Talk:Pectinidae

Topic creation

This article was created by removing the long Taxonomy section from the Scallop article and including it here as the main body of the article. A header paragraph was created by consulting the foreign wiki Pectinidae articles, primarily fr:Pectinidae and es:Pectinidae versions.

Formerly, this topic was a redirect to Scallop, which is an example of a bivalve belonging to the Pectinidae taxonomic family. There was no separate Pectinidae topic in English.

This caused some confusion in the Scallop article itself, which was a hodgepodge of both general information about the Scallop, as well as more strictly biological and taxonomic classification.

In addition, it caused one very particular kind of confusion, namely in the Interwikis, those little language links in the left nav bar. Most major foreign wikis already have two separate articles, one for Pectinidae, and one for the "Scallop" (in the local language, e.g., fr:Coquille_Saint-Jacques) and the English interwiki links sometimes pointed to the Scallop article, and sometimes to the Pectinidae article on the foreign sites.

Spawning Pectinidae from the Scallop taxonomy section solved both problems.

This note was added by User:Mathglot (talk | contribs) at 01:16, on 15 February 2009‎

Five years later

That sounds all very well and good, except that here I come along, and can't figure out why there is an article on pectinidae as well as an article on scallops, and then I can't figure out if they are really supposed to be the same thing or not, and then I can't figure out why we have separate articles on them, and then I wonder where I should be putting the stuff that I a reading about scallops-- in the article on scallops or this article on pectinidae... And I have no way of assessing where the new information should go, because it looks like it belongs either place... or both places, which would be asinine and redundant. This article's page is getting on the order of 40-60 hits a day. The article on scallops is consistently getting more than 1,000 hits a day. I am not yet sure that I understand what information has been annexed into this article that does not belong in the article on... well, on scallops. And I am not altogether certain I understand the reasoning given above with regard to foreign language wikis. Inasmuch as this is the English language Wikipedia, I do not think it is relevant or important for us to be making sure our articles "line up" well with those in Spanish or French or Hebrew because the fundamental facts of language will always mean there are incongruencies between any two and alignments are hardly guaranteed. It appears I do not understand, and the explanation above, while a great start, has not really answered my question. I feel like I want to see a redirect again, but am not going to implement it over a previous discussion without getting some consensus or a more thorough explanation first. Anyone?? Am gonna ping Invertzoo here for some help. KDS4444^Talk 05:39, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

I am not at all convinced that this separation is a good idea as it currently stands, and I don't really understand the logic behind it. "Scallops" in English is a common name which is used (in English at any rate) for all of the species in the family Pectinidae; in English "scallop" is not a name for just one edible species, or a name restricted to only a small group of edible species. Personally (and this is admittedly a separate question) I would prefer all articles on taxa to use the scientific (Latin) names as the article title, and have the common name be a redirect. However I don't think we have anything like a consensus on that issue, and actually I believe that the MoS and/or the Tree of Life Project recommends the opposite: using the common name for a taxon, as long as the common name is very well known and very frequently used. In the case of some taxa of animals and plants, we do have one article about the taxon, and one article about the food item, which seems like a reasonable system. If someone wanted to do that with the scallop info that would be alright with me. However, that is not what Mathglot did. BTW, if there is info in the article that applies to only one species, or only one genus, that info should be moved to the article about that species or genus. If I am missing a point here, feel free to explain it to me. Otherwise I feel the articles should be merged back together again and then cleaned up as necessary. Invertzoo (talk) 11:49, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

P.S. Just so that people know, in a similar way, we have one article for mussel, which is also the article for Mytilidae, and one article for cockle (bivalve), which is also the article for Cardiidae. I am not saying that the older way of doing things is ideal, just that this is the way we are currently doing this, and if this system of article creation really needs to be changed, we need to work out a better way of splitting the articles, and it should be done only after much discussion and deliberation as this would be a policy change for WikiProject Bivalves and also for WikiProject Gastropods. Invertzoo (talk) 12:02, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

P.P.S. Mathglot said this new article is about the "taxonomy" of the Pectinidae, however, it includes sections on the lifestyle and behavior etc and now the info on the anatomy, reproduction, motility and so on of the Pectinidae is left behind in the Scallop article. Doesn't make sense. If you want one article to be scientific and the other article to be about the human uses and relevance of scallops (as food, in art and architecture, the historical symbolism etc), that would be at least a somewhat logical suggestion. Note that I am not suggesting we do that. Invertzoo (talk) 13:21, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

You see, that is exactly what I was thinking. I don't like setting precedent and I don't like the thought of changing policy because those things usually are they way they already are for very good reasons, but having one article on "scallops" and another on "pectinidae" would be like having one on "people" and one on "homo sapiens" (and maybe yet another on "folks" and one on "bipedal modern apes", each with its own kind of "flavor"). I am also on the side of having redirects from common names to scientific ones, but that is the scientist in me talking louder than the typical wikipedia reader in me. KDS4444^Talk 05:43, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

There is this, if it is helpful: I recently participated in some discussion regarding the article on "sunflower." Seemed there was an article called "Sunflower" that went on to talk about the particular species Helianthus annuus, in rather great detail. Problem was, "sunflowers" are a much wider group of plants, and on the talk page there was frustration expressed by this fact. In the end, what happened was that "Sunflower" became a redirect to "Helianthus", the genus (which is how it currently stands), and you have to type "Helianthus annuus" to get the article on the common sunflower OR click on the link in the second sentence of the lead of the Helianthus article that will take you there. So the end result was that people may rather often type in "sunflower" and be expecting to get Helianthus annuus, but get Helianthus instead. These people then get to discover that there are in fact many kinds of sunflowers, including the one they are probably looking for, Helianthus annuus. So far there have been no complaints. The article on Helianthus also jumped from about 100 views a day to now around 700 views per day (you can trace this from June 27th of 2014, when the change was made). The old search term "sunflower" used to pull in over a thousand, sometimes more than 1,500 hits per day, and it has now dropped off to around 450 (again, traceable to June 27th), and Helianthus annuus, which used to get around 50 hits per day, has been steadily climbing almost every day since the change as other articles in other places have changed their links to the specific flower and away from the genus. What all this means is this, I think: the change caused a bit of a hiccup, but it is slowly getting straightened out, and for the better. I see no reason why we should not try the same thing here. It seems the "encyclopedic" thing to do.KDS4444^Talk 05:43, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

And so in the interest of gaining consensus and getting the various wikiprojects on board, might it perhaps be relevant to send out a WP:request for comment on this matter, and formally notify the interested parties/ projects as well? If so, I would be glad to create the request.KDS4444^Talk 05:43, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

We certainly could do that KDS4444, and please feel free to do that if it seems like the most appropriate course of action. Also include WikiProject Tree of Life if you are going to ask around about this. But first can I ask, have we talked to Mathglot to see what he makes of our point of view? If Mathglot in retrospect understands what we are saying, then it may not be necessary to canvass everyone and try to change policy about this kind of article. However, I am thinking that perhaps the scallop article as it stood before this change may have needed some careful re-working in its organization, as overview articles often become sloppy as they grow over time. Or was the original article too long? I wouldn't mind trying to clean it up a bit, assuming it needs some work. If we decide to re-merge the articles, please paste a copy of Mathglot's version, without categories, onto this one of my subpages. However, I must explain that I am going on a trip for 2 1/2 weeks starting this Monday, and I won't be able to contribute very much at all during that time. Invertzoo (talk) 12:49, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

I asked Mathglot to come by and read this discussion. Invertzoo (talk) 13:18, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

I feel the articles simply should not and can not stand the way they are (even though they have stood this way since 2009 (!). We did not have a bivalve WikiProject until 2012, and even now that project is not very active at all, so I don't really have anyone else to help me with this. But clearly all the scientific information should be moved so that it is all together in one article, there is no doubt about that. However I am not quite sure if all the human-related info should be grouped under Scallop or not, and am also not sure if the article Scallop should retain that simple title. Invertzoo (talk) 14:52, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Re-organizing the two articles

I have now attempted to place all the scientific info in this article only, and to leave all of the human-related info in the Scallop article. I don't know if this is really desirable, but it is a start. I removed the taxobox in the Scallop article. I do not have enough time right now to deal with the two sections "Locomotion" and "Motility and behavior" which overlap in content. Now I have to get back to my packing. Invertzoo (talk) 17:05, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

I applaud your boldness and share your hesitancy. Let me generate an RfC here on this talk page and see if I can get a sense of what some other editors think about this. Go pack! KDS4444^Talk 07:27, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

PS I have now placed notifications of the RfC below on both of the wikiproject pages you mentioned, hopefully there will be some insights through them. KDS4444^Talk 07:50, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks KDS4444, I will leave this in your hands. Invertzoo (talk) 13:01, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

RfC: Splitting and joining Scallop & Pectinidae

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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The pectinidae are all scallops, yet for years they have been separate articles with overlapping content. How might we best split/ join the two? KDS4444^Talk 07:32, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

NOTE: The two articles started off as one article. That article was imperfectly split into two in 2009, leaving a lot of the scientific info behind in the scallop article. Yesterday I did a clean-up in order to make the two articles internally consistent. I would originally have favored merging and going back to one article, but I am open to all and any suggestions. I suppose that in the future, as this kind of overview article gets longer and longer, it may need to be split in some way, perhaps spinning off an article on Scallop (food). Invertzoo (talk) 12:59, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

ANOTHER NOTE: The editor who split the article in two, back in 2009, complained that having only one article, "caused one very particular kind of confusion, namely in the Interwikis, those little language links in the left nav bar. Most major foreign wikis already have two separate articles, one for Pectinidae, and one for the "Scallop" (in the local language, e.g., fr:Coquille_Saint-Jacques) and the English interwiki links sometimes pointed to the Scallop article, and sometimes to the Pectinidae article on the foreign sites." I personally know almst nothing about Interwikis so I have no idea how important this consideration is. Plus of course I also don't know what the situation is like now in the other language Wikipedias viz a viz Pectinidae and scallops. Invertzoo (talk) 23:15, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

• Officially.....slap a merge template.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 08:43, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

• I support a merge as well. The entirety of the contents of the Scallop article can be placed as a subtopic under "Uses" or "Importance" in this article. Separating the two based on one being mostly about natural history and the other on human uses and cultural importance is arbitrary and results in far more confusion. The term "Scallop", after all, is not restricted in the same way in daily usage. Of course a separate article under a better heading, e.g. "Scallops as food" or something can be made instead, but that's not really called for given that the article isn't really that lengthy in the first place.

Either of the two titles can be used (Pectinidae or Scallop), but IMO, there should only be one article, and one or the other should be a redirect. -- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 09:26, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

• Support merge, with "Scallop" as primary title per WP:RECOGNIZABLE. No one besides (and maybe including!) malacologists would talk of "baked pectinids", or "Members of the taxonomic family Pectinidae in heraldry". If all pectinids are scallops, let's just call a scallop a scallop.--Animalparty-- (talk) 01:58, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

• Snow Merge - Title should be "Scallop". Per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna), "Use the most common name when possible". The interwiki issue seems to indicate problems on non-English wikipedia's. NickCT (talk) 12:56, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

• I am getting the sense that maybe I should close this RfC with a merge-to-scallop and redirect-from-pectinidae outcome... KDS4444^Talk 15:02, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

• @KDS4444: - I'm getting the sense you might be right. NickCT (talk) 17:56, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

• Comment (Discordant note). I don't like the idea of a merge. Having skimmed the two articles I reckon that in their present form either could stand alone, with only the reasonable current links between them. The amount of logical overlap is small and in particular, is a small proportion of each article. (No doubt because of Invertzoo's efforts). Each article is at the moment of a reasonable size, but combined, though not ginormous, it would be definitely on the largish side. Now, I don't mind large articles when they are large because of their logical coherence reflecting their logical structure, but I don't like them much when they have clearly separable parts. By way of analogy, we could have a single huge article on Cattle, incorporating Bos and Dairy and Beef. Every bit could fit in logically, but for most readers on any topic, most of the article would be noise. Yes, I know that a Scallop-and-Pectinidae article would be smaller, but the structural and usability objections remain. Also, to use a common name as a redir to a taxon article is painless, because the reader might not even notice that there has been a redirection, and in particular, one could have a dozen common name redirs to the same article without any penalty, but a taxon name redir to a common name is another matter, especially as so-called common names more often than not are applied to paraphyletic and polyphyletic populations, and unstably at that. Think of a counter-example to scallop. such as "winkle"; we have an article on winkles written as if the name were definitive in reference to one species, but actually it could refer to any of umpteen Gastropoda in several families, and there are other common names even for the winkle species in the article. For lay readers this is misleading; for biologists it renders a simple redir next to useless; the upshot would have to be a disambiguation that ultimatel might point to multiple articles. I urge you to move in the opposite direction. Must run (mercifully?) JonRichfield (talk) 05:42, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Note about Winkle: I have now hopefully fixed that problem with a disambiguation page. Invertzoo (talk) 15:56, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

* PS Apologies for foregoing error in bold print. Have now corrected it. Note the "Use the most common name when possible" principle is rarely applicable anyway. That rule is a counter-functional product of deficient philology. The commonest and least parochial headword almost invariably is the taxon name. The word "scallop" itself already appears in a few hatnotes, suggesting that it could do with a disambiguation page, but more to the point, when the creator of a page uses a common name in smug confidence that his choice is "the most common", even if he technically happens to be right, it could be the term of choice for just a decade or two in just a few (say) Eastern states where he grew up. It could be unknown or the name for two or three other creatures further north or south. It certainly would not be the chosen term for non-Anglophones. I don't suppose that matters, does it? Hmmm? But please note, ALL those people could look up their own redir, not even noticing that it is a redir, and quite happily wind up at Pectinidae. And in ANY language Pectinidae would be what the wanted if they wanted the taxon. And if they cared, they could follow links and hatnotes to err... scallop? Think of a few other common names such as say, "skipjack"; do you mean a tuna, any of several kinds of herring, several other fishes, a bird, several hundred beetles, or what? No matter which one you choose, how do you justify YOUR choice when most of the people we serve would prefer some other choice? And even if you can find a common name that undeniably IS definitive, why should that make a difference? If all the articles follow the same principle, still permitting Joe Public to find what he wants transparently by redir or as flexibly as possible by disambiguation, then using a consistent discipline makes sense. JonRichfield (talk) 07:01, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

• @JonRichfield: - Jon, your wall-of-text makes it really hard to understand what you are proposing. Are you saying we should merge but use "a common name as a redir to a taxon"? That is, are you suggesting we merge but but have "Pectinidae" be the article title? NickCT (talk) 14:06, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT:No, I reckon don't merge anyway, but if you do merge, then do the redir to the taxon, and if you don't merge, then keep the article names as they are. Scallop is an OK name for an article that deals with the commercial and domestic material, and Pectinidae is OK for the biological article (with all the redirs for as many common names as anyone feels like having of course). Of course there should be the appropriate cross-refs between the actual articles anyway. JonRichfield (talk) 19:39, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

@JonRichfield: - Ok thanks. That was clear. So thinking about your "don't merge" position; I'm tad confused as to your point here. You seem to be saying "Don't merge b/c 1) there's a lot of unique content on both articles & 2) the resulting merger would be too large". While I might not necessarily disagree with you on either of those points, I think you're missing the overriding issue, which is that "Pectinidae" and "Scallops" are the same thing. That's not true of your Cow, Beef, Cattle example. "Cow" is not synonymous with "Cattle" which is not synonymous with "Beef". Those are examples of things which are different.

I struggle to see what distinction you could make between "Pectinidae" and "Scallops". NickCT (talk) 20:34, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

While I sympathize strongly with Jon's logic here on several points, I am so far finding myself agreeing with NickCT on application. I did a survey of several non-molluscan taxa to see what was being done elsewhere, and though there were some messy points (the eagles, whales, and elephants in my sample) the pattern was clear: if there is a common name, and if that common name means something specific (which I believe it does here), then that common name should be used for the [only] article title on that animal (food terms a given exception, of course: if it is a mass noun like "pork", it gets a separate article from "pig"). In the interest of avoiding another wall of text I will put my list on my own talk page for others to check out as desired. KDS4444^Talk 04:05, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT: Yes Nick, I was thoroughly conscious of those (perfectly valid) points as I was writing that. The reasons that I invoked examples in which there were indeed differences between the notionally mergeable topics is just that it made it easier to highlight some of the considerations. However, note that the size objection remains, though I am fully aware that it is a quantitative point, not a qualitative one. What bothers me more than gross size is the logical discontinuity between the subject matter in each current article. However, there remains a point of difference. You say: "the overriding issue ... that "Pectinidae" and "Scallops" are the same thing". That is not a functional issue at all IMO. It isn't even in every sense true, even if we accept that each member of each set exactly matches each of the other set. Context changes everything, including what determines which articles appear in WP. Ask yourself: how frequently will someone who looks up "Pectinidae" be wanting the existing article "Scallop"? Rarely. And, if not, how often will he want to wade thorough the rest of the scallop stuff? Vice versa someone wanting the scallop information would find it confusing and annoying to wade through the technical zoological stuff. And a simple hatnote would painlessly redirect anyone who happened upon the wrong article. Just one glance and one click! There also is the matter of encouraging by example the same principles where other topics are dealt with such as my hypothetical Bos/cattle/beef example.JonRichfield (talk) 06:28, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

@JonRichfield: - If your point is that the current article "Pectinidae" contains too much technical detail which people searching for "Scallop" might not want, then it seems like the right solution would be to merge to "Scallop", then have a subsection in "Scallop" called "Technical stuff about Scallops" then create a WP:SPLIT with a "Main article:Technical stuff about scallops". Your argument isn't one against a merge. NickCT (talk) 00:47, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT: It is not so much 'too much technical detail which people searching for "Scallop" might not want' as that the two articles, each coherent in itself, would make an incoherent, or at least cumbersome, whole. As I read the WP:SPLIT article in response to your remarks, my proposal always was perfectly in line with the principles espoused there. Certainly "Main article XXXX" links should appear in suitable places in both the articles, just as in thousands of other articles. OTOH, if you are serious about calling the link pointer anything as patronising as "Technical stuff about Scallops", you might get some flak from anyone literate enough to refer to WP at all, and even if you insisted on that link label, there would be no point to re-naming the actual "technical stuff" article anything but Pectinidae. Why do you say that is not an argument against a merge? I never suggested a single article anywhere; cross-linking is not merging. We are supposed to be helping our readers, and what would suggest to a zoologist or taxonomist looking for "Pectinidae" that he should search on "Technical stuff about scallops", or worse, why he should take the article seriously when he got there? Should we call the Scallop article "Scallops for Dummies"? That sort of thing is fashionable elsewhere, but really... :) JonRichfield (talk) 15:54, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

@JonRichfield: - re "if you are serious about calling the link pointer anything as patronising as "Technical stuff about Scallops"" - Not serious. That was meant to be humurous. "Taxonomy of Scallops" if you prefer a serious example.

re "Why do you say that is not an argument against a merge?" - B/c the only real argument against a merge is that too subjects are unique and distinct from each other, and further, are individually notable.

Regardless, I've enjoyed this chat Jon. Kudos to you on being a good conversationalist. That said, I don't think we're gonna see eye-to-eye here. NickCT (talk) 19:53, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT: Good, Nick. I in turn was not all that serious about the dummies thing, except in principle. Like you, I agree that we are likely to remain poles apart (lower case intentional!) but I must protest at your: "...only real argument against a merge..." being "...two subjects are unique and distinct from each other, and further, are individually notable...". "Individually notable", certainly, and the two topics in this case are sufficiently individual, notable, and as remote from each other in intent, for us validly to title one as "Scallop" and the other as "Pectinidae". For these reasons they furthermore are individual enough for a single article to be cumbersome if it must deal adequately with both. "Uniqueness" in this case is hardly well defined, let alone relevant; unique in what sense? That it deserves its own title? If that were a categorical criterion, then why do we ever need disambiguation? And "distinct"? Not so sir, but far otherwise, if we are to accept the definition of "distinction" as "perfect continence"! By way of example, I am sure that you would not argue for the merging of "leather" into the article on "Integument", even though the topics are far from distinct in content or concept! And even worse, consider merging "integument" into the article on "leather", even though the latter is the "most common name". Such overlaps we deal with by including suitable links rather than by merging articles. But I really do appreciate your courtesy and friendly tone; they make a nice contrast to many of these discussions; many thanks. Cheers, JonRichfield (talk) 09:31, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

And you both probably deserve barnstars for civility, a rare enough trait when it comes to discussions like this one. In the end, however, some kind of decision must be made, and that may yet prove difficult. I don't find the argument regarding "leather" and "integument" compelling because we are talking about taxonomy, not merely different words for the same thing (though we certainly ARE talking about different words for the same thing and though the comparison is very interesting! Thanks for that!). I think the final arrangement we come to here should reflect, as best it can, the pattern being used on other Wikipedia articles of similar scope and style, and after having surveyed these pretty extensively myself, I've come to the conclusion that we aught to have a single article, and that the single article aught, in the end, to be "scallop." All of the other bivalves at the same taxonomic level have articles by their common names with redirects from their scientific ones (unless they are rare or extinct) and the Manual of style policy stating that articles should exist under the animal's common name, if one exists, rather than under the corresponding scientific one, seems to be the clearest reason to merge everything back into "scallop." I've also been thinking this: "What do I think a person typing in 'scallop' expects to get?" And I think they expect to get an article that contains both the scientific information as well as the cultural, with the scientific first, and I think they expect to have to do a little bit of wading to get to the specific information they want, but I do NOT think they expect to see only PART of this information and then have to click on a link-- any link-- to find the rest of it in another article. I think there are much better candidates for such a split than this one on scallops/ pectinidea, given the degree to which the terms coincide. May God help those articles if someone eventually proposes such a split! I think that in an encyclopedia, there should be a single article on scallops, and not a separate additional one on pectinidae... Though I hope the editors of such an encyclopedia would have as thorough and interesting and civil a discussion about the matter as we have so far had here. KDS4444^Talk 23:38, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

@KDS4444 and JonRichfield: - re "not merely different words for the same thing " - Really? That's exactly what I thought we were talking about.

Thinking back to my fourth grade teacher's lesson on synonyms; I can say "A shell is a kind of integument" and "A shell is not a kind of leather"; hence I know those things are not synonyms. Can you do the same for "Pectindae" and "Scallop"? NickCT (talk) 00:34, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

@KDS4444: for kind remarks, much thanks. I think that our ease of interaction is simply that we both (all three) take the subject matter seriously, but not subject to resolution by shouting each other down. Nor would either of us (I think!) feel good about shouting anyone down.

Now, you say i.a. they expect to get an article that contains both the scientific information as well as the cultural, with the scientific first... but this I think is unrealistic. I could imagine a biologist hitting a Scallop article when he had entered Pectinidae muttering something naughty and then settling down to dig out the bits he wanted (after all, digging into literature is part of his training), but the layman wanting to know about scallops would be likely to take one look, and go away, shaking his head. In spite of your opinion to the contrary, I reckon the layman is likely to be grossly dissatisfied at having to do ... wading to get to the specific information they want...; he is likely to go away without even wading through the TOC (it is pretty long just for Pectinidae, please note, and by the time you have added Scallop, it won't fit onto one page. That is heavy wading for Joe Average!) For precisely such reasons, it is better to send each to the article he wants, as smoothly as possible, with as little wading as possible. The layman will practically never look up Pectinidae, and if for some disastrous reason he did, and the first thing he finds is a hatnote saying Scallop, he will click on it and be happy, having at most glanced at the material and said "Huuhh?" The biologist OTOH might well have entered scallop, found the hatnote and clicked on it immediately. By his standards that wasn't much wading, and no imposition. And if he happened to want "scallop" (which a biologist well might from time to time) he would have no problem dealing with it at all. Just a click. Note that "hatnote", "click", etc are not four-letter words, whereas in an encyclopaedia "wade" is very four-letter indeed. JonRichfield (talk) 09:59, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT:, a shell may be regarded as integument in suitable contexts, certainly, but integuments are not necessarily shell and it would strain some points of terminology to regard all shell as integument in every relevant context. Leather may be regarded as integument (arguably as a proper subset of integument, though I am not sure that I would be happy about that). (Practically?) every class of object in nature (in the real world) has multiple classes of attributes, and there is considerable overlap of attributes. It does not follow firstly, that every pair of articles in which some, even most, of the attributes of the subject matter overlap, should be merged even when it is possible to do so in principle. For example, logically (really logically) leather could be merged into an article on integument, and so could shell. So could a number of other articles on the same basis. In fact, if they were to be separated it would be highly unsatisfactory to write them without some cross linking. But which would be the greater evil: A single, huge article, juxtaposing shell and leather among other topics, dealing with the nature of integument in all its connections, all its processed forms, all the economic, historical and industrial aspects and implications of all its forms, with a vanishingly small likelihood of any one reader reading or even being able to understand the whole lot, or would it not be better to have a sizeable set of internally coherent articles, variously clickably linked?

Now, I (really!) do understand your point that all scallop meat and scallop-related industry derives from or refers to the family Pectinidae, though I seem to have had some difficulty conveying the point that it does not follow that the typical scallop-eater knows or cares, nor that the typical taxonomist is likely to be wanting to look that up every time he looks up details about the Pectinidae. But if you check the article on scallop as it stands, you will find that it lacks any biological reference apart from tangential mention in dealing with the geography and economy of major sources. In its nature the Scallop article is closer by far to the Seafood article than to the Pectinidae article. Even Scallop aquaculture is closer, and that rightly has a separate article. Pectinidae OTOH, has practically nothing except about the biology. Of those three articles (four, counting Seafood) each stands on it's own merits because what justifies its existence is not the set of elements that it refers to, but the contexts in which it refers to them, and the reasons for which people would refer to them separately. Analogously, and for similar reasons, we have separate articles for Steak, Beef and Bovid. JonRichfield (talk) 09:59, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@JonRichfield: - I'm not sure how to make this clearer. "Scallop" and "Pectinidae" always refer to the same thing. "Leather" and "integument" do not always refer to the same thing. "Scallop" and "Pectinidae" are the same. "Leather" and "integument" are not the same.

All scallops are pectinidae. All pectinidae are scallops. While all leathers might be integuments, not all integuments are leathers.

I appreciate all the other points you're making, but you're missing the central point, which is that scallops and pectinidae are the same. NickCT (talk) 12:48, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT: No Nick. Correction. Far from being central, those points are not even relevant. I had not missed them, not when you made them earlier, and not during the discussion, so I apologise for leaving you under the impression that there was any need to make them any clearer. The central point is that we don't write scallops. We don't even write Pectinidae; we write articles. We do so for an encyclopaedia. From that point of view the article we write on a scallop on a plate or in a can is not the same as the article we write about a preserved (or FTM, fresh) specimen of a member of the Pectinidae in a dissecting dish, nor for that matter a live scallop in the littoral sand, nor in a breeding cage, and accordingly the requirement is not to say the same things about either, and most emphatically not in the same article unless what we say about the one happens to be immediately relevant to what we say about the other, which in this case it rarely would be. Articles about scallops are what we say about scallops, and if we are to serve Wikipedia and our readers and to live up to our duties as editors, then what we say about scallops in an article on scallops will not be the same as what we say about Pectinidae in an article about Pectinidae. And as for lumping the two together into the same article, it would be about as helpful as insisting on uniting an article on Vehicle manufacture with one about Driving because both involve Homo sapiens and both involve vehicles; a perfect match. We could do it of course, but no one would thank us. JonRichfield (talk) 15:36, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

If a restaurant menu lists a dish with scallops, I'd expect it to contain white discs of abductor muscle, and would be very suprised to get a dish with the entire animal, shell and all (on the other hand if mussels show up on a menu I'd expect shells to usually be included, and clams may or may not be in the shell depending on the dish). Context is important; in some contexts scallop is the same thing as Pectinidae (the entire animal in it's shell, living or not). However, I suspect that in most contexts where the term scallop appears, it means the abductor muscle of a pectinid as a food item. Direct incoming links to the scallop article are almost entirely from articles on culinary subjects; there are also a large number of incoming links transcluded from templates on fishery species (food again), and heraldry (and the scallop article discusses symbolism). I don't have a strong opinion on whether readers are better served by having one or two articles, but it's pretty common on Wikipedia for there to be separate articles on animals and the use of that animal as food. In English, beef and pork are distinct words for the meat, but even when there aren't distinct words, there are separate articles on chicken (food), turkey meat and shrimp that aren't focused on the animal itself.

There's a similar semantic distinction with plants and their edible parts, but it's less common for Wikipedia to have separate articles on these. Tea/Camellia sinensis is one case where these senses are split (and it works pretty well). Starfruit/Averrhoa carambola is another (which I think works less well). There's only one article for apples, but it's pretty clear that apple has two related meanings. An apple may be a small round thing (the fruit), or a tall woody leafy thing (the tree). Context disambiguates. If somebody says they planted an apple, I'd assume they put a young tree in their garden, not that they buried a fruit. If a menu lists apple pie, I expect it to contain pieces of fruit, not leaves and twigs.

In a biological context, scallop is the common name for pectinids (and they are the same thing). In a culinary context, scallop is the abductor muscle of a pectinid (perhaps a subtopic of the biological context, but not exactly the same thing). Plantdrew (talk) 16:46, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: - So you're arguing we should merge then make Scallop (food)? NickCT (talk) 17:56, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

No. I'm arguing against the notion that Pectinidae and scallop are the same. I wouldn't split apple into apple tree and apple (fruit). But there is a context dependent semantic distinction. While I lean towards not merging, I could see covering scallops as animals and scallops as food in the same article. However, if a single article would be overly long (and I kind of think it would be), Pectinidae/scallop is a logical way to split it into shorter articles. Non-transcluded incoming links to scallop are dominated by articles on food and symbolism, which is exactly what the article covers. Scallop (food would probably be unecessary disambiguation. The incoming links to Pectinidae and scallop already reflect the distinction between scallops as food and as animals. Plantdrew (talk) 19:08, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: - That's shenanigans. The primary meaning of "scallop" is the animal (as the primary meaning of "chicken" is the animal). If some kid asked you "What's a scallop?", you'd reply "It's a shellfish". You wouldn't reply "It's something you eat".

Scallop, the animal, is the same as Pectinidae; thus the primary topic for "scallop" and Pectinidae are synonymous. If you feel scallop the food and scallop the animal or too large individually to be put together, then you should follow disambig rules which would lead you to Scallop (food).

re "logical way to split it into shorter articles" - I'm not going to agree or disagree as to whether it's logical or not to split that way. What I am going to say is that naming policies and conventions are pretty clear in this case. We should follow the rules. NickCT (talk) 20:04, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT: Nick, fortunately the article is not about shenanigans, because what Plantdrew said is correct and to the point; not a shenanigan in sight, not even in its shell. To take your case in point, if I were in an aquarium and the child asked "What is a scallop?" I might well say "One of those little shelled animals there.", certainly not "Something in a chowder." On the other hand if the child asked the same question in a restaurant or a fish shop, my reply would be quite different. It certainly would not be along the lines of: "...marine bivalve mollusks in the superfamily Pectinoidea." More like: "...that chewy white stuff in the chowder..." Conversations are different in other families, no doubt.

You speak as if there were such a thing as a definitive "...primary topic for "scallop" and Pectinidae", but that is a delusion. There is no such thing. There isn't a "primary topic" for any non-trivial entity in the universe, and emphatically not for any topic in biology. Every context has its topic and whether two topics should be merged into a larger topic is not to be decided on the basis of whether they deal with the same item or same two items or same two trillion items. It has to do with the logical structures of the respective topics, which in turn might overlap deeply and widely, or tenuously to the point of mutual alienness. In this case it is the latter. Right?

Even a zoologist thinks differently about chowder as opposed to specimens or marine populations. Especially if he is hungry. In the case of our current two articles and their names, I would watch with great interest while you demonstrate, firstly, which subtopic in either article would fit better in the other article, or in fact would fit comfortably into the other article at all. They are different articles Nick, dealing with different entities and different relationships.

"But," you object, "they are not different entities, they are the same!" Oh really? Let's ask the child, that very one who asked "What is a scallop?" Can you imagine the expression if you proffered the chowder as an example in the aquarium? Or the live animal at supper? Different entities Nick, as Plantdrew pointed out, no matter what their DNA tells us! Like leather and steak and cows, right?

It isn't the animal that has the topic, primary or otherwise; it is the article that "has the primary topic", and if the articles have different primary topics they should be written as different articles. Suppose we were writing about "Homo sapiens" and nothing but. You could hardly get simpler than that could you? And by your reasoning that is a single topic, if I follow your argument, right? So "Fanny Hill" and "Parliamentary procedure" should go between the same covers?

Not in these shoes, I think!

You say that you are "not going to agree or disagree as to whether it's logical or not..." But Nick, if logic has nothing to do with it, then what is the point of discussion in any case? The point is what fits into which article, and that is something that depends on logic. You add: "What I am going to say is that naming policies and conventions are pretty clear in this case." I would love to agree, but the rules are not so clear that you have been able to show how the rules you have in mind should be applied. I would love to see the rule that says that everything pertaining to a given taxon must go into the same article!

And it is exactly when we have room for argument because a logical difficulty has arisen, that we have the rule that where necessary for the benefit of WP, we ignore all rules, and frankly when it comes down to explicitly justifying a particular interpretation of the rules by ignoring logic as it affects the articles and the users, I say that your interpretation was not the intention of the rules that we should follow.

I have said all this sort of thing in various formulations in the past page or several and don't mind going on to say it again in a few more pages for as long as anyone finds it entertaining, or at least until logic prevails, but I began to wonder whether it wouldn't be a good idea to go to the project page and ask for a few more voices instead of just random RFCs. So lets see whether any new voices chime in, shall we? JonRichfield (talk) 14:51, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

@JonRichfield: - re "You speak as if there were such a thing as a definitive "...primary topic for "scallop" and Pectinidae", but that is a delusion. There is no such thing. There isn't a "primary topic" for any non-trivial entity in the universe, " - I'm sorry Jon, I'm having trouble following your thought process in your wall of text. That said, your assertion that there is no primary topic for non-trivial entities would seem to run directly contrary to WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. I'm not really interested in having debates about philosophy or logic with you. I look to WP policy to figure out how articles should be arranged on WP. Call me crazy.......

Feel free to go find more voices. That's always a good thing. NickCT (talk) 20:48, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT:, what is so difficult about distinguishing between the article, that undoubtedly should have a primary topic (which is of course what WP:PRIMARYTOPIC refers to) and the entity (in this case the taxon) that fundamentally cannot have a definitive topic that anyone can assert to be "more primary" than other topics? Try talking to a representative chef about the monophyly of Pectinidae, and see how quickly that topic puts a glaze over his eyes. Try speaking to a malacologist busy in his laboratory, about the relative merits of scallops in chowder or bouillabaisse, and unless you catch him in a hungry moment, he will point out that gastronomy is not his topic. And yet you wish to cram both topics into one article? Where in the Scallop article is the biology or taxonomy even mentioned? And why should it be? Each article has a primary topic, and the two topics are radically different.

"Philosophy and logic"? They are what the WP policies that you cite are based on, in dealing with practical considerations. You have mentioned a few of them by now, but I challenge you to find one (Decidedly including WP:PRIMARYTOPIC) that says that every aspect of discussion of an object must go into the same article, or indeed, that the primary topic is an attribute of the object, rather than the article. Think about it while you read the article on Seafood! JonRichfield (talk) 09:32, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

@JonRichfield: - re "every aspect of discussion of an object must go into the same article" - When every aspect of an object can't fit in the same article we refer to WP:SPLIT and WP:DISAMBIG.

re "primary topic is an attribute of the object" - I don't understand this point. The primary topic is an attribute of the word. The primary topic of the word "pectinidae" is the animal. The primary topic of "scallop" is the animal. Their primary topics are the same, hence they are the same. NickCT (talk) 13:52, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

@KDS4444:You said, a while ago: "The pectinidae are all scallops, yet for years they have been separate articles with overlapping content." I don't know what they were like at the time you wrote, but I had a look at them as they stand, and it seems to me that Invertzoo must have split them very neatly. What overlap did you have in mind? The more I look at them, the more disruptive it seems to me to contemplate lumping them. JonRichfield (talk) 09:32, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Jon: Invertzoo did an excellent and thorough job of splitting them-- this is not how they looked before. If the articles were to remain split, the way they look now is certainly how they should continue to look (more or less). But I remain opposed to the idea of the split. Also: I've also been talking to a person named Thomas Waller who is a research scientist at the Smithsonian and who publishes journal articles on bivalves. His words: "It is true that the popular term “scallop” applies to bivalves that at present fall into three families (Pectinidae, Propeamussiidae, and Enboliidae). All three families reside in a superfamily name Pectinoidea. I see no reason why the popular term cannot apply to all three groups." Perhaps we should be considering not just a merge of Pectinidae and scallop, but of scallop and the order Pectinoidea. We would then continue to have an article on Pectinidae, but the article on Pectinoidea (which is little more than a stub article) would redirect to scallop. If we were to merge.

When I imagine myself going to an encyclopedia on a shelf in a library, and pulling down the book on the letter "S" to look up "Scallop", what I expect to get is an article that begins with a discussion of the animal from a scientific point of view because THAT is what a scallop IS. I then expect it to go on to discuss the scallop as a kind of food, as cultural symbol, etc. I do NOT expect to pull down that book, find the word "Scallop", and then have to pull down the letter "P" to find scientific or biological or behavioral information on "Pectinidae" or "Pectinoidea". As an encyclopedia, I think we need to have one article on scallops that begins with a scientific examination and proceeds to other uses. I think this is why the primary topic policy exists: so we can have the "basic, fundamental facts" all right where people expect to find them. I do not feel there is enough ambiguity in what is meant by the word "scallop" to warrant separate articles (unlike the word "conch", for example, which is used indiscriminately in English and therefore does not have a consistent single scientific article). --KDS4444^Talk 23:23, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Lastly, consider that even Mr. Waller uses the word "Scallop" in the titles of his scientific publications which are about evolution, biology, and genetics: "1991. WALLER, T.R. Evolutionary relationships among commercial scallops. pp. 1-73, 11 figs., 8 pls., 1 table. In S.E. SHUMWAY (editor), Scallops: biology, ecology and aquaculture. Elsevier, Amsterdam. " KDS4444^Talk 01:30, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

@KDS4444: - You mean the famous Dr. Waller. Celebrated master of all things bivalve? That's funny. I got a few buddies down at Smithsonian. Next time I'm there maybe I'll look him up. Let him know he's being discussed in some dark corner of the internet.

So Dr. Waller seemed to say that "All scallops are Pectinoidea". I wonder if he'd say "All Pectinoidea are scallops". That would decisively confirm that words are synonymous.

Lastly, I feel like a lot of the comments above are being made without consideration to policy. It doesn't really matter what we feel is the most logical naming convention. It doesn't even really matter what Dr. Waller feels is the most logical naming convention. Not that I want to sound like wikilawyer or anything, but what matters is WP:POLICY. WP does have rules to help us deal with this kind of thing. NickCT (talk) 20:13, 20 August 2014

(UTC)

I didn't realize Dr. Waller was a man of bivalve fame (though his list of publications on the matter is indeed long). As to your question, you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and ask him. If I lived anywhere near D.C. I would love to drop in on him and meet him in person... Alas, I am on the wrong coast. We shall see what he says. And Nick, you and I have consistently been on the same side with regard to policy here, and that hasn't changed. Perhaps once I hear back from Dr. Waller we can arrange for closure to this discussion. Scallops are all very interesting but I am ready to move on! KDS4444^Talk 01:51, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

@KDS4444 and NickCT: What Dr Waller calls scallops or Pectinidae, whether in speech or articles, has nothing to do with these two articles on these two topics (four if you count Scallop aquaculture and Seafood. I hardly dare mention "shellfish" or scallop theorem"!). The fact that he is correct in doing so, either as a matter of preference or logic, equally has nothing to do with these articles and I have no quarrel with his usage either way. KDS4444, let me try to put it in your own words, slightly doctored, and you tell me where I misrepresent your views: When I imagine myself going to an encyclopedia on a shelf in a library, and pulling down the book on the letter "S" to look up "Seafood", what I expect to get is an article that begins with a discussion of the animal from a culinary point of view because THAT is what a scallop IS, (absolutely any kind of scallop, right?)

Now, I am beginning to despair of conveying to you chaps the fact that the two topics do not belong together, or that the policy is dead against Nick's impressions, so it occurred to me to put it to the vote.

"Let's ask the users, I thought." (There has been a deafening silence from the project team.) How many of the users go to Scallop for utilitarian purposes, and how many curse and link off to the Pectinidae in frustration?

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So I looked at the stats. In the last 90 days (as far back as I could go, sorry!) there have been over 1310 hits per day for scallop, and less than 58 hits per day for Pectinidae.

If even half of the Scallop hits had clicked on the Pectinidae hatnote, the Pectinidae hits would have been about ten times higher! If we really do have a lot of zoologist users that type in "scallop" and give up their access attempt because they cannot manage to click on the hatnote, then I don't see why the day-to-day users should have to wade through the zoology before they find the secular stuff, just to accommodate notionally computerate scientists. If instead you append the scientific stuff to the kitchen and traditional material, (because after all, culinary material is what a scallop is, right? A scallop is a pectinid and a pectinid is a scallop, I am informed!) then it would be far more trouble to the real scientists to traipse to the end, even via the TOC, than just one click at the top. To use your idiom of a paper encyclopaedia, it is not as though we would be asking the forlorn zoologist to rupture himself wending his weary way returning his "S" volume to the bookshelf and repeating the exercise with "P", for goodness' sake; it is a single click at the top of the page!

Try asking yourself why the vote turned out that way, and what practical or moral right you have to buck it!

And don't take MY word for it, check the figures yourselves. JonRichfield (talk) 09:14, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

@JonRichfield: - I don't get your point. If some zoologist is looking for scientific information on "Pectinidae" and they get redirected to "Scallop", all they have to do is click for the "Taxonomy" section, then click on "Main Page : Taxonomy of Scallops" hatlink to get to the information they want.

Regardless, your hypothetical "what if?'s" don't really matter. Wikipedia has policies that clearly cover this issue. Let me say that again as you've seemingly ignored it several times now. Wikipidia has policies that clearly cover this issue. Those policies get applied to articles. Articles like Bos Taurus for example. Or Gallus gallus. Or Ursidae. They all redirect to the commonname page b/c that's what policy dictates they do. Again, let me repeat. They ALL redirect to the commonname page b/c that's what policy dictates they do.

Now I understand this might not make sense to you. I understand you may think it's a little more logical to do things differently here, but you'd really have to come up with an overwhelmingly compelling reason that Scallops are different from pretty much everything else. So far you haven't. NickCT (talk) 15:43, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

@NickCT: Nick, I don't know how to put this more kindly, but to keep insisting the likes of "policy dictates" this that and 'tother, reflects poorly on the source, when policy does nothing of the type, unless one cherry-picks the wording, which, if one were to do so, would amount to wikilawyering. Policy recommends certain practices in certain circumstances, but recommends opposite practices in other circumstances, as I think I said before. Among the classes of consideration that one is expected to take into account, some of the most important include the logic and structure of the articles and their value and convenience to the user. And yet, you say that I am trying to do things differently?

I need no compelling reason for claiming that "Scallops are different from pretty much everything else", partly because they are not. I have explained why already, and Plantdrew independently made very similar points, which you equally brusquely stonewalled. You repeat and repeat that scallops are scallops, forcing me wearily to point out time after time that I long had nurtured similar suspicions independently and that the operative point was altogether different. Brace yourself...:

Certainly scallops are the same taxon as scallops, but the article on scallop biology is not the same as the article on scallop utility (remember?) Nor is the article on scallop utility the same as the article on Scallop aquaculture (remember?) even though any scallop could be aquacultured, and every aquacultured scallop is a scallop. Right? No doubt you will be consistent enough to insist on merging that article as well? If you do not, it will display in a very poor light, your demand that we merge Pectinidae and Scallop.

Actually, that point is redundant anyway; you also need to come up with an overwhelmingly compelling reason that Scallops are different from other sea food, whereas by your line of reasoning, because scallops are (as I am sure you hasten to insist!) a proper subset of seafood. If you do not insist on all three merges instead of just one, then please explain why you are making special pleas for merging Pectinidae. You claim that if the entities dealt with by different articles are the same, then the articles should be the same too, right? Well Nick, all four articles deal with Scallops, three of them exclusively! Right? You can think of an exception perhaps?

I am completely nonplussed at your apparent inability to see that the two (four) articles are on different topics, or perhaps I should say (since you studiously have insisted on ignoring the extra two) your grounds for concentrating on Pectinidae for merging, whereas exactly the same arguments apply to all four.

Consider again. You say that Scallop and Pectinidae and Scallop aquaculture are the same because they deal with scallops. I say they are different because their prime topics are different, namely Pectinidae as a zoological topic, Scallops as a resource, and Scallops as livestock. If you are right, then it would make no difference who logged in, they would all be equally interested in any part of the single topic. Also, there would be overlap in the text.

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In practice, there is hardly any overlap at all (go ahead, humiliate me, prove me wrong!) and apart from hatnotes and the like, even the cross-linking between the articles is modest and deals with isolated points. And the users? Voting unrehearsed with their feet, we find well over 90% visiting just one article (over 95% if we omit the aquaculture), and doing so without even looking in on the other articles. You might see an essential identity between the topics, but the users (remember them?) disagree with you, and they disagree overwhelmingly.

And what are we offering them, the non-zoologists, non-aquaculturists, offering unasked at that? Those same 92% (I just checked) who have been going in to read Scallop, almost all without even looking in on the other two articles? I'll tell you what: we take their article with its single page TOC and its familiar, desired topics (the topics that they select unprompted and without obvious requirement to look further to supplement them) and start with a three-page TOC, then give them about sixteen pages of barely comprehensible gobbeldegook about the zoology and husbandry, and finally deign to let them at what they wanted in the first place? All five pages or so? This is a joke???

What's that? They could just click on the TOC to go straight where they wanted? Page three of the TOC? REALLY!

Do think about it this time Nick; if you do, I won't even bother you with the logically consistent demand to take the resulting monster and append it to Seafood! JonRichfield (talk) 11:39, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Sorry to butt in here, but I wanted to record my vote. I think the merge should take place, and I'm happy with either title. I'm convinced they are synonymous words, or sufficiently so that a split is misleading. We have plenty of precedents for putting food and cultural interests at the foot of a biological article, and that's what I'd do here. Macdonald-ross (talk) 15:17, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

@Macdonald-ross: There is of course no question of "butting in". This is not, and could not be, a private exchange. In the light of your statements I am however curious to know on what basis you have evaluated the points that:

• Split or no split, there is for practical purposes hardly any overlap in the content of the three topics in their respective articles
• There is no suggestion that the use of synonymous titles, chosen for convenience, implies either a split or a union of topic
• Even if there were a split, given that the three main topics (I may have missed some, but feel welcome to find more) are respectively the biology and taxonomy of the family, their husbandry, and their human utility and associations, what would be undesirable or misleading about a split? Are you suggesting that there is an essential unity between the consumption of scallops, their culture, and their taxonomy, and that the nature of that unity demands that they be treated in the same physical article instead of their only physical connection being their mutual (and highly convenient) hatnote links?
• Note that only one of the topics even deals with the scallops as a topic in themselves; the other two deal with them mainly as objects of production or consumption, altogether different topics, fully justifying splits in every sense.
• There never was any controversy about precedents for putting food and cultural interests at the foot of a biological article as such, nor about their appearing in two or more separate articles, as also occurs commonly, particularly when a combined article would be unwieldy or otherwise unrewarding. The disagreement is about whether it is desirable in this case, and why, or why not.
• There is strong evidence for users overwhelmingly (certainly over 90%) visiting the Scallop article without the slightest interest in visiting either of the other articles, even though they are visibly linked, and only a click away. This supports the suggestion that a split in topic might well be valid, not merely convenient to the editor or user.
• No one has suggested why there should be any reason to compel these currently apparently satisfied users to wade through something like five times as much material as they wanted, just to satisfy our perceptions that the topics are the same.
• I don't know the effect on tablets, smartphones etc, but on my desktop and laptop the two orphan technical articles (one receiving less than 5% of all the hits and the other less than 4%) are something like eight pages each, and with nearly a page of TOC each. In contrast, the utility article is only about 5 pages, not counting references. Combining the whole lot would give us over 20 pages for one article, with a TOC of nearly three full pages. (And on a tablet? I hesitate to ask!) There are in fact larger articles in WP, (I am sure!) but most of them deal (or certainly should) with monolithic, coherent topics that should be of interest to almost any user. Here we have the exact opposite: three practically independent topics, with no indication that there is any wide overlap in user interest, and clear evidence that no more than a small minority of the bulk of readers do, or should, make any use of the two large articles. (Actually, I reckon that Scallop could well be split as well, but it is only modest in size and the part probably most widely consulted is at its beginning, so it is hardly worth bothering about that.)
• If we were to attempt to accommodate the 90+% of users by putting the consumption-oriented topic first, incommoding the taxonomists, livestock managers, and biologists by relegating them to the end of the article, Joe Public still wouldn't be best pleased to have to deal with three pages of TOC, rather than a TOC that fits on the same page as the lede, don't you think? And what sort of article structure would that be, do you think?
• And all that to achieve what? What would it save in clicks, searches, redirections and disambiguations? What impression would it give to any outsider consulting it and finding himself in not just a wall of text, but a wall of incoherent TOC? If splitting were to cause some deep intellectual dislocation, I could sympathise, but no one has yet explained that. Yes, you mentioned the possibility of a misleading split, ignoring the fact that there are cross-links that are no more inconvenient to use than entries in the TOC, and a good deal more convenient than clicking on the right entry in a three-page TOC. But not much of a split, that isn't!

There is more where that came from, but I do hope you will excuse me for the moment. JonRichfield (talk) 19:14, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

• Weak separate based on size considerations. Keep reading for details, but I think this article should be renamed "scallop", and include a short section each on its use as food and as a symbol. The current scallop article should be split into 2 articles, one for food ("scallop (food)", "scallop (cuisine)", or some such) and one for the use of the shell image ("scallop (symbolism)", "scallop shell motif", or some such). I can help with the editing, whatever is decided.
  • Running the numbers I get pectinidae at 43.7kB [1] and scallop at 17kB [2]. Combining the 2 would yield an article of ~60kB, a size for which the article size guideline says the article "probably should be divided".
  • In the current scallop article, the "Symbolism of the shell" section looks like it would make a nice standalone article. The "as food" and "seafood industry" sections probably need a little more work, but together have the potential for a nice article. Keeping the food and symbolism topics together in an article without the parent article (currently "pectinidae") doesn't make sense to me.
  • Skimming the current "pectinidae" article gives me the impression that it is a fairly thorough and well written biology article. It is the primary topic from which the food and symbolism derive, so should be at it's common name "scallop".
  • My second choice would be for merging the two articles. The resulting article would be pretty good (small g) but would be a bit long.

--Wikimedes (talk) 21:12, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

@Wikimedes: Your points are generally reasonable, but I take issue with the idea that the idea that the taxon is the "primary topic from which the food and symbolism derive, so should be at it's common name "scallop"". The overwhelming user requirement has been demonstrated unambiguously to be for an article called "Scallop" and the overwhelming interest is in their utilisation, not in their biology. To force users to make their entry through the technical article would be a major disservice to them and to the encyclopaedia. For zoologists to enter at "Pectinidae" would be not in the slightest inconvenient, even if they did so via the disambiguation in the Scallop article. Also, why did you omit the Scallop (aquaculture) article from your calculations; it is far more closely related to the Scallop article than the Pectinidae article is, right? JonRichfield (talk) 19:36, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Taking your points in turn:

• The food and the shell image do derive from the organism, though I suppose that this doesn't automatically make the organism the primary topic. Citation needed for your claim that users are primarily interested in scallops' utilization. Also, not only zoologists are interested in the organism - I imagine anyone who has seen a scallop shell on the beach or eaten a scallop would be. I would expect most of those have never run across the word "pectinidae", though redirects make it easy to find the article at either title.
• Thanks for bringing up Scallop aquaculture - somehow I missed it. It looks like there's already a good place to move the food content if the decision is to split the current scallop article.--Wikimedes (talk) 03:30, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

@Wikimedes: Concerning citation required, quite right of course. I had assumed that you had waded through the foregoing walls of text; small blame if you hadn't. I obtained the figure by OR (which, mercifully, is permissible on talk pages!) personally checking the hit rates on each article. Rather than repeat the exercise or demand that you should, I have inserted two @Flag lines in the foregoing discussion, so that if you hit the search button for the string @Flag or even @F, it will take you to the two places where I had referred to the figures. In case you doubt my accuracy, feel welcome to check the figures by obtaining new values yourself; my figures are a week or two out of date by now, but I doubt that they have changed substantially in the interim! :)

You do realise, I hope, that I never for one moment thought that only 'ologists of any stripe would (or should) use any article, technical or not. My point was that the hit rates for these articles demonstrated that in practice the vast majority of users went straight to Scallop and did not proceed to Pectinidae. (Disappointingly few who had seen a scallop shell on the beach or eaten a scallop seem to share your (and my) spontaneous interest in such things.) However, those that did proceed (there must have been some after all) would require just one click to get there and one click to get back if they wished. They wouldn't even need to go via the TOC.

Most people miss the aquaculture article, I only found it because I happened to conduct an actual search for other reasons. I think it is sufficiently notable and content-rich to justify its own article, and IMO it is sufficiently separate in its topic matter to deserve a separate article both in the interests of convenience and coherence. Frankly I think that the current split is pretty well OK. There are two technical articles, each large enough and independent enough to justify its own existence, and each with a very reasonable hit rate, plus one everyday non-technical one that has a very good hit rate (well over 1000 per day; I don't know what average WP hit rates are, but that sounds like plenty to me). @Invertzoo: is pondering the desirability of splitting it, and I would not argue with his justification, but then, it is a smaller article, only five pages or so, so I am not terribly sure that a further split is what the users would like. I discuss that below. JonRichfield (talk) 06:53, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for flagging the hit analysis. (I had skimmed for links, although I hadn't read every word, so I missed it.) I see now where your reasoning comes from, and there is indeed a good case for leaving this article at pectinidae.

In terms of splitting the current scallop article, it still makes sense to me to have a separate article covering food, the seafood industry, and aquaculture.--Wikimedes (talk) 07:39, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

In this mass of material, missing a point or two is hardly surprising! :) As long as there are adequate links and the various articles are easy to find in context, coherent and not too unwieldy, I have no problem with the article you propose. JonRichfield (talk) 14:53, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

• Separate. I've found it really hard to make up my mind what is the most appropriate thing to do here, and so I have hesitated to weigh in. At first I was in favor of merging, but currently I am leaning somewhat towards dividing the current "scallop" article into two articles Scallop (seafood) and Scallop (symbolism and design) or something like that. I guess we also need an extensive disambiguation page for Scallop, which would also list Scalloping, and Escalope. I am currently in favor of leaving Pectinidae with that title as the scientific article, and having the disambiguation page be what leads people either into the scientific article or one of the "human relevance" articles. There is plenty of scope for expansion in all of the proposed articles and a lot of good RS out there to use for expansion if anyone is willing to work on these topics. I am no big fan of taking readers straight to a disambiguation page, but maybe that would be the best course here? Invertzoo (talk) 13:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

@Invertzoo: I received your heads-up on winkles and I will reply in detail elsewhere, but you have raised such an important principle that I don't want to rush this and first I would like to research another article where I got into a discussion on similar matters. I suggest that before we get too involved, we do a bit of thinking about the principle. I don't know how soon I'll come back to you, but I promise to do so this week. I have more to say about disambiguation anon, but in spite of my vote against merging the scallop articles, it is true that scallops are a far more compactly defined topic than ever winkle could be, so I am not yet sure that they need any more disambiguation than is already provided by their hatnotes and mutual links. I'll be back soon. JonRichfield (talk) 06:53, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Wow, just saw the request to come take a look at this, but it's going to take me a while to catch up on everything that's been said. I have no real stake here just because I did the original split so if a merge makes more sense, I'll be happy to support it. I do want to read what's been written first though. Also, my opinion doesn't carry any more weight than anybody else's, though if more detail about the reasons for the original split would be helpful I'd be happy to comply.

I guess my initial reactions now (not having read 95% of the discussion yet) are that a goal should be to keep things logical and helpful to users, thus anything that doesn't address User:KDS4444's concerns at the top wouldn't be acceptable. Having said that, the interwikis are important, and I can go into more detail later about why they are. Mainly, they should be consistent across languages: you don't want English "dog" pointing to Spanish "perro" and Spanish "perro" pointing to English "cat"--that much should be obvious. The problems here were more subtle than that, but that's the most basic idea. Also, English wikipedia doesn't exist in a vacuum, and isn't consulted solely by English native speakers. Last, and perhaps most important of all, is that this merge/split issue seems like it might be only a tiny subset of a more general problem involving plant and animal articles. Clearly a lot of words have been been expended above about whether to split or merge this one article, and I'd like to find a solution that would both work here as well as avoid having to play out this same conversation over and over again for other articles about plants or animals that by definition would also all have a genus + species taxonomic name, irrespective of whether there's a WP article by taxonomic name or not. Perhaps that means putting this merge request on hold temporarily and bumping this discussion up to some higher level, so we could decide more generally what to do about this, i.e., whether we should ever have two articles, one by common name and one by taxonomic name, or not, and then coming back and applying that more general guideline here. Or perhaps not, I have no experience with such things; maybe someone who does can weigh in.

In the meantime, I'll go back and read through the discussion, and contribute whatever I can. And thanks for the invite to join in.
Mathglot (talk) 00:55, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

File:Scallop Diagram2.svg to appear as POTD

Hello! This is a note to let the editors of this article know that File:Scallop Diagram2.svg will be appearing as picture of the day on November 13, 2014. You can view and edit the POTD blurb at Template:POTD/2014-11-13. If this article needs any attention or maintenance, it would be preferable if that could be done before its appearance on the Main Page. Thanks! — Crisco 1492 (talk) 04:32, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Picture of the day

Anatomical diagram of a giant scallop, a species in the family Pectinidae. Colors are close to those in an actual animal, though shown with greater than natural contrast for emphasis. Not shown are the left gill, the veins on the left side of the body, and the left shell or "valve". The hinge line corresponds to the animal's dorsal side, though when living it usually rests "sideways", on its right. The giant scallop is equilateral and very nearly equivalved (having left and right valves close to the same size and shape), though this is not true of all, or even most, members of its family.

The scallop's nervous system is centered around the visceral ganglia, which constitute a kind of molluscan "brain". The head-to-tail longitudinal axis reaches from the anterior ear to the middle of the adductor muscle, making only a very small portion of the animal morphologically the "front" and the rest corresponding to its "back". The final loop of the intestine goes directly through the ventricle of the heart before it reaches its u-shaped terminus.Diagram: K.D. Schroeder