This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 35 | ← | Archive 38 | Archive 39 | Archive 40 | Archive 41 | Archive 42 | → | Archive 45 |
Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
The 100 Skins of the OnionOpen Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that. Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron. Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF. From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart. Links
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from
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MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion to merge many categories in the family Category:Vertebrates of Benin to Category:Vertebrates of West Africa, following many earlier similar mergers. I believe this discussion is of interest to many of us, but happens in a corner of Wikipedia where few relevant editors will notice it (as has happened before).
In my view, these mergers lead to loss of useful information. Notwithstanding that few countries represent natural biogeographic units, the world happens to be organized in countries, and country-based categories have lot of practical relevance. Instead decimating the system, we should have discussion on what kind of category structure we would like to have.
As far as I see, the criticism to "Organisms of countryX" categories is based on the fact that most organisms are not unique to a country, hence WP:NON-DEFINING. I found this argument too formalistic and overlooking the practical functions of categories. While I agree that for groups with typically very broad distributions, country-based categories can become impractical, this does justify the decimation of the whole system. But where to draw the limit?
For example, I would not argue for a comprehensive system of country-based categories for birds or marine animals. But to take something I am familiar with, amphibians, most species occur only in a few countries, so I do not see this a major problem. There are of course also broadly-distributed species in areas with many smallish countries, say in the forest and savanna belts of West Africa, or Europe. However, while we do have List of birds of Benin and few others, we do not have List of amphibians of Benin, List of reptiles of Benin, nor List of (freshwater) fish of Benin. While these would not be too difficult to create, I have trouble seeing that someone would actually maintain them. Therefore, I would argue for a relatively comprehensive system of country-based categories for amphibians. Micromesistius ( talk) 15:16, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
discussion[s] on what kind of category structure we would like to have, which, for animals, have in the past resulted in a consensus against country-based classifications. Peter coxhead ( talk) 08:53, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
even though these categories are accepted for plants– well, not "country-based" categories; plants are categorized using the highest level of the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions that applies. Peter coxhead ( talk) 19:55, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
ScienceSource fundedThe Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.
The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen. The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm. Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help. Links
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. ScienceSource pages will be announced there, and in this mass message. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from
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MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
so now that Garra is done for the time being, I am moving on to Henicorhynchus. I notice that there are a few species that CoF places there that Fishbase and the IUCN place in other genera. If there is no objection, I'll follow CoF placement (looks like some of the species list a species in one genus in the taxobox, and another in the article body, so needs to be corrected anyway)...… Pvmoutside ( talk) 15:41, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
I am in an edit war with User:Dw122339 over 2 articles: Vinagarra and Vinagarra elongata. I cannot find a reference anywhere to even a redirect to the species or genus page, so I blanked both pages hoping for a speedy delete. Dw122339 keeps on restoring without explanation..... Pvmoutside ( talk) 17:17, 29 May 2018 (UTC)
Seems to me that Garra is a large genus from which some new genera have been recently derived, e.g. Sinigarra and Vinagarra, although Fishbase doesn't recognise the split (yet?). Endruweit (2014) says Vinagarra was created for V. laichowensis and findolabium should be transferred to it. It seems unlikely that both G. elongata and V. elongata are valid names for two such closely related fish, which is what CoF currently suggests. CoF also lists Pareuchiloglanis tamduongensis as current status uncertain.
FishWisePro recognises V. elongata, V. laichowensis and V. tamduongensis in Vinagarra and also (strangely) has V. findolabium as the valid name of G. findolabium under Garra, but doesn't list it under Vinagarra. It does have all four as valid species names, just not in the same place.
Overall, it seems the
Vinagarra article is correct in listing four species. The remaining question is whether there are two elongata species. The records in CoF and FishWisePro suggest they are, but this seems suspicious when one is a derived genus. One is found in India, the other in Vietnam.
Jts1882 |
talk 08:46, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
Please post on the relevant article talk page when a discussion like this starts out. This is a good discussion with a legitimate commitment to finding verifiable sources, and that's awesome, but because it wasn't linked to until later all we saw was a page being surriptitiously blanked. -- HighFlyingFish ( talk) 19:19, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.
Portals are being redesigned.
The new design features are being applied to existing portals.
At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}.
The discussion about this can be found here.
Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.
On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.
Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.
So far, 84 editors have joined.
If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.
If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.
Thank you. — The Transhumanist 11:02, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
Can we do something about Unikonta? The group is well past its best-before date, but retains a high profile in templates and taxoboxes. Because the name carries an embedded hypothesis that has turned out to be false (that amoebozoans and opisthokonts are ancestrally uniciliate), it was abandoned by Adl et al. in their Revised Classification of Eukaryotes (2012). That paper establishes Amorphea for a clade of the same composition.
Cavalier-Smith, who erected Unikonta in the first place, has also abandoned it, noting that "the ‘unikont’ condition (having a single centriole) of phalansteriids and Archamoebae is not ancestral for podiates, as was once postulated...and not even ancestral for Amoebozoa, which must now be considered originally biciliate" (see https://ac.els-cdn.com/S1055790314002796/1-s2.0-S1055790314002796-main.pdf?_tid=a855ddd2-63f3-47a0-bbb2-ee0d522f11e1&acdnat=1528295824_e4c1972597de06b6f87097d39cb1a76e ).
For similar reasons, Derelle and his collaborators declared in 2015 that "the term Unikonta should no longer be used". They suggest "Opimoda" as an alternative( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4343179/). However, that name has not caught on (Google Scholar shows just 13 uses since 2014, as compared to 130 for Unikonta and 215 for Amorphea).
Unikonta does not feature in Ruggiero et al., 2015, the scheme that forms the framework for databases like The Catalogue of Life, ITIS and WORMs.
Back in 2005, when the Unikonts page itself was created, Wikipedia enthusiastically embraced then-current phylogenetic conjectures such as Chromalveolata and Unikonta. Since that initial burst of effort, something like institutional inertia seems to have settled in, and the encyclopedia has been slow to update some of these. Whether we mean it to be, or not, Wikipedia is a prominent source of taxonomic information, so it's important to keep up to date (or, alternatively, be more cautious about using WP:PRIMARY, so as not to flash-freeze rapidly-changing taxonomic hypotheses).
If there is some consensus on it, we could begin by replacing Unikonta with Amorphea in Template:Taxonomy/Amoebozoa, Template:Taxonomy/Opisthokonta, etc. Deuterostome (Talk) 16:01, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
User:Caftaric, whose name certainly has been mentioned here before, has been blocked. I've made a post at the WP:WikiProject Lepidoptera talkpage regarding the impact they've had on our categorization structure and how to handle it. As the WikiProject is both low-activity and shares many of its editors with this WikiProject, I'm cross-posting a notice here. The post can be found here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Lepidoptera#Post-Caftaric category straightening-out/clean-up. AddWittyNameHere ( talk) 20:28, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
The Editor is
Charles Matthews, for
ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to
Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions. Close to home also, a template, called {{ medrs}} for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter. This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.
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MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
After User:Caftaric's blocking as sock/block evader, more accounts were uncovered. These include the recently-active User:Couiros22, the old and stale but to many editors highly familiar User:NotWith, as well as lesser-known and already-blocked-now-tagged User:R567, User:Wwikix and long-blocked original account User:Nono64.
For the relevant discussion, see User talk:JamesBWatson#What_to_do_now_re_Couiros22 (the most relevant section, but sections Re:Caftaric & Caftaric etc. are also relevant) ( permalink up to the as-of-now most recent relevant comment)
As an admin's user talk is not the best place to stage and coordinate a large-scale clean-up effort, I (though anyone else is also welcome to) intend to make an organized subpage of this WikiProject (at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Nono64 and its talkpage Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life/Nono64; as long as those are red-links, no one has gotten around to creating them yet) to function as central coordination point to determine strategy, keep track of what's been done and who's doing what to avoid folks doubling back over the same edits. Considering there's a six-figure number of edits involved, that's kinda important if we don't want to still be busy in 2030 or so.
Until someone—whether me or not—gets around to it, this notification/discussion will have to serve as staging point. Beats causing notification-hell on our friendly neighbourhood admin's talkpage, at least. AddWittyNameHere ( talk) 22:42, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
Feel free to add additional tasks that need doing
Pinging the relevant editors from the discussions on JamesBWatson's usertalk & the discussion at WikiProject Lepidoptera: @ Plantdrew, DexDor, Nick Thorne, and Loopy30. AddWittyNameHere ( talk) 22:42, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
Is a doctoral thesis a sufficient source for a species to be listed? It seems to have been "published" but I can now only find it online through the Internet Archive (see here). I haven't found any solidly reliable source for the species elsewhere. We have articles for ten species, but they are not now listed on the genus page Donacaula. They were removed in 2014 by an account which only made that edit. I'm not sure if I should nominate those pages for deletion or add them back to the genus page. Thanks, SchreiberBike | ⌨ 04:36, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Donacaula was revised by Martinez (2010) in an unpublished dissertation, therefore the new scientific names are not available until they are published.Umimmak ( talk) 05:46, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Hi,
I'm writing about a modest little bivalve. There is some dispute about its name. The ITIS database (and the rest of Wikipedia, for that matter) refers to it as "Tellina simulans". https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=81206#null/ The WoRMS database says that this name is no longer accepted and the correct name is "Eurytellina simulans". http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=575431/ Eurytellina was previously a sub-genus and has apparently been promoted. It seems to me that Eurytellina is likely the more "correct" answer in that the new name presents the most current thinking on this topic, and is based on the database that specializes in marine life. On the other hand, I am aware of many instances where biologists fight amongst themselves about taxonomy. Does Wikipedia have a view on what is definitive in taxonomy?
Thanks! Jordanroderick (talk) 15:38, 7 July 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jordanroderick ( talk • contribs)
Hello all:
PS: As for the other matter: if CoL really is using WP and WikiSpecies data, via any route, that would be a pretty serious issue.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 19:02, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
do remember that the liklihood you will come across an old name is dependant on what and why you read about a species. As a taxonomist I frequently find old names as I spend a lot of time examining the original literature. However the majority of readers will not see a lot of synonyms, hence I still think the recent and commonly seen ones are enough. Complete synonymies are on Wikispecies and in various checklists for those who need them. Sure add them add hoc if you wish or find them but for the most time its not necessary I think and I would not like to see it become policy. I agree circularity of authorities is a big issue, hence I bring it up alot, here, at Wikidata and Wikispecies. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) talk 19:26, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
A couple of points: (1) Some synonyms are the same as legitimate organism names. It might be nice not to make redirects for these, since it is confusing for someone searching for the legitimately named organism, and it makes it harder for someone creating a page for the legitimately named organism. (2) As mentioned above, I think some synonyms have close to zero probability of being used by a Wikipedia reader. It seems like quite a few obscure synonyms could be omitted. Bob Webster ( talk) 20:33, 27 June 2018 (UTC) ,
Here is a list of COL databases, those mentioned above as suspect "linking from" are not listed. William Harris • (talk) • 08:49, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
An anon with a rotating IP address has been making a lot of non-trivial changes at Taxonomic rank. These should probably be reviewed for accuracy, as they're changing the hierarchical relationships between various ranks. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:13, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
On the automatic taxoboxes, yes, that'll all need to be at semi-protected a least, since screwing with it could have wide-ranging negative effects. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:50, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
I was trying to take a look at the most recent Reptile Database update and all I get is machine language. Anyone out there know if this can be translated to English?... [2]..... Pvmoutside ( talk) 17:50, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
There is a list of Wikiproject stub sorting templates here that can be used in stub articles about insects, arachnids, arthropods, and a lot of other scientific topics. There are some users who edit articles and replace the stub template with a new one that is not in this list, usually with a little lower taxonomic rank.
For example, GTBacchus has changed {{ Tachinidae-stub}} to {{ dexiinae-stub}} and {{ ichneumonoidea-stub}} to {{ ichneumonidae-stub}}
Sbbarker19 changed {{ bee-stub}} to {{ sweat-bee-stub}}, which was created today.
Caftaric (since banned as a sock puppet) changed a lot, such as {{ arthropod-stub}} to {{ Springtail-stub}} for springtails.
What should be done?
(1) Nothing, it's not a big deal,
(2) Start using the new templates or non-official stub templates (if so, should they be added to the official list?),
or (3) Revert the edits to a template on the WikiProject stub sorting list.
The main thing I was wondering is whether I should stick with the official list for future articles. I was going to post this on the stub project talk page, but it doesn't seem very active and I thought someone here would know.
Bob Webster ( talk) 18:22, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! I've posted this at the Stub sorting project. Bob Webster ( talk) 20:21, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
The Editor is
Charles Matthews, for
ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to
Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources. Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume. If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".
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MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
I've set up a RM discussion on the talk page for what you may know as New Zealand fur seal. Some controversy about whether to use scientific name or use common name. Please feel free to comment..... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pvmoutside ( talk • contribs) 15:36, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Please jog my memory. I know there's a word for this, for old now-rejected taxa based on visual similarities in the pre-genetics days. Googling for it just brings up "cladistics" over and over again. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:02, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
even a grade are all fairly closely related. For example, Vermes used to be a taxon of "worms", and is certainly polyphyletic, and not even a grade. But there is a use of " worm" referring to a grade of animals, i.e. a group of not necessarily related animals that have the same general body plan: "worms are simply animals which have retained the general vermiform shape of their ancestors more or less unchanged, having bodies some 2–3 to over 15 000 times longer than wide and flattened or rounded in section" (Barnes, R.S.K.; Calow, P.; Olive, P.J.W.; Golding, D.W.; Spicer, J.I. (2001), The Invertebrates: a Synthesis (3rd ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-632-04761-1
{{
citation}}
: Unknown parameter |lastauthoramp=
ignored (|name-list-style=
suggested) (
help), p. 80)
Peter coxhead (
talk) 10:10, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
Please see:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ICZN
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 16:28, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
I'm unhappy with the genus Mus having the title Mouse. a better title would be Mus (genus) or Mus (rodent). Mouse is a pretty broad term which would better apply to a broader category of rodents.......any opinions?.... Pvmoutside ( talk) 21:32, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
lg,
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 35 | ← | Archive 38 | Archive 39 | Archive 40 | Archive 41 | Archive 42 | → | Archive 45 |
Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
The 100 Skins of the OnionOpen Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that. Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron. Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF. From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart. Links
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from
our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all
massmessage mailings, you may add
Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery |
MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion to merge many categories in the family Category:Vertebrates of Benin to Category:Vertebrates of West Africa, following many earlier similar mergers. I believe this discussion is of interest to many of us, but happens in a corner of Wikipedia where few relevant editors will notice it (as has happened before).
In my view, these mergers lead to loss of useful information. Notwithstanding that few countries represent natural biogeographic units, the world happens to be organized in countries, and country-based categories have lot of practical relevance. Instead decimating the system, we should have discussion on what kind of category structure we would like to have.
As far as I see, the criticism to "Organisms of countryX" categories is based on the fact that most organisms are not unique to a country, hence WP:NON-DEFINING. I found this argument too formalistic and overlooking the practical functions of categories. While I agree that for groups with typically very broad distributions, country-based categories can become impractical, this does justify the decimation of the whole system. But where to draw the limit?
For example, I would not argue for a comprehensive system of country-based categories for birds or marine animals. But to take something I am familiar with, amphibians, most species occur only in a few countries, so I do not see this a major problem. There are of course also broadly-distributed species in areas with many smallish countries, say in the forest and savanna belts of West Africa, or Europe. However, while we do have List of birds of Benin and few others, we do not have List of amphibians of Benin, List of reptiles of Benin, nor List of (freshwater) fish of Benin. While these would not be too difficult to create, I have trouble seeing that someone would actually maintain them. Therefore, I would argue for a relatively comprehensive system of country-based categories for amphibians. Micromesistius ( talk) 15:16, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
discussion[s] on what kind of category structure we would like to have, which, for animals, have in the past resulted in a consensus against country-based classifications. Peter coxhead ( talk) 08:53, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
even though these categories are accepted for plants– well, not "country-based" categories; plants are categorized using the highest level of the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions that applies. Peter coxhead ( talk) 19:55, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
ScienceSource fundedThe Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.
The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen. The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm. Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help. Links
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. ScienceSource pages will be announced there, and in this mass message. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from
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MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
so now that Garra is done for the time being, I am moving on to Henicorhynchus. I notice that there are a few species that CoF places there that Fishbase and the IUCN place in other genera. If there is no objection, I'll follow CoF placement (looks like some of the species list a species in one genus in the taxobox, and another in the article body, so needs to be corrected anyway)...… Pvmoutside ( talk) 15:41, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
I am in an edit war with User:Dw122339 over 2 articles: Vinagarra and Vinagarra elongata. I cannot find a reference anywhere to even a redirect to the species or genus page, so I blanked both pages hoping for a speedy delete. Dw122339 keeps on restoring without explanation..... Pvmoutside ( talk) 17:17, 29 May 2018 (UTC)
Seems to me that Garra is a large genus from which some new genera have been recently derived, e.g. Sinigarra and Vinagarra, although Fishbase doesn't recognise the split (yet?). Endruweit (2014) says Vinagarra was created for V. laichowensis and findolabium should be transferred to it. It seems unlikely that both G. elongata and V. elongata are valid names for two such closely related fish, which is what CoF currently suggests. CoF also lists Pareuchiloglanis tamduongensis as current status uncertain.
FishWisePro recognises V. elongata, V. laichowensis and V. tamduongensis in Vinagarra and also (strangely) has V. findolabium as the valid name of G. findolabium under Garra, but doesn't list it under Vinagarra. It does have all four as valid species names, just not in the same place.
Overall, it seems the
Vinagarra article is correct in listing four species. The remaining question is whether there are two elongata species. The records in CoF and FishWisePro suggest they are, but this seems suspicious when one is a derived genus. One is found in India, the other in Vietnam.
Jts1882 |
talk 08:46, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
Please post on the relevant article talk page when a discussion like this starts out. This is a good discussion with a legitimate commitment to finding verifiable sources, and that's awesome, but because it wasn't linked to until later all we saw was a page being surriptitiously blanked. -- HighFlyingFish ( talk) 19:19, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.
Portals are being redesigned.
The new design features are being applied to existing portals.
At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}.
The discussion about this can be found here.
Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.
On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.
Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.
So far, 84 editors have joined.
If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.
If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.
Thank you. — The Transhumanist 11:02, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
Can we do something about Unikonta? The group is well past its best-before date, but retains a high profile in templates and taxoboxes. Because the name carries an embedded hypothesis that has turned out to be false (that amoebozoans and opisthokonts are ancestrally uniciliate), it was abandoned by Adl et al. in their Revised Classification of Eukaryotes (2012). That paper establishes Amorphea for a clade of the same composition.
Cavalier-Smith, who erected Unikonta in the first place, has also abandoned it, noting that "the ‘unikont’ condition (having a single centriole) of phalansteriids and Archamoebae is not ancestral for podiates, as was once postulated...and not even ancestral for Amoebozoa, which must now be considered originally biciliate" (see https://ac.els-cdn.com/S1055790314002796/1-s2.0-S1055790314002796-main.pdf?_tid=a855ddd2-63f3-47a0-bbb2-ee0d522f11e1&acdnat=1528295824_e4c1972597de06b6f87097d39cb1a76e ).
For similar reasons, Derelle and his collaborators declared in 2015 that "the term Unikonta should no longer be used". They suggest "Opimoda" as an alternative( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4343179/). However, that name has not caught on (Google Scholar shows just 13 uses since 2014, as compared to 130 for Unikonta and 215 for Amorphea).
Unikonta does not feature in Ruggiero et al., 2015, the scheme that forms the framework for databases like The Catalogue of Life, ITIS and WORMs.
Back in 2005, when the Unikonts page itself was created, Wikipedia enthusiastically embraced then-current phylogenetic conjectures such as Chromalveolata and Unikonta. Since that initial burst of effort, something like institutional inertia seems to have settled in, and the encyclopedia has been slow to update some of these. Whether we mean it to be, or not, Wikipedia is a prominent source of taxonomic information, so it's important to keep up to date (or, alternatively, be more cautious about using WP:PRIMARY, so as not to flash-freeze rapidly-changing taxonomic hypotheses).
If there is some consensus on it, we could begin by replacing Unikonta with Amorphea in Template:Taxonomy/Amoebozoa, Template:Taxonomy/Opisthokonta, etc. Deuterostome (Talk) 16:01, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
User:Caftaric, whose name certainly has been mentioned here before, has been blocked. I've made a post at the WP:WikiProject Lepidoptera talkpage regarding the impact they've had on our categorization structure and how to handle it. As the WikiProject is both low-activity and shares many of its editors with this WikiProject, I'm cross-posting a notice here. The post can be found here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Lepidoptera#Post-Caftaric category straightening-out/clean-up. AddWittyNameHere ( talk) 20:28, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
The Editor is
Charles Matthews, for
ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions. Close to home also, a template, called {{ medrs}} for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter. This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.
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MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
After User:Caftaric's blocking as sock/block evader, more accounts were uncovered. These include the recently-active User:Couiros22, the old and stale but to many editors highly familiar User:NotWith, as well as lesser-known and already-blocked-now-tagged User:R567, User:Wwikix and long-blocked original account User:Nono64.
For the relevant discussion, see User talk:JamesBWatson#What_to_do_now_re_Couiros22 (the most relevant section, but sections Re:Caftaric & Caftaric etc. are also relevant) ( permalink up to the as-of-now most recent relevant comment)
As an admin's user talk is not the best place to stage and coordinate a large-scale clean-up effort, I (though anyone else is also welcome to) intend to make an organized subpage of this WikiProject (at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Nono64 and its talkpage Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life/Nono64; as long as those are red-links, no one has gotten around to creating them yet) to function as central coordination point to determine strategy, keep track of what's been done and who's doing what to avoid folks doubling back over the same edits. Considering there's a six-figure number of edits involved, that's kinda important if we don't want to still be busy in 2030 or so.
Until someone—whether me or not—gets around to it, this notification/discussion will have to serve as staging point. Beats causing notification-hell on our friendly neighbourhood admin's talkpage, at least. AddWittyNameHere ( talk) 22:42, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
Feel free to add additional tasks that need doing
Pinging the relevant editors from the discussions on JamesBWatson's usertalk & the discussion at WikiProject Lepidoptera: @ Plantdrew, DexDor, Nick Thorne, and Loopy30. AddWittyNameHere ( talk) 22:42, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
Is a doctoral thesis a sufficient source for a species to be listed? It seems to have been "published" but I can now only find it online through the Internet Archive (see here). I haven't found any solidly reliable source for the species elsewhere. We have articles for ten species, but they are not now listed on the genus page Donacaula. They were removed in 2014 by an account which only made that edit. I'm not sure if I should nominate those pages for deletion or add them back to the genus page. Thanks, SchreiberBike | ⌨ 04:36, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Donacaula was revised by Martinez (2010) in an unpublished dissertation, therefore the new scientific names are not available until they are published.Umimmak ( talk) 05:46, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Hi,
I'm writing about a modest little bivalve. There is some dispute about its name. The ITIS database (and the rest of Wikipedia, for that matter) refers to it as "Tellina simulans". https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=81206#null/ The WoRMS database says that this name is no longer accepted and the correct name is "Eurytellina simulans". http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=575431/ Eurytellina was previously a sub-genus and has apparently been promoted. It seems to me that Eurytellina is likely the more "correct" answer in that the new name presents the most current thinking on this topic, and is based on the database that specializes in marine life. On the other hand, I am aware of many instances where biologists fight amongst themselves about taxonomy. Does Wikipedia have a view on what is definitive in taxonomy?
Thanks! Jordanroderick (talk) 15:38, 7 July 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jordanroderick ( talk • contribs)
Hello all:
PS: As for the other matter: if CoL really is using WP and WikiSpecies data, via any route, that would be a pretty serious issue.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 19:02, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
do remember that the liklihood you will come across an old name is dependant on what and why you read about a species. As a taxonomist I frequently find old names as I spend a lot of time examining the original literature. However the majority of readers will not see a lot of synonyms, hence I still think the recent and commonly seen ones are enough. Complete synonymies are on Wikispecies and in various checklists for those who need them. Sure add them add hoc if you wish or find them but for the most time its not necessary I think and I would not like to see it become policy. I agree circularity of authorities is a big issue, hence I bring it up alot, here, at Wikidata and Wikispecies. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) talk 19:26, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
A couple of points: (1) Some synonyms are the same as legitimate organism names. It might be nice not to make redirects for these, since it is confusing for someone searching for the legitimately named organism, and it makes it harder for someone creating a page for the legitimately named organism. (2) As mentioned above, I think some synonyms have close to zero probability of being used by a Wikipedia reader. It seems like quite a few obscure synonyms could be omitted. Bob Webster ( talk) 20:33, 27 June 2018 (UTC) ,
Here is a list of COL databases, those mentioned above as suspect "linking from" are not listed. William Harris • (talk) • 08:49, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
An anon with a rotating IP address has been making a lot of non-trivial changes at Taxonomic rank. These should probably be reviewed for accuracy, as they're changing the hierarchical relationships between various ranks. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:13, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
On the automatic taxoboxes, yes, that'll all need to be at semi-protected a least, since screwing with it could have wide-ranging negative effects. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:50, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
I was trying to take a look at the most recent Reptile Database update and all I get is machine language. Anyone out there know if this can be translated to English?... [2]..... Pvmoutside ( talk) 17:50, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
There is a list of Wikiproject stub sorting templates here that can be used in stub articles about insects, arachnids, arthropods, and a lot of other scientific topics. There are some users who edit articles and replace the stub template with a new one that is not in this list, usually with a little lower taxonomic rank.
For example, GTBacchus has changed {{ Tachinidae-stub}} to {{ dexiinae-stub}} and {{ ichneumonoidea-stub}} to {{ ichneumonidae-stub}}
Sbbarker19 changed {{ bee-stub}} to {{ sweat-bee-stub}}, which was created today.
Caftaric (since banned as a sock puppet) changed a lot, such as {{ arthropod-stub}} to {{ Springtail-stub}} for springtails.
What should be done?
(1) Nothing, it's not a big deal,
(2) Start using the new templates or non-official stub templates (if so, should they be added to the official list?),
or (3) Revert the edits to a template on the WikiProject stub sorting list.
The main thing I was wondering is whether I should stick with the official list for future articles. I was going to post this on the stub project talk page, but it doesn't seem very active and I thought someone here would know.
Bob Webster ( talk) 18:22, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! I've posted this at the Stub sorting project. Bob Webster ( talk) 20:21, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
The Editor is
Charles Matthews, for
ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to
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Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources. Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume. If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".
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MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
I've set up a RM discussion on the talk page for what you may know as New Zealand fur seal. Some controversy about whether to use scientific name or use common name. Please feel free to comment..... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pvmoutside ( talk • contribs) 15:36, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Please jog my memory. I know there's a word for this, for old now-rejected taxa based on visual similarities in the pre-genetics days. Googling for it just brings up "cladistics" over and over again. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:02, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
even a grade are all fairly closely related. For example, Vermes used to be a taxon of "worms", and is certainly polyphyletic, and not even a grade. But there is a use of " worm" referring to a grade of animals, i.e. a group of not necessarily related animals that have the same general body plan: "worms are simply animals which have retained the general vermiform shape of their ancestors more or less unchanged, having bodies some 2–3 to over 15 000 times longer than wide and flattened or rounded in section" (Barnes, R.S.K.; Calow, P.; Olive, P.J.W.; Golding, D.W.; Spicer, J.I. (2001), The Invertebrates: a Synthesis (3rd ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-632-04761-1
{{
citation}}
: Unknown parameter |lastauthoramp=
ignored (|name-list-style=
suggested) (
help), p. 80)
Peter coxhead (
talk) 10:10, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
Please see:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ICZN
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 16:28, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
I'm unhappy with the genus Mus having the title Mouse. a better title would be Mus (genus) or Mus (rodent). Mouse is a pretty broad term which would better apply to a broader category of rodents.......any opinions?.... Pvmoutside ( talk) 21:32, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
lg,