Talk:Cyperus scariosus
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Most of this article must be deleted
[edit]It's not just Wikipedia, most of internet is a shitshow regarding this species.
First off, the main reference refers to Cyperus rotundus, that's about 80% of this article that should go, see diff..
Second, practically all of the rest of the article (minus what I added 2 days ago) refers to Cyperus pertenuis (it is now a redirect to Cyperus articulatus on Wikipedia, following Govaerts 2007) and should be deleted/moved -bear with me. The synonymy is taken from The Plant List database circa 2017, a notoriously out of date source - C. pertenuis was considered a synonym of C. scariosus until a 2012 article. In the 19th century, the Hindi name nagar motha referred to two species: C. pertenuis and C. rotundus. C. pertenuis was synonymised to C. scariosus in 1894 by Charles Baron Clarke (2012 article has wrong date! In the 1894 work, Clarke refers to another article by himself in the Journal of the Linnean Society, but this article took a while to get published).
This also means the distribution given in PoWO is incorrect, they are attributing the collection localities of the 4-5 C. pertenuis specimens in existence to the wrong species, because they are still basing their distributions on Govaerts' old database.
This also means the common names given in GRIN are incorrect, they refer to C. pertenuis (see their source).
And then there is the picture. The one in the article appears to be a cultivated specimen of Cyperus alternifolius. In fact, as far as I can tell, almost all pictures of C. scariosus online are of C. alternifolius, one is of Cyperus albostriatus, one is Cyperus haspan, five are of C. rotundus, but this may actually be the real thing (C. pertenuis, to be clear -note the three involucre bracts (what we are incorrectly calling leaves in the Cyperus article)). Here's another picture
While I'm at it, the picture at the Cyperus alterniflorus is also clearly mislabelled C. alternifolius in Flickr (Dinesh Valke is a smart guy, but this is just a typo!) and should be relabelled in Commons.
And then there is the claim that C. pertenuis may be endangered because no one bothered to take a herbarium sample of it in 120 years. That would essentially mean all the Indian producers of cypriol are lying to us. More likely, I would venture the reason is simply that to most humans, Cyperaceae are inanely boring. 2A02:A45D:25BD:1:D55C:983A:EF0C:F67C (talk) 15:07, 5 January 2022 (UTC)