Talk:Swedish Blue

What a mess!

You do have two!!!! Standards of Perfection as references in that article and you are considering it to not be a breed?!??? --PigeonIP (talk) 09:12, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

I may know, where the confusion comes from:

1. within PCGB and APA only the blue variety of the Swedish duck is recognised, as well as in the Netherlands. The reason why it is called "Swedish Blue". In fact there are four colours, all recognised in Scandinavia: blå vidbrystet (= blue), gul (=yellow), perlegrå hvidbrystet (=grey), sort hvidbrystet (=black) [1] Yellow[2] is the only one, that is not described in that article, but is recognised in Germany, where the blue one is not.
2. there is/was in fact a "Swedish blue duck"-landrace, that shall not be identical with the breed.[3] So it may be possible, that this article refers to two different domestic ducks.

I will write an e-mail to get this right, but will soon be travelling for some days. And holidays are around... So it may take some time. --PigeonIP (talk) 11:46, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

It definitely is a mess. It's blatantly falsifying what the APA source says, by claiming it says that the Swedish Blue is also known as the Swedish. What it actually says is that there's a breed called the Swedish duck, on which we have no article, and that the APA recognizes a blue formal variety. The idea that there are other varieties (that the APA doesn't care about) was already hinted at be redlinks I've seen, e.g. at the article Landrace, to a supposed Swedish yellow duck or Swedish Yellow duck, before you mentioned the other non-blue color variants here. I agree that we're probably talking about some landraces and some formal breeds that may be derived from them, and that these should be in separate articles or at least separate sections in the same article with a lead that distinguishes them. Some editors heads seem to implode upon contact with idea for some reason (my efforts to maintain Van cat, a landrace, and Turkish Van, a formal breed (and a British one at that) separate are never-ending because people insist, no matter how clear the hatnotes and explanation are, in conflating them). At any rate, at least some poultry editors have known this is a mess for some time, but some among them would rather take me to WP:ANI for daring to suggest at WP:RM that one of "their" articles (this one) should be renamed, instead of doing the real, non-psychodrama work of actually fixing what's wrong with this article. Also, neither page cited is a "Standard of Perfection" at all, they're simple short lists of "breeds and varieties", and it's actually quite unclear whether the PCGB or APA recognize any distinction at all between breeds and landraces in such lists. PS, @PigeonIP: Please avoid histrionics like "!!!" and "?!???". This is not Facebook or your blog, and such behavior is incivil, and comes of as acting in loco parentis as if screaming at a disobedient child.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:18, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

You already did a lot of mischief by moving poultry and pigeon articles and you did know, that there is a project. I also told you to ask the people there first, before you move a breed article to get the best name. (remember chicken vs. fowl?) --PigeonIP (talk) 20:57, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Maybe these pages, will help you sort it out:

• http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/Ducks/Swedes/BRKSwedes.html
• http://www.backyardchickens.com/products/blue-swedish

--PigeonIP (talk) 20:57, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

How is that constructive? How does that help resolve the "what a mess!" issue before us? What if I said you "did a lot of mischief" by trying to change this article to hide any reference to landraces, only to find that the real sources tripped you up? Not too charitable a characterization, is it? But at least it pertains to this actual article. Second, wikiprojects do not WP:OWN articles, and have no magical right to control their content or names. I'm not bound by any haughty orders from you to get your permission for anything. The fact that the poultry articles were an inconsistent morass of confused, seemingly totally random attempts at article naming, many of which clearly violate WP:AT policy, I did the project (I mean Wikipedia, not "your" wikiproject in particular) a favor by initiating cleanup efforts, even if not every name I suggested will be the final one, and even if using WP:RM process would have been a better approach (which, yes, it would have). Finally, what have old moves, about natural vs. parenthetical disambiguation, etc., to do with what this article's content should actually consist of, based on what sources? That question determines what this article's scope and thus name will be. If you have an issue with my editing in general, take it up on my talk page, don't add more off-topic material about unrelated moves to the Swedish blue duck article's talk page. An article's talk page is for improvement of that article.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:54, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

All that gave you the right to neglect well introduced alternate breed names and to create your own? like Sebright chicken or Cornish chicken, when there is an alternative Indian Game?

Get your facts right and do invest some time to engage yourself with the subject of the article at hand.

By the way, if fanciers talk about a "landrace" they do talk about a breed that was derived from an original landrace, way back... That was, what was written in that article. As long as this sentenc causes you so much confusion, it is better to not have it written down there. --PigeonIP (talk) 09:57, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

I "forgot" to ever bother checking back here until now (read: I got tired of the three-editor Stonewall of Doom, and stayed away from all these articles, despite the large amount of sourcing and other improvement I was making in them), so I'm addressing this very belatedly. Let's get through this quickly and stepwise (to the extent I can parse what you're trying to say; I realize you're not a native speaker, but your last post is very hard to understand with any certainty).

Really, no one will care about this stuff but you and me:

I think you're trying to suggest that "Sebright chicken" is a "made up name", but it is not. It's the breed name "Sebright", followed by the natural disambiguation "chicken". This is the same pattern as we use in all breed articles that need disambiguation. I've been over this with you literally dozens of times already, and if you still can't understand WP:AT policy, that would seem to be a WP:CIR matter. If it were "Sebright Chicken" (notice the capital C) and the RS all said the breed name was just "Sebright", then it would be a made-up name. Literally the only person involved in these pages who still doesn't understand this is you. Please do not resume this WP:IDHT pattern. I am getting the facts right. As demonstrated already, it's you who deleted factual information, then noticed there's a reliable source for it, then failed to restore the information you nuked. Makes one wonder where else sourced information is being suppressed for personal reasons. In the last bit, you're just misunderstanding English and the sources written in them, sorry. When a source provides a breed standard for a formal breed named the "Foo Landrace", you're partially correct, some of the time. Odds are that this breed was developed from an actual landrace named (at least some of the time) "Foo" or from an area named "Foo". But this is not universally true at all. Even when it is, it actually tells us absolutely nothing about whether the free-breeding, locally adapted landrace still exists, and in many cases they do. (Some of them that were nearly extinct and were even being bred out of existence or slaughtered in favor of standardized breeds are now being actively preserved for biodiversity and conservation reasons, especially as more and more genetic faults in over-bred livestock are discovered all the time now that we have the tools for it. You can find boatloads of academic journal material about this.) Moving on: When a source refers to the "Foo landrace" it does not mean a breed named "Foo Landrace", it means a landrace named "Foo". In cases where there's a "Foo landrace" (an actual landrace) and a standardized breed named "Foo Landrace" (or substantially similar, e.g. "Fooish Landrace"), there's a fair chance the latter is derived at least in part from the former, but this is not always the case, either. You cannot make assumptions about this stuff because you're think you're a "breeds person", you actually have to do the research. (Preferably without pretending you're doing it, while lecturing others to do it, which they actually already did, but which you deleted from the article despite knowing it's reliably sourced! WTF!)

Way more importantly than any of that stuff, I see that the article has actually gotten worse in the interim, and is now suppressing all information that there is or ever was a landrace. It's just blatant falsification of what the sources are telling us. Given the history at so many of these pages I'm not even faintly surprised. Will I personally fix it? Probably not. I have better things to do with my time here that push for proper, sourced facts against a clique who will not yield to RS, at hundreds of obscure breed articles many of which would not survive AfD anyway (because all the sourcing in them is tertiary, or just "it exists" passing mentions, without any in-depth secondary source coverage). I trust that, perhaps years from now, new editors will break the stranglehold a tiny gaggle of users have on this whole swath of articles. It's not my personal duty to deal with it.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:37, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Scope

• Let's get this discussed properly. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 14:34, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Discussion transferred from User talk:Anthony Appleyard

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Sorry, I have not seen the request by SMcCandish befor,

but as you can see in Swedish Blue duck#References it IS a breed:

• PCGB: Blue Swedish [4]
• APA: Swedish, Blue p.19

--PigeonIP (talk) 09:03, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

APA: No: It says that the Swedish duck, on which we have no article, is a breed, and that the blue variety is just a color variety of it (an idea supported by redlinks I've seen elsewhere to a supposed Swedish Yellow duck - see "what links here" at that redlink, if you care - and perhaps others). The last sentence in the lead falsifies what this source actually says. PCGB: Maybe; I'd bet good money that they do not actually bother to distinguish between breeds and landraces; few poultry associations seem to bother, but it matters encyclopedically. Regardless, the changes to the article open the question enough that, yes, I agree that the move request is now no longer uncontroversial, but this became true only after PigeonIP and Justlettersandnumbers substantively changed the article, to erase any suggestion that the variety is a landrace rather than a breed. As the article stood at the time, the move suggestion was perfectly appropriate under MOS:LIFE, since it said clearly in the lead that it was a landrace. I didn't put that there; I only edited the article to be consistent on this point. As it stands now, the article may still be wrong, as the Swedish [B|b]lue may simply be a color variant, like a lilac-point Siamese cat, in which case we don't need a separate article on it, just like we don't have lilac Siamese cat or lilac-point Siamese cat or Siamese lilac-point), but we should have a broader Swedish duck article. Regardless, the pile of WP:DRAMA that Justlettersandnumbers launched at ANI over this was pointless and unjustifiable.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  13:54, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Note also for the record that after PigeonIP removed the information from the article about the duck being a landrace, the same editor posted to its talk page a source saying it's a landrace.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:22, 4 August 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.

• Oppose: This is not a species, so the rules there are not applicable here. Further, the line between a "breed" and a "landrace" is ill-defined in animal breeding—and neither is a species. I would suggest that the FAO would be a reliable source on this. Montanabw^(talk) 21:50, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
• Comment There's not any actual move proposal. What is actually under discussion is what this article's content and thus its title should be. I see Anthony Appleyard thought I was still proposing a move, but that's not correct; I've disabled the RM tag. The sourcing has moved way beyond a move question, and had before he put that tag here. As the heading indicates, this was a discussion transferred from that admin's talk page (in which it was also already made clear that there was no move proposal); I've hatted the old user-talk discussion so people stop trying to continue it. See the "New discussion" section below. Anyway, if you think MOS:LIFE only applies to species, you're mistaken.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:04, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

New discussion

1. The (british) Swedish Blue is a breed. The breed Swedish Blue is derived from a landrace, maybe the Swedish blue.
2. The (british) Swedish Blue is the same as the (american) Swedish, that comes in only one colour: blue.
3. The (british) Swedish Blue and the (american) blue Swedish are identical.
4. FAO, APA and PCGB are refering to the "Swedish Blue" as breed.

   (FAO says: Description of origin: collected and standardized in 1920's --> breed)

The source saying the swedish blue duck is a landrace, also says, that it was an old landrace, collected in the 19th century, tainted with ducks of unknown origin and (European?) Pekin ducks and that there a is breed: the Swedish Blue (also mentioned: the Pomeranian). VIEH I may add: VIEH may not be the best source, ever, but good enough to look for more informations about a "real" landrace. --PigeonIP (talk) 20:37, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Great start. How do the other color variants fit in? PS: Your numbered points 2 and 3 above appear to be equivalent; were they meant to convey something different from each other?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:56, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

• respoding to MOS:LIFE: that guideline refers to taxa. Breeds are no taxa.
• responding to beeing a landrace: most "old" breeds are derifed from a landrace and still have their name. (like the Pomeranian goose and duck, ...)

So please be carefull with "is a landrace, not a breed", while reading not more than just that one word. --PigeonIP (talk) 21:50, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

MOS:LIFE refers to taxa and to any general type or classification, including landraces. Including, actually, everything but formal breeds (I'm surprised it doesn't include them explicitly by now, but it's not any kind of goal I've had myself).

I would agree, if this is also your idea, that in cases where sources refer to an old landrace and a modern breed developed from it, that they be treated in the same article, with care, where this is reasonable. It is not actually always reasonable. In cases where one landrace gave rise to multiple breeds (or multiple landraces produced one breed) the landrace and the breeds are likely to be independently notable, and could be awkward to cover in a merged article, unless the landrace is nearly forgotten. (By way of analogy, the snooker sport article mentions it derivation from some old pool games like life pool and black pool, but we don't have articles on them and may never, because they're no longer played by anyone and have no historical significance other than having been fused into snooker.) In cases where the relationship between the landrace and the breed(s) is unclear or disputed, they probably also need to be treated separately (this is the case with Van cat and Turkish Van). Technically, it wouldn't necessarily have to be in separate articles; separate sections with clear sourcing would suffice, and should do fine for the Swedish ducks at issue. In cases where the landrace is very clearly independently notable, all other considerations aside, it should have its own article (that's the case with the extinct St. John's water dog, the forerunner of the retrievers and several other formal dog breeds). Where they are treated in one article, it probably makes most sense to write it essentially as a breed article (and title it as such), addressing the landrace in a "History" section or the like. An exception might be addressing a failed, extinct breed (there are many) that had been developed from a landrace.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:56, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

And I have yet to see anything produced on-wiki that approaches an official definition of where to draw the line between a landrace and a breed anyway. Montanabw^(talk) 22:09, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

This really isn't the best place for such a discussion, for which see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Organisms#Distinguishing formal breeds from landraces. In short: The Breed article is quite clear: A breed is a specific group of domestic animals or plants having homogeneous appearance (phenotype), homogeneous behavior, and/or other characteristics that distinguish it from other organisms of the same species and that were arrived at through selective breeding.[5] The Landrace article is also clear on what the difference is: A breed has selective breeding for specific traits, with pedigrees tracked by some organization, while a landrace does not, and has any more-or-less distinctive characteristics mostly or entirely because of a limited geographical gene pool with limited if any selective breeding. All breed registries, across all species, understand this distinction. There are long and involved processes to go through to establish a breed of any kind of animal, and they are either a) controlled, pedigreed breeding to fix, further develop and breed-true some traits found in a landrace population, or b) controlled, pedigreed breeding to develop, fix and breed-true some trait(s) desired for aesthetic or practical reasons using specimens from diverse populations (modern genetic tampering with highly-controlled varieties like lab rats also falls under the latter). Labeling landraces "breeds" is a WP:NOR problem. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:56, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

PCGB, APA, EE and FAO do have a WP:NOR-problem? That is nonsense, we are done here. --PigeonIP (talk) 09:37, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

That comments makes absolutely no sense, and isn't responsive to anything anyone said in that discussion. This is fairly par for the course with PigeonIP in these discussions, and it seems to be an English-skills matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:47, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

I hate to "necropost", but a grand total of jack-squat has been done to resolve the facts-and-sourcing problems highlighted on this talk page since I walked away from it almost 3 years ago.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:47, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Which facts appear to you unsourced, SMcCandlish? – apart, of course, from the standard Mendelian distribution of colours in blue breeds, for which I'll add a reference as soon as I sign this. It seems adequately sourced to me – indeed, better than many of our articles. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:05, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

I take that back – I went to add that one ref and found a number of problems, including a mini-copyvio. I think it's closer to OK now, but if you see other lacunae please point them out. I really can't make head or tail of the conversation above, which appears to be an exercise in miscomprehension between a user who is extremely knowledgeable but not a proficient speaker of English, and one who is extremely proficient in English but ... well, not so well-informed. I see some mention of the Swedish Yellow or Svensk Gul Anka; for the avoidance of doubt, that is a distinct and separate breed, listed and reported as such: it's rather unlikely we'll ever have an article on it, though – it doesn't have the international distribution of the Blue Swedish. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 22:40, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

See the older thread with PigeonIP; he removed sourced, relevant info about the landrace. As I said up there, I just chose to walk away from this and similar disputes, but it doesn't make the underlying issue go away. I think we have a PoV problem of over-focus, even obsessive focus, on standardized breeds in some of these articles [not poultry in particular]. Many of them are recent and are of less historical relevance/importance that the landrace population. And some editors do not even understand that there's a difference (or worse yet, have some sort of personal or political reason to try to hide difference). Some of the "breeds" are are also bogus, including as still-ongoing attempts to create a standardized breed out of a local landrace, or labeling a subpopulation as a "breed" by one country for political reasons when the exact same cattle or whatever also live in the surrounding three countries and are called something else, classified differently. It's not really an editing sphere I feel like getting back into in any depth at this point in time, because the drama haze is still in the air, but I haven't and won't just forget about it. More to the point, even if all of us on this page suddenly blinked out of existence, the cleanup should happen anyway by someone else so the encyclopedic content is better.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:20, 3 June 2018 (UTC)