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Common name

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After checking in several ways (including Google Ngram book search, image search, web search, and what various sources say), I suggest the following:

  1. Boiga dendrophilia has a dominant common name, which is "mangrove snake" (with various capitalizations)
  2. The name "gold-ringed cat snake" is rarely used
  3. The name "mangrove cat snake" is rarely used – even more rarely than "gold-ringed cat snake"
  4. Boiga dendrophilia is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the term "mangrove snake"

—BarrelProof (talk) 17:55, 27 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 11 March 2016

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The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No move. There's no agreement on the moves after nearly 4 weeks of discussion. Cúchullain t/c 15:56, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]


– After checking in several ways (including Google Ngram book search, image search, web search, and what various sources say), I concluded the following: 1) Boiga dendrophilia has a dominant common name, which is "mangrove snake" (with various capitalizations); 2) The name "gold-ringed cat snake" is rarely used for this snake; 3) The name "mangrove cat snake" is also rarely used for this snake – even more rarely than "gold-ringed cat snake"; 4) Boiga dendrophilia is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the term "mangrove snake". I said all this more than a year ago on Talk:Boiga dendrophila, and there has been no objection (and indeed, no response). —BarrelProof (talk) 18:22, 11 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support, several snake pages have changed to the common names recently, and this one seems to follow that precedent. Randy Kryn 00:18, 12 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, (1) I'm in general skeptical about the benefits of using common names as page titles, especially for species that do not reside in English speaking countries. (2) In this particular case, the name is misleading because it suggests that the species has a close association with mangroves, which it does not (as the article acknowledges). In fact, Cox et al. say it can reach 610 m altitude. The name "gold-ringed cat snake" is at least descriptive. Micromesistius (talk) 16:36, 12 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • Question: You seem to be expressing a disagreement with Wikipedia's policy to use the WP:COMMONNAME (which may not be the "official" name) of a topic for the article title. Do you dispute that "mangrove snake" is the name most commonly used for this species in English? Regarding your second comment, please note that it is not really unusual for common names to have some problems with accuracy (e.g., milk snakes have nothing to do with milk, but that is certainly their common name). —BarrelProof (talk) 17:40, 12 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The most directly relevant policy is WP:NCFAUNA, which you can use to justify this move (I am not disputing the standing of "mangrove snake"). However, I do think that the policy does not provide a proper guideline for this situation. "Mangrove snake" is a positively misleading name, whereas "gold-ringed cat snake" would be both physically descriptive and taxonomically informative. However, to me the preferred title remains the scientific name, with redirects from the common names, with disambiguation where needed. After all, there are other "mangrove snakes" that seem more typically to inhabit mangroves, e.g. Liophis cobella. This also is my general preference, but I guess we should not start discussing this bigger issue here. Regarding milk snakes, the name raises question marks, but is not directly misleading in the way "mangrove snake" is. Micromesistius (talk) 20:13, 15 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose I'm not convinced that Boiga dendrophila is the primary topic. It get 77.5% of the hits for the snakes mentioned in the dab page, which isn't the level of overwhelming usage that usually accompanies a primary topic (see here). And there are some other snakes not mentioned on the dab page that with common names that include the term "mangrove snake" that contaminate attempts to determine primary topic from Google results. Google Books has 547 results for "mangrove snake" + Boiga, 126 for "mangrove snake" + Nerodia, 36 for "mangrove snake" + Liophis, 92 for "mangrove snake"+Myron (a genus that includes the "Aru mangrove snake", "Richardson's mangrove snake" and "Broome mangrove snake"), and 138 for "mangrove snake" + Fordonia. 41% of Google books results for "mangrove snake" are snakes besides Boiga dendrophila, and "mangrove snake" is arguably the common name for snakes in the genus Myron. While "mangrove snake" predominantly refers to Boiga dendrophila it doesn't rise to the level of a primary topic. Keep the dab page at the base title. Plantdrew (talk) 20:45, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
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