Talk:Crotalus angelensis

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This is an encyclopedia, not a biology book

In recent edit summaries, Jwinius claims that type locality statements should be literal quotes. In normal writing, editor's comments may be inserted within a quotation provided they are enclosed in square brackets. I challenge Jwinius to show that biologists forbid the use of comments in square brackets when mentioning type locality statements in general-interest publications. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 16:47, 1 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, no hard feelings, but these are supposed to be literal quotes from original publications. I've frequently included translations and such between parentheses after the quote, but I believe the quoted text should be kept intact for historical reasons. For example, if you were to discover a famous passage from a Mark Twain novel quoted somewhere in Wikipedia that included a distance in miles, would you also modify it to include the equivalent distance in kilometers? I would hope not. Type locality statements should be regarded in much the same way. They're often in German or French, some are very old and some are even wildly wrong. I'm not a professional zoologist and I don't know that any hard rule exists that forbids type locality statements from being modified in any way, but I've noticed that all of my sources seem to do this, so I've followed suite to avoid any trouble. What's wrong with trying to be accurate? --Jwinius (talk) 18:10, 1 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I read your reference to Wikipedia:Quotations. It says "If not used verbatim, any alterations must be clearly marked, i.e. [brackets] for added text, an ellipsis (...) for removed text, and emphasis noted after the quotation as '(emphasis added)' or '(emphasis in the original)'." Unfortunately, that passage is under an inappropriate heading, "Quoting copyrighted text"; the advice is equally applicable whether the material is copyrighted or not.

Of course, an alternative to inserting conversions within the quotation is to provide them in a footnote, or in a statement immediately following the quotation. If an editor feels that would look better, the editor may certainly make such a change, but the editor should not remove useful information from an article just because the editor does not like how it looks. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 18:29, 1 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, my apologies for abusing Wikipedia:Quotations, but if we can agree to place conversion info after the type locality statements, that will suite me just fine. --Jwinius (talk) 18:49, 1 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]