Talk:Lyssomanes viridis

Caption of image in taxobox

The spirit of MOS:CAPTION is clear, although it does not specifically cover this case. There's an exact analogy with "In a biography article no caption is necessary for a portrait of the subject pictured alone; but one might be used to give the year, the subject's age, or other circumstances of the portrait along with the name of the subject" – in a spider article, no caption is necessary for a portrait of the spider alone if there are no sex differences. All that's needed here is the sex of the subject.
I think what editors have been guided by is really MOS:HEADINGS, reading "Headings should not refer redundantly to the subject of the article" as "Captions should not refer redundantly to the subject of the article".
If you look through organism articles, you'll see that the most common style is to omit the name in a caption when it's the same as the title of the article or taxobox.
It seems utterly redundant to me to have an image with the heading "Lyssomanes viridis" in bold immediately above and then repeat "Lyssomanes viridis" below.

Peter coxhead (talk) 06:29, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Peter, I'll respond point-by-point:

To begin with, analogizing those two circumstances is a big leap in my mind, when the section you quote is explicitly talking about biographical articles. And even if we were to take the circumstances for a binomial and a name to be perfectly analogous (and I don't think that I do), I still find your argument there to be a non-sequitur. The section of WP:CAPTION you quote is not in any sense discussing whether to use names or proper nouns in a caption; rather, it is only discussing whether to utilize a caption at all. When captions are utilized, they almost always include a name to identify the content with specificity.
Sorry, but we cannot just read guidelines to refer to an entirely different set of phenomena than are actually stated within them. MOS:HEADINGS is about...y'know, headings. If the community felt that there was need for a standard on lead images that is consistent with your perspective, there would be one. You can always WP:PROPOSE one at MoS, but short of that, you can't import rules into an area of content which they are not explicitly related to in order to create a new standard, unless you test that standard through a proposal and the community formally adopts it into a guideline.
You seem very certain that the trend is to omit these names across taxonomic articles, but as someone who is fairly familiar with that class of article themselves, I'm not convinced you're correct. But even if that were the case, it would still be WP:OTHERSTUFF and without a policy or style guideline to support one approach or the other, we fall back on default content dispute rules, and go with the older stable version--at least until one of us wins the other over or consensus is otherwise achieved. That said, I'll do a review of a few dozen species articles of similar size. If I find that the practice is nearly uniform, that would be decent cause for me to re-evaluate my position. I personally don't see the value of the approach, and even if it has been adopted widely, its not necessarily a good thing. But in the interest of trying to find grounds to come to a consensus, it can't hurt to look.
I kinda-sorta-maybe guess I sort of see why that bothers you aesthetically, but for me, the resulting truncated and awkward word flow for the caption itself is a much bigger concern than the fact that the species name will be mentioned more than once in the infobox.

Anyway, let me do my little informal survey and get back to you. As you can see, I am not won over by the other arguments, but I don't want to butt heads overmuch regarding a very small difference in content, so I will see if I can't find excuse enough to give over for the sake of conformity--though I must reiterate that such is truly the least compelling reason to chose one style approach over another, when not even MoS has a preference! Snow ^{let's rap} 12:50, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, just found a little time to go through some articles. I tried to pick random but fairly well-known species off the top of my head; if the common name I used took me to a genus or other higher level of taxon than I was expecting, I selected the first species I could find in the parent article. The species I picked included arthropods, nematodes, mammals, reptiles, avians, fish, molluscs, bacteria, fungi, and vascular plants--and I think you would recognize every one of them. I saved a list if you are curious to see it, but the take-away is that almost exactly one half of the several dozen articles I checked used the name of the species in the caption for the main infobox image, if they had an image at all; an even higher number used the name in at least one caption somewhere in the article.

Now, thirty-odd articles is a very small sample size, but in order to abandon the normal policy approach set out by WP:LOCALCONSENSUS and WP:STYLEVAR for these circumstances, I would have needed to see something in the vein of 97%+ of all articles doing the same thing. Instead I've got something close to 50/50. So we are back to arguing this on the merits of what sounds appropriate in the circumstances. And there, I am afraid that we are still at a loggerheads, because I think this is very much something that can or cannot be done per the context of the statement being made in the caption--which I would forward as the reason why there is no rule for it even in MoS. Snow ^{let's rap} 15:52, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I tell you what; just so we don't waste any more time on such a small content matter, let's just get a third opinion and agree to go with however that editor calls it? I feel confident that I could lock in my version under WP:STYLEVAR rationale in this instance, but I don't wish to resolve an editorial matter in that fashion if I can avoid it--it feels very non-collaborative. If you're agreeable, I would certainly feel comfortable letting User:SemanticMantis make the call, but if you'd rather get someone random, WP:3O would be fine too. Does that sound like a reasonable approach? Better than a coin flip, anyway! Snow ^{let's rap} 16:11, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]