Talk:Haplogroup L (mtDNA)

Merger proposal

I think that the history of their editing shows that all the present L clade articles are pretty much stubs, and are not likely to change soon. Of course they might one day be subject to a burst of energetic editing, but for the time being it appears one article would be much more appropriate? See Haplogroup L1 (mtDNA),Haplogroup L2 (mtDNA),Haplogroup L3 (mtDNA),Haplogroup L4 (mtDNA),Haplogroup L4a (mtDNA),Haplogroup L5 (mtDNA),Haplogroup L6 (mtDNA)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:12, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

No merging:

The African genetic history is the most ancient, diversified and complex. Meanwhile human mitochondrial history is 200,000 years old, the conquest of Europe is only 40,000. However the European population has been given 11 letters in an arbitrary way to define their main haplogroups. East Asia has 8, Australia 3 and Subsaharian Africa only one: “L”. But Europe shows great homogeneous in mitochondrial genetic.

That means that this system is Eurocentrist (or Occidentalcentrist). The African haplogroups are less advanced because we are not interested enough; but that does not mean they are not important. Making only one article for all of African haplogroups, would be the worst form of Eurocentrism. --Maulucioni (talk) 21:39, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

This is a similar position to the response of Wapondaponda on WP:HGH but it seems to be based on the idea that articles should be split/merged based on their age, rather than how much there is to say about them?I do not think that merger/split decisions have anything to do with Eurocentrism or with any possible solutions to bias. Even if we should be thinking about bias, do you think it is good for the L articles to all be stubs? Will this lead people to understand their great age and importance?

Of course, if someone has time to develop them all into articles that would be even better?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:40, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I think that what should be done is to develop this article: HG L (mtDNA) in order to lead people to understand its great age, diversification, spreading and importance. I'm willing to do so. If we delete the L articles, then we should also delete articles such as CZ, C, Z, E, G, F, S, R0, JT, and many others that are even shorter than articles like L0, L3 or L1. Every important article starts by being small; don't discriminate against what you call stubs.

By the way, all these articles are not stubs. Reading Wikipedia:Stub: “A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information, and it should be capable of expansion.” --Maulucioni (talk) 19:53, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I think yes, developing these articles would definitely be better, but otherwise, stub or not they would still be more informative to readers, and better even for contributors, if merged in their current form? I think that yes, the same logic could apply to many of the haplogroup articles which seem to have been developed almost blindly over the last year or so. There is no point having an article for every node in a phylogenetic tree. A phylogenetic tree is not an oppressed entity, it is just an effect of someone finding a mutation. To treat subjects fairly, it can not be best to divide them into dozens of little articles no one will ever read.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:31, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I am glad that Maulucioni and I have independently come to the same conclusion. There has been indeed some centrism in the scientific community and wikipedia as well regarding mtDNA haplogroups. According to the 2008 publication "Updated Comprehensive Phylogenetic Tree of Global Human Mitochondrial DNA Variation", all the mtDNA haplogroups were named in the order they were discovered, and there was no particular attention paid to phylogenetic relationships. Naturally much of the research was initially in Europe, so Europe picked up the most letters of the alphabet.

An excerpt states:

The first mtDNA haplogroups, discovered in Native Americans, were baptized A, B, C, and D (Torroni et al.,1993). Subsequently detected haplogroups were designated using other letters of the alphabet. By now, all letters of the alphabet, except O (although once proposed), have been used (Figure 1). Simple rules for mtDNAhaplogroup nomenclature were proposed by Richards et al. (1998) (see also Kivisild et al., 2006a); but unfortunately, the mtDNA haplogroup nomenclature is not always used consistently. Several examples can be found where different authors coined the same name for different haplogroups: e.g......All these examples illustrate the need for an overall mtDNA phylogeny with universal nomenclature but also their consistent use by the mtDNA community

In short the current nomenclature system for mtDNA is not systematic. The YCC did a better job of standardizing Y-chromosome nomenclature. It is possible that the same may be done for mtDNA in the future. Wapondaponda (talk) 10:28, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

That's because Y DNA haplogroups came a decade after mtDNA's, hind-sight is 20-20. Merging these haplogroups together is an altogether bad idea. Simply because African studies have not caught up with Eurasian levels of typing given the African diversity is no reason to merge. If you really wanna see some sucky nomenclature try HLA-A and B, where they could not distinguish the two loci for the first 10 years and serially named serotypes at for 2 loci treated as one. Andrew, don't you have a few Y-DNA articles that need to be fixed, try R1b1, which you started to work on and quickly petered out, do I need to come over an hold your hand on that one also?PB666 ^yap 04:44, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

merging

Given this haplogroup's importance, I think that the most accurate name to call this article is Macro-haplogroup L (mtDNA). --Maulucioni (talk) 23:03, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

In the sense that Haplogroup L is universal, I agree that it is somewhat different. However, the problem is convention and consistency. Other lineages such as haplogroup L1, L2, M, N and R are also sometimes referred to as macrohaplogroups, but we have maintained the "haplogroup" naming system. Wapondaponda (talk) 04:15, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Merge done. Histmerge left. --Maulucioni (talk) 14:51, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Still trying to avoid stubs

I can see that L has been moved to an article with a new name. But there are still too many stubs in this phylogeny which either need to be written up or (for now) merged. I can see L0 now has a decent enough existence, but should all the others perhaps be merged into an article perhaps called Macro-haplogroup 1-6 (mtDNA)?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:56, 5 February 2010 (UTC)