trying to tendentiously drag out and nickel-and-dime everything in a war of attrition, picking on articles that violate (non-existent or invalid) wikiproject-level naming rules, and [insert various personal attacks here]. It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, in which the desire to have wikiprojects autonomous and making up their own "naming conventions" that conflict with the next project over, leads to both WP:FILIBUSTER tactics being used by the same parties; neither approach to cleaning up the breed article naming mess can succeed, because both are blockaded.
Do you really feel an RFC would be effective now, and if so how would it proceed? The devils are really in the details on this, and virtually all the involved projects want there to be no site-wide rules to comply with, only their own internal convention on "their" articles.
My tactic lately has been to try a third approach that is much harder to prevent community consensus about, and it's one that is usually effective, regardless of topic. That is to sort RMs into groups of titles that all raise the same problem (e.g. confusabilty with an ethnicity), that is already clearly addressed by WP:AT policy and/or WP:MOS rules, and propose moves to names that comply with those rules. Then it's not an animal breed names (or whatever) discussion, it's a discussion about article compliance with actual, site-wide naming conventions generally, and this either eliminates drama or makes the drama much easier to detect and ignore as just drama. After enough such moves, a pattern of how to name breed articles will naturally, automatically emerge (in theory), and can't be easily WP:BATTLEGROUNDed against. An RFC at that point should cement things into an actual, written naming convention that is adopted as a guideline and doesn't conflict with WP:AT policies.
Unfortunately, the mess at Talk:Teeswater sheep is liable to result in a confused, confusing and disruptive mass status quo ante reversion to inconsistent and AT-violating names, and necessitate an whole new round of these discussions. Fortunately, I've already sorted them, at that page, into 7 different kinds of article titling issues, so they can probably be addressed in 7 RMs, the results of which will effectively be a new naming convention. Unfortunately again, the main problem is that the launcher of that RM mess has vowed to launch several more such messes, which will simply drag this out even longer, because they interfere with the other RMs.
So, you tell me – why would an RFC, even one hosted at WT:AT, be effective now, instead of just derailed by more grandstanding and handwaving? And more importantly by inter-wikiproject canvassing to protect WP:LOCALCONSENSUS interests (i.e. to protect the status quo of chaos and inconsistency simply because it's not a rule to comply with)? What can be done to prevent a handful of combative wikiproject editors from derailing the entire thing again? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 09:39, 21 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not sure that the Big pig vs. Big Pig stuff would make any difference; "The breed is closely related to the American Quarter Horse" vs. "The breed is closely related to the American quarter horse". Who cares? Obviously people who like to capitalize breed names do, but I mean that for encyclopedic reasons, it doesn't matter; the actual article wording will correctly give the breed name in the lead (here it would be "The American Quarter Horse is..." vs. "The American Quarter is..."). There may be one or two cases where a breed and a landrace or type name would coincide, because of a WP:DIFFCAPS disambiguation, but those are dumb ideas in this topic area anyway, and if there are still any, they should be renamed. If one wants to make the argument that using parenthetical disambiguation would "protect" a breed name, lower cased, from being confused with something else, it wouldn't really, because the horse project for one consistently uses parenthetical dab. for the names of individual horses (mostly racehorses) and these sometimes even coincide with breed names. We have such limited ways of dab'ing, there is no one perfect solution. The least conflicting one is: "Foo Bar baz" means a domesticated baz breed named Foo Bar; "Foo Bar Baz" means a domesticated baz breed named Foo Bar Baz; "foo bar baz" (or "Foo bar baz", if Foo is a proper name) means a non-breed population or type of bazes; "Foo Bar (baz)" means some term Foo Bar that relates to the baz species, most often a body part or an individual. The "Foo Bar (baz)" structure can already mean almost anything, and it's senseless to operator-overload that further to also mean breeds. At least one person purporting to represent the horse project will go to the mat on this, and "Foo Bar baz" naming has been totally uncontroversial in several other species such as cats. (Most of the "controversy" that exists at all, is three individual editors being loud about it. One doesn't even agree with the stance she's taking and openly says she's doing it just because she doesn't like me, which means her position can be ignored by the closer. One of the others has such serious English language comprehension problems, including with regard to capitalization basics, that the competence of their input renders their !votes basically useless, too. So that leaves one editor mostly responsible for the filibustering of consistency in these categories.) Thet fact that getting these names consistent would mean they could be easily mass-moved with regard to capitalization, disambiguation style, is clearly among the reasons for resistance against consistency in breed article titles. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
I've just had my attention drawn to your request on AN. I really don't understand why you didn't avoid the drama and ask me directly. Always always always try the most drama-free method first - the worst that can happen is I'd say "take it to AN". the panda ɛˢˡ” 15:52, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
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Unfortunately, you have misinterpreted my position. I never meant to suggest that projects control content of articles included in their projects. I was talking about project scope and which articles are included. Even after your changes (done without consensus), it still holds that projects have a strong say over which articles they include. My issue was that linking to that section appears to accuse project banner removers of WP:OWN, which isn't necessarily the case. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 12:44, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
Could you point me to where the decision to use "participant" rather than "member" for WikiProjects is documented? I note that although looking at a random selection of WikiProject pages suggests most use "participant" on the project page (with the interesting exception of WikiProject Birds), all the templates I looked at in Category:WikiProject user templates used "member". Apart from WP:OWN issues, "participant" seems to me to be more likely to encourage people to join in than "member", since to become a "member" of a group normally requires some qualification or approval process. I'd like to change the user project template for WP:PLANTS at least, but would like to know where this is supported, should there be objections. Peter coxhead ( talk) 13:37, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
PS: Going back even further, I found another one, in which I actually opposed preferring one over the other; changed my mind on that later after some of the WP:OWN problems surrounding wikiprojects became clearer. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 03:30, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
Apropos Landrace, I have looked over the section on plants from time to time and sighed to myself – in my view it's far from NPOV (basically written as "landrace" = good, "cultivar" = bad), depends on too few sources (partly responsible for the NPOV) and ignores modern approaches to describing and naming cultivated plants, such as the ICNCP. Peter coxhead ( talk) 16:23, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not really sure what the solution is, other than simply biding enough time that anyone with an extreme point of view to push loses interest and goes away to work on other articles again, and someone like you in the interim improves the article with balancing sources like ICNCP. Their detailed nomenclature system doesn't seem incompatible with landrace classification, any more than it is with heirloom plant classification. The landrace question is fairly simple: Is this a regionally isolated, domesticated organism adapted to its local environment on its own through free-breeding selection in it area, or is it something mostly shaped by selective, pedigreed breeding for specific qualities (in particular, over the last century or so)?
This doesn't seem to me to interfere with ICNCP classification of something as varietas, forma, etc., since landrace vs. standardized breed is about a human management question. To me, ICNCP's system is, by way of analogy, like deciding if a pickup truck is a Ford, a Chevrolet, etc., then what model it is, then what year, then what "trim level" or options package; the landrace question is like asking whether it was designed for the commercial delivery vs. personal/family use markets. Or in personal computers, the landrace distinctions is analogous to off-the-shelf PCs (generally made from whatever parts the manufacturer has procured) vs. a custom-built machine built to exacting specs, e.g. for gaming, or A-V development, or whatever; in that metaphor, ICNCP's nomenclature is akin to the technical specs (CPU and bus architecture, etc.), which are independent of the build process and any specialized intent. I'm not trying to 'splain to you what ICNCP is doing – you know better than I do – but conceptualize how the approach differs, in simple terms, so that the article can be adjusted without it turning into another dispute from the usual quarters. Metaphors like this tend to be helpful in that regard, as long as they're apt. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:42, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
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Not wanting to stir up yet one more controversy, but I thought I'd float a balloon over an idea. If you are opposed, I won't pursue it further, but I'm seriously wondering if there is at least a partial solution to the landrace dilemma with this: Make two articles, one on plants, one on animals. You know that I generally tend to disfavor splitting and forking, so you realize that I'm making a sincere proposal - this time I wonder if it would ratchet down some of the drama because I think part of the problem is comparing "apples and oranges" (or apples and cattle, oranges and sheep - to be more precise). The plant article will probably be longer and more complex, as the concept has been around longer, and there are way more peer-reviewed sources on plants. The animal one will probably still have disputed material, but at least we will know what we are fighting about. But I suspect the whole problem began with a lot of animal articles linking to "landrace", which when you clicked on the link, originally was mostly a plant article. I won't even debate titling, perhaps Landrace (plant) and Landrace (animal) or Plant landrace and Animal landrace - whatever. I can also still move articles if you want to set up sandboxes... if you like the idea, I'll slap on a "split" template and we can just state at talk that we agree on the split and if no one else cares, then when the two new articles are at least sketched out, even if we still disagree on content, the landrace one becomes a dab. Your friend above, Peter Coxhead, may be useful to work on the plant one. Montanabw (talk) 05:50, 27 September 2014 (UTC)
I also agree with you about cultivars and formal breeds being vital, and do not want the article to push a POV that landraces are "better" than them; we have sources that say why they have advantages, and we need sources that cover the counter-advantages of formal breeding, like increased production, etc. So we really disagree about this far less than it has seemed.
I would propose (informally; this is not a WP:PROPOSAL) that all of our breed articles need to be clarified to use "standardized breed" or some synonym ("formal breed", etc.) when we mean that, at least on first occurrence, and linked to Breed. If we use landrace link it to Landrace. If we use "landrace breed", link it to Landrace, and avoid "breed" by itself as ambiguous.
If you (Montanabw) and FAO have a very broad sense of the word "breed", so may some other readers. That makes the term ambiguous at least some of the time, so we have a duty to clarify in article text. If every case has "X is a standardized breed" or either "X is a landrace" or (when we really, really want to use FAO terms) "X is a landrace breed", then no more problem, ever. Just never say "X is a breed".
As a draft criterion, I would suggest that we use FAO's "landrace breed" only for livestock, not pet breeds/landraces. Secondly, it should only be for cases where a preponderance of sources actually use the term "breed" in a very broad way to also include what we know are landrace breeds, which is probably most if not all horse landraces, because horse encyclopedias and the like tend to call everything "breeds" and distinguish formal/standardized ones by saying "standardized breed" or whatever. But it probably does not apply to many others. In goats and pigs, the phrase "landrace breed" means "standardized breed with the word 'Landrace' in its name", and actual landraces seem mostly to be ignored, i.e. are non-notable. So, "landrace breed" itself can also be ambiguous if used inappropriately. In cats and dogs, what constitutes a breed is generally based on what national and international organization specify, not private-business studbooks, so the issue does not arise. I.e., there is no question at all that the Van cat is a landrace not a standardized breed, and the term "breed" should not be applied to it, nor "landrace breed" since it'll just be redundantly long.
This is obviously just an informal proposal on my talk page, for agreement between us. We'd have to see if it actually worked well in real articles, but I'd bet money that it will. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 07:06, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
I do not agree that a "breed" is only a "standardized breed", though I have no problem linking "standardized breed" to "breed" where it is appropriate to do so.
Then there is no disagreement, basically. What is it you think you're arguing with me about? How can you be telling me I'm wrong when I'm telling you you're right, that "breed" can be used more broadly in some sources than "standardized breed"; we have to write more carefully to disambiguate? I even also prefer "landrace" by itself, but you're the one, not me, insisting that the word "breed" be applied to all distinguishable horse populations, so the solution that presents tiself is "landrace breed", a term we can source to FAO. You know, the source you are so insistent is the most reliable? How are we even still having a disagreement about this?
Doodle doodle dee...
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Landrace as applied to animals is not a neologism; it dates to no later than the early 1930s (when it entered English via pig landrace breeds, so the term was already in use in Dutch, etc., no later than the '20s). We have reliable sources for this in the article already. Exact parameters of definitions are always in flux about most all terms of art in science. The central ideas of the concept have remained constant: A landrace is a distinguishable population of a domesticated species, adapted to its local environment mostly without selective human breeding, with a greater degree of variability than a standardized breed/cultivar, but enough homogeneity to be distinguishable. There's really nothing more to it as a basic definitional matter. Various specific definitions emphasize or de-emphasize one thing or another, or add or subtract some constraint, such as connection to traditional agriculture, but the basic facts are pretty consistent. |
@ Montanabw: I have made a move proposal as a step in resolving a content dispute. I don't think it works to say that we have to resolve the content dispute before there is a move; the point is that the move will split off the less contentious and confusing material (on plants) from the more contentious material where there is not as much agreement and much ambiguity on terms. Montanabw (talk) 19:31, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
|url=
.] If there were a real dead link [i.e. resources deleted from original site, or site gone], the way to repair that is to go to the
http://Archive.org site and look it up in the "Wayback Machine" form in the middle of that page, and get the |archiveurl=
and |archivedate=
for the citation from there. Virtually no actually reliable source is ever a truly dead link any more because Archive.org will have copies. No one can use a broken URL as an excuse to start a bogus dispute. Doing so would be
WP:BATTLEGROUNDing and
WP:Tendentious editing.@ Montanabw: Rather than "all for now", how about "all for quite a while"? Perhaps a mutual WP:SHUN is in order, I'd propose for at least 30 days, barring substantive disputes about content that have to be addressed, and even then only doing it in utterly de-personalized terms, e.g. "I believe this edit raises a POV problem, because...", "There seems to be a SYNTH issue with that argument, due to...", as if the editor who made the edits in question did not exist and the edits appeared out of nowhere. I've found this technique helpful in [two-way] disarming disputes of this sort, and I've ended up good collaborators with some people after 1-3 months of such mutual personal avoidance. What say you? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 04:48, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Agriculture for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions, so be sure to sign your answers. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Thanks, Rcsprinter123 (articulate) @ 09:25, 27 September 2014 (UTC)
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Nikkimaria ( talk) 03:09, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
Pursuant to our discussion at Wikipedia talk:Article titles, I have created an essay Wikipedia:Consistency in article titles, and would welcome your input into that essay. I believe that it should quickly be refined with whatever additional points are needed to fully reflect our practices with respect to consistency, and moved to guideline status. Cheers! bd2412 T 21:22, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
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Why don't we just solve this via a general RFC at WikiProject Agriculture, rather than stringing out a bunch of split arguments across many articles. It would be easiest for all involved to discuss the issue in one place. Steven Walling • talk 03:46, 21 September 2014 (UTC)
All that said, attempts to resolve these matters centrally are attacked as trying to force a one-size-fits-all view, an external rule, a style cabal straightjacket, [insert something else histrionic here]. Meanwhile, attempts to resolve them one article at a time are attacked as trying to tendentiously drag out and nickel-and-dime everything in a war of attrition, picking on articles that violate (non-existent or invalid) wikiproject-level naming rules, and [insert various personal attacks here]. It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, in which the desire to have wikiprojects autonomous and making up their own "naming conventions" that conflict with the next project over, leads to both WP:FILIBUSTER tactics being used by the same parties; neither approach to cleaning up the breed article naming mess can succeed, because both are blockaded.
Do you really feel an RFC would be effective now, and if so how would it proceed? The devils are really in the details on this, and virtually all the involved projects want there to be no site-wide rules to comply with, only their own internal convention on "their" articles.
My tactic lately has been to try a third approach that is much harder to prevent community consensus about, and it's one that is usually effective, regardless of topic. That is to sort RMs into groups of titles that all raise the same problem (e.g. confusabilty with an ethnicity), that is already clearly addressed by WP:AT policy and/or WP:MOS rules, and propose moves to names that comply with those rules. Then it's not an animal breed names (or whatever) discussion, it's a discussion about article compliance with actual, site-wide naming conventions generally, and this either eliminates drama or makes the drama much easier to detect and ignore as just drama. After enough such moves, a pattern of how to name breed articles will naturally, automatically emerge (in theory), and can't be easily WP:BATTLEGROUNDed against. An RFC at that point should cement things into an actual, written naming convention that is adopted as a guideline and doesn't conflict with WP:AT policies.
Unfortunately, the mess at Talk:Teeswater sheep is liable to result in a confused, confusing and disruptive mass status quo ante reversion to inconsistent and AT-violating names, and necessitate an whole new round of these discussions. Fortunately, I've already sorted them, at that page, into 7 different kinds of article titling issues, so they can probably be addressed in 7 RMs, the results of which will effectively be a new naming convention. Unfortunately again, the main problem is that the launcher of that RM mess has vowed to launch several more such messes, which will simply drag this out even longer, because they interfere with the other RMs.
So, you tell me – why would an RFC, even one hosted at WT:AT, be effective now, instead of just derailed by more grandstanding and handwaving? And more importantly by inter-wikiproject canvassing to protect WP:LOCALCONSENSUS interests (i.e. to protect the status quo of chaos and inconsistency simply because it's not a rule to comply with)? What can be done to prevent a handful of combative wikiproject editors from derailing the entire thing again? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 09:39, 21 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not sure that the Big pig vs. Big Pig stuff would make any difference; "The breed is closely related to the American Quarter Horse" vs. "The breed is closely related to the American quarter horse". Who cares? Obviously people who like to capitalize breed names do, but I mean that for encyclopedic reasons, it doesn't matter; the actual article wording will correctly give the breed name in the lead (here it would be "The American Quarter Horse is..." vs. "The American Quarter is..."). There may be one or two cases where a breed and a landrace or type name would coincide, because of a WP:DIFFCAPS disambiguation, but those are dumb ideas in this topic area anyway, and if there are still any, they should be renamed. If one wants to make the argument that using parenthetical disambiguation would "protect" a breed name, lower cased, from being confused with something else, it wouldn't really, because the horse project for one consistently uses parenthetical dab. for the names of individual horses (mostly racehorses) and these sometimes even coincide with breed names. We have such limited ways of dab'ing, there is no one perfect solution. The least conflicting one is: "Foo Bar baz" means a domesticated baz breed named Foo Bar; "Foo Bar Baz" means a domesticated baz breed named Foo Bar Baz; "foo bar baz" (or "Foo bar baz", if Foo is a proper name) means a non-breed population or type of bazes; "Foo Bar (baz)" means some term Foo Bar that relates to the baz species, most often a body part or an individual. The "Foo Bar (baz)" structure can already mean almost anything, and it's senseless to operator-overload that further to also mean breeds. At least one person purporting to represent the horse project will go to the mat on this, and "Foo Bar baz" naming has been totally uncontroversial in several other species such as cats. (Most of the "controversy" that exists at all, is three individual editors being loud about it. One doesn't even agree with the stance she's taking and openly says she's doing it just because she doesn't like me, which means her position can be ignored by the closer. One of the others has such serious English language comprehension problems, including with regard to capitalization basics, that the competence of their input renders their !votes basically useless, too. So that leaves one editor mostly responsible for the filibustering of consistency in these categories.) Thet fact that getting these names consistent would mean they could be easily mass-moved with regard to capitalization, disambiguation style, is clearly among the reasons for resistance against consistency in breed article titles. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
I've just had my attention drawn to your request on AN. I really don't understand why you didn't avoid the drama and ask me directly. Always always always try the most drama-free method first - the worst that can happen is I'd say "take it to AN". the panda ɛˢˡ” 15:52, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
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Unfortunately, you have misinterpreted my position. I never meant to suggest that projects control content of articles included in their projects. I was talking about project scope and which articles are included. Even after your changes (done without consensus), it still holds that projects have a strong say over which articles they include. My issue was that linking to that section appears to accuse project banner removers of WP:OWN, which isn't necessarily the case. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 12:44, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
Could you point me to where the decision to use "participant" rather than "member" for WikiProjects is documented? I note that although looking at a random selection of WikiProject pages suggests most use "participant" on the project page (with the interesting exception of WikiProject Birds), all the templates I looked at in Category:WikiProject user templates used "member". Apart from WP:OWN issues, "participant" seems to me to be more likely to encourage people to join in than "member", since to become a "member" of a group normally requires some qualification or approval process. I'd like to change the user project template for WP:PLANTS at least, but would like to know where this is supported, should there be objections. Peter coxhead ( talk) 13:37, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
PS: Going back even further, I found another one, in which I actually opposed preferring one over the other; changed my mind on that later after some of the WP:OWN problems surrounding wikiprojects became clearer. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 03:30, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
Apropos Landrace, I have looked over the section on plants from time to time and sighed to myself – in my view it's far from NPOV (basically written as "landrace" = good, "cultivar" = bad), depends on too few sources (partly responsible for the NPOV) and ignores modern approaches to describing and naming cultivated plants, such as the ICNCP. Peter coxhead ( talk) 16:23, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not really sure what the solution is, other than simply biding enough time that anyone with an extreme point of view to push loses interest and goes away to work on other articles again, and someone like you in the interim improves the article with balancing sources like ICNCP. Their detailed nomenclature system doesn't seem incompatible with landrace classification, any more than it is with heirloom plant classification. The landrace question is fairly simple: Is this a regionally isolated, domesticated organism adapted to its local environment on its own through free-breeding selection in it area, or is it something mostly shaped by selective, pedigreed breeding for specific qualities (in particular, over the last century or so)?
This doesn't seem to me to interfere with ICNCP classification of something as varietas, forma, etc., since landrace vs. standardized breed is about a human management question. To me, ICNCP's system is, by way of analogy, like deciding if a pickup truck is a Ford, a Chevrolet, etc., then what model it is, then what year, then what "trim level" or options package; the landrace question is like asking whether it was designed for the commercial delivery vs. personal/family use markets. Or in personal computers, the landrace distinctions is analogous to off-the-shelf PCs (generally made from whatever parts the manufacturer has procured) vs. a custom-built machine built to exacting specs, e.g. for gaming, or A-V development, or whatever; in that metaphor, ICNCP's nomenclature is akin to the technical specs (CPU and bus architecture, etc.), which are independent of the build process and any specialized intent. I'm not trying to 'splain to you what ICNCP is doing – you know better than I do – but conceptualize how the approach differs, in simple terms, so that the article can be adjusted without it turning into another dispute from the usual quarters. Metaphors like this tend to be helpful in that regard, as long as they're apt. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:42, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
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Not wanting to stir up yet one more controversy, but I thought I'd float a balloon over an idea. If you are opposed, I won't pursue it further, but I'm seriously wondering if there is at least a partial solution to the landrace dilemma with this: Make two articles, one on plants, one on animals. You know that I generally tend to disfavor splitting and forking, so you realize that I'm making a sincere proposal - this time I wonder if it would ratchet down some of the drama because I think part of the problem is comparing "apples and oranges" (or apples and cattle, oranges and sheep - to be more precise). The plant article will probably be longer and more complex, as the concept has been around longer, and there are way more peer-reviewed sources on plants. The animal one will probably still have disputed material, but at least we will know what we are fighting about. But I suspect the whole problem began with a lot of animal articles linking to "landrace", which when you clicked on the link, originally was mostly a plant article. I won't even debate titling, perhaps Landrace (plant) and Landrace (animal) or Plant landrace and Animal landrace - whatever. I can also still move articles if you want to set up sandboxes... if you like the idea, I'll slap on a "split" template and we can just state at talk that we agree on the split and if no one else cares, then when the two new articles are at least sketched out, even if we still disagree on content, the landrace one becomes a dab. Your friend above, Peter Coxhead, may be useful to work on the plant one. Montanabw (talk) 05:50, 27 September 2014 (UTC)
I also agree with you about cultivars and formal breeds being vital, and do not want the article to push a POV that landraces are "better" than them; we have sources that say why they have advantages, and we need sources that cover the counter-advantages of formal breeding, like increased production, etc. So we really disagree about this far less than it has seemed.
I would propose (informally; this is not a WP:PROPOSAL) that all of our breed articles need to be clarified to use "standardized breed" or some synonym ("formal breed", etc.) when we mean that, at least on first occurrence, and linked to Breed. If we use landrace link it to Landrace. If we use "landrace breed", link it to Landrace, and avoid "breed" by itself as ambiguous.
If you (Montanabw) and FAO have a very broad sense of the word "breed", so may some other readers. That makes the term ambiguous at least some of the time, so we have a duty to clarify in article text. If every case has "X is a standardized breed" or either "X is a landrace" or (when we really, really want to use FAO terms) "X is a landrace breed", then no more problem, ever. Just never say "X is a breed".
As a draft criterion, I would suggest that we use FAO's "landrace breed" only for livestock, not pet breeds/landraces. Secondly, it should only be for cases where a preponderance of sources actually use the term "breed" in a very broad way to also include what we know are landrace breeds, which is probably most if not all horse landraces, because horse encyclopedias and the like tend to call everything "breeds" and distinguish formal/standardized ones by saying "standardized breed" or whatever. But it probably does not apply to many others. In goats and pigs, the phrase "landrace breed" means "standardized breed with the word 'Landrace' in its name", and actual landraces seem mostly to be ignored, i.e. are non-notable. So, "landrace breed" itself can also be ambiguous if used inappropriately. In cats and dogs, what constitutes a breed is generally based on what national and international organization specify, not private-business studbooks, so the issue does not arise. I.e., there is no question at all that the Van cat is a landrace not a standardized breed, and the term "breed" should not be applied to it, nor "landrace breed" since it'll just be redundantly long.
This is obviously just an informal proposal on my talk page, for agreement between us. We'd have to see if it actually worked well in real articles, but I'd bet money that it will. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 07:06, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
I do not agree that a "breed" is only a "standardized breed", though I have no problem linking "standardized breed" to "breed" where it is appropriate to do so.
Then there is no disagreement, basically. What is it you think you're arguing with me about? How can you be telling me I'm wrong when I'm telling you you're right, that "breed" can be used more broadly in some sources than "standardized breed"; we have to write more carefully to disambiguate? I even also prefer "landrace" by itself, but you're the one, not me, insisting that the word "breed" be applied to all distinguishable horse populations, so the solution that presents tiself is "landrace breed", a term we can source to FAO. You know, the source you are so insistent is the most reliable? How are we even still having a disagreement about this?
Doodle doodle dee...
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Landrace as applied to animals is not a neologism; it dates to no later than the early 1930s (when it entered English via pig landrace breeds, so the term was already in use in Dutch, etc., no later than the '20s). We have reliable sources for this in the article already. Exact parameters of definitions are always in flux about most all terms of art in science. The central ideas of the concept have remained constant: A landrace is a distinguishable population of a domesticated species, adapted to its local environment mostly without selective human breeding, with a greater degree of variability than a standardized breed/cultivar, but enough homogeneity to be distinguishable. There's really nothing more to it as a basic definitional matter. Various specific definitions emphasize or de-emphasize one thing or another, or add or subtract some constraint, such as connection to traditional agriculture, but the basic facts are pretty consistent. |
@ Montanabw: I have made a move proposal as a step in resolving a content dispute. I don't think it works to say that we have to resolve the content dispute before there is a move; the point is that the move will split off the less contentious and confusing material (on plants) from the more contentious material where there is not as much agreement and much ambiguity on terms. Montanabw (talk) 19:31, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
|url=
.] If there were a real dead link [i.e. resources deleted from original site, or site gone], the way to repair that is to go to the
http://Archive.org site and look it up in the "Wayback Machine" form in the middle of that page, and get the |archiveurl=
and |archivedate=
for the citation from there. Virtually no actually reliable source is ever a truly dead link any more because Archive.org will have copies. No one can use a broken URL as an excuse to start a bogus dispute. Doing so would be
WP:BATTLEGROUNDing and
WP:Tendentious editing.@ Montanabw: Rather than "all for now", how about "all for quite a while"? Perhaps a mutual WP:SHUN is in order, I'd propose for at least 30 days, barring substantive disputes about content that have to be addressed, and even then only doing it in utterly de-personalized terms, e.g. "I believe this edit raises a POV problem, because...", "There seems to be a SYNTH issue with that argument, due to...", as if the editor who made the edits in question did not exist and the edits appeared out of nowhere. I've found this technique helpful in [two-way] disarming disputes of this sort, and I've ended up good collaborators with some people after 1-3 months of such mutual personal avoidance. What say you? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 04:48, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
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