Talk:Merrifieldia oligocenicus

Incorrect names

In the present Wiki article, three names are being used: Merrifieldia oligocenicus, Merrifieldia oligocenus and Pterophorus oligocenicus. None of these names are found in the reference, only the different Pterophorus oligocenus. Are those forms on oligocenicus actually attested? And is the specific combination Merrifieldia oligocenicus used, as the gender of the adjective (masculine) does not correspond to the gender of the noun (feminine)? Wimpus (talk) 12:35, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

I have added a reference to the Merrifieldia oligocenicus page at fossilworks, and corrected the misspelling that was left over from the move. The P. oligocenus reference is a misspelling by the authors of that papers. Gender is not something that was enforced by the ICZN for names until the last MAYBE decade, and so there was never a requirement for gender matching in names before that. And since they are names and not words many authors did not worry at all about it, its not a language after all, but a name. --Kevmin § 18:43, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for trying to solve this, but I think you've added the wrong reference. So, in this case 31.2. Agreement in gender is not applicable? The move to Merrifieldia was actually done in 2012 as I later found out (as also can be seen here) (is this the reference you wanted to add?). In that monograph you can see (p. 59): "MERRIFIELDIA Tutt, 1905 [extant] ....[next line] oligocenicus Bigot, Nel and Nel, 1986: 283, figs. 1–4, 5e (Pterophorus). comb. nov." The fourth edition of the ICZN from 1999 (so predating 2012) already had the section "31.2. Agreement in gender", so it is not clear to me why Merrifieldia oligocenicus would be a valid name. Wimpus (talk) 19:33, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

I fixed the citation. Its valid though not gender agreeing until an authority offically publishes a name correction in a taxonomic paper. It does not become invalid.--Kevmin § 19:47, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. Can you give me a source for your statement? I am not familiar with the ICZN. But, in this case, you do agree, that Sohn et al. (2012) made a mistake (and a violation of rule 31.2)? Wimpus (talk) 20:08, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Speaking as an ICZN Commissioner, Kevmin's comment above is incorrect. Gender agreement is automatic and mandatory, it is NEVER cited, because it is not considered to be an actual change in spelling; only actual spelling changes have authorships and citations. No "authority" EVER has to publish a gender-based change in order for it to be valid - that's what mandatory and automatic means - no citation for precedent is provided or required, so even if every authority alive is using the wrong gender, you are still compelled by the Code to use the correct gender if you know better. No one will ever cite you, and you don't cite anyone else; you just use the correct gender. I've had to explain this to numerous publishing taxonomists, which is surprising, as it should not be that hard to grasp. The name of this species is Merrifieldia oligocenica, no matter what anyone has said, and that's the end of the issue. If you want to know WHY the Code works this way, it's simple: back in 1910 or so, there was no easy way for taxonomists to communicate rapidly with one another. To a very real extent, everyone had to act independently of everyone else, which meant that rules for nomenclature had to be as "free-standing" as possible. In other words, if you needed to cite external sources for everything, then no one would be able to make any progress at all, because back then, no one had access to all the available literature. So, certain rules were set to be arbitrary and automatic, such that 50 different taxonomists in 50 different countries publishing 50 different papers independently would all use the exact same spellings, if they followed those same rules. Furthermore, the requirement for mandatory gender agreement not only dates back to the 1st Edition of the Code in 1961, but was in practice under the pre-Code rules for a century prior to the formal publication of the Code. Dyanega (talk) 00:01, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Show the primary or secondary sources that use the name Merrifieldia oligocenica. You can assert all you want as an ICZN Commissioner, BUT you as a wikipedia editor should know very well that if it NOT used in any source, it can NOT be used here, wikipedia ONLY reports whats written elsewhere. No source is using that name. period. Its clearly NOT simple given that you yourself state it has to be explained to those who you expect to follow it.--Kevmin § 00:13, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

It is clear that with no source whatsoever a spelling change can't be made on Wikipedia. But given the ICZN rules, it seems reasonable to take any source correcting the spelling as a source for the correct spelling, even if it is not a primarily taxonomic reference and doesn't explicitly cite the ICZN rule for the spelling change. That a source followed through on the "mandatory and automatic" change required by the ICZN should be sufficient. This obviously wouldn't apply if it was the sole source doing so and a hundred others didn't.   Jts1882 | talk  07:35, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

What you are describing is a policy that sets up a proverbial Catch-22 situation. Please bear with me as I outline how and why, my motives are far less selfish than you seem to think. Most importantly, you are probably unaware that there is a de facto prohibition on publishing works solely to correct gender mismatches (because the ICZN doesn't require formal publication, most journal editors will reject any attempts to do so, because it's a waste of everyone's time), and yet you're insisting that you won't fix gender mismatches in WP unless there are published sources. This is not something I'm fabricating, not hyperbole, and not just my personal opinion: you will not find any examples in the taxonomic literature that meet these criteria: (1) the sole type of nomenclatural act in the work is to correct gender mismatching (2) the genus name is unambiguously considered to be a given gender, and (3) the species epithet is unambiguously considered adjectival. The only published works that correct gender mismatches are those where items 2 and/or 3 are NOT met, or works where any such correction appears, uncommented and un-annotated, within the larger body of the work (usually a revisionary work, checklist, or catalog). Along these lines, I will further point out that the Commission has, since its inception, ruled on and published around 4000 applications, and, so far as I am aware, not a single one of those applications had the sole purpose of establishing the gender of a genus, or fixing the gender-based spelling of a species name. Why not? After all, wouldn't you think that'd be the most likely venue for any such formal statements to be published? The reason is simple: since the rules are explicit in the Code, and applied automatically, this precludes any necessity for a formal statement in print - and the Commission accordingly rejects any applications dealing with gender (a rough analogy would be a judge refusing to hear a case that, under the law, is explicitly supposed to be resolved out of court). In essence, the ICZN precludes publications of the EXACT sort that you are insisting must be cited before WP editors are allowed to comply with the ICZN. In a nutshell, the ICZN does not require there to be sources for gender agreement, so it makes no sense for WP to insist upon sources that will likely never exist for any given name. It's almost like you're claiming diplomatic immunity from the rules. But there's a very big problem with claiming that you are not bound to uphold the rules of the ICZN because it conflicts with WP policy to do so, and this is what concerns me more than any "turf battle" over whose standards take precedence. That is, the way the internet works, online aggregators of scientific names tend to "feed off" one another, and they propagate and perpetuate names without regards to correctness or Code-compliance; most of it is a blind and mindless automated process lacking any measure of quality control or human intervention. WP is one of the ONLY online resources where a bad scientific name CAN be subjected to quality control and human intervention, to help break the vicious cycle of online resources perpetuating each others' bad names, and now you're telling me that it's against the rules to fix them - despite WP being essentially the primary source for all scientific names it contains (it's damn hard to type any scientific name into Google without WP being the #1 hit). The ICZN says it is the responsibility of each individual source of scientific names to make certain that the names they use are in compliance, and you're saying that you reject that responsibility, and by doing so you perpetuate obvious and easily-fixed errors in such a way as to make it LESS likely that anyone will ever realize they need to be fixed. This really, really does not seem like what that OR policy was intended to prevent, and I'm tempted to say that this is a significant enough matter to raise the issue as high as possible in the WP admin system to review it; I can certainly imagine that other Commissioners besides myself would find this worthy of concern, discussion, and negotiation. The "unintended consequences" here are VERY severe and very negative for the scientific community, and I doubt that anyone objectively believes that this is in everyone's best interests. Dyanega (talk) 01:46, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

I don't think anybody is asking for a nomenclatural act correcting the gender agreement. They're asking for a source, any source, that has the string "Merrifieldia oligocenica". With my Wikipedian hat on, I'm not very comfortable with Wikipedia giving a spelling that doesn't occur (yet) in any other sources. With my common sense hat on though, there's nothing magic about "any source"; if different sources have different spellings it's not particularly helpful to pick one with the correct spelling just for the sake of having a source to cite (yes, ideally, there would be a source that explicitly mentions the misspelling, and which gives the correct spelling). I mean, here's a taxonomically oriented source that gets the gender of a plant epithet wrong (and I suppose for entomologists, it might seem obvious that a tree genus ending in -us is masculine (it's actually feminine), and the epithet's ending should be "corrected"). I can find a source for either Quercus alba or Quercus albus, but I'm unlikely to find a source that gives both spellings and explicitly flags one as incorrect.

Pragmatically, Kevmin says he got some updates on Fossilworks. Can we get the spelling there fixed, and then just cite Fossilworks? Plantdrew (talk) 20:26, 24 October 2018 (UTC)