Template talk:R to scientific name

Category change

I have changed this template so that it does not automatically tag articles into Category:Printworthy redirects. I have found that many redirects to a scientific name are not printworthy. One can have directs to a scientific name

• from a misspelled scientific or common name e.g Banskia -> Banksia
• from a mispunctuated scientific name e.g. Banksia integrifolia subsp integrifolia -> Banksia integrifolia subsp. integrifolia
• from a scientific name that misuses nomenclatural convention, such as the use of zoological trinomial convention for a plant name e.g. Banksia integrifolia integrifolia -> Banksia integrifolia subsp. integrifolia

Hesperian 00:30, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Note that as of 2014, this template is only for redirects to scientific names from vernacular or common names, so the examples above should no longer be tagged with this template. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:02, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

For things outside of biology?

I have started a discussion at the Village pump; please continue it there.— The Great Redirector 18:24, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

(I can't find that discussion from 5 years ago, so I continue here.) Why does the Template:R from English name redirect here? See e.g. One Foot Island which redircts to Tapuaetai. I know that {{R from alternative name}} exists, but {{R from English name}} seems more precise. And, as I understand it, {{R from alternative language}} is for "redirects from foreign-language terms." -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 10:02, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Note that this was fixed by the redirect "R from English name" being deleted. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:02, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Edits needed

This protected template needs to be updated to ensure that it is only used in mainspace. Please modify it in the following manner:

• from this...

 
----
This is a redirect from a common name to a scientific name.
<includeonly>
[[Category:Redirects to scientific names|{{PAGENAME}}]]
</includeonly><noinclude>
{{Documentation}}
</noinclude>
<!-- this is Template:R to scientific name -->

• to this...

 
----
This is a redirect from a common name to a scientific name.
<includeonly>
{{Main other|[[Category:Redirects to scientific names|{{PAGENAME}}]]}}
</includeonly><noinclude>
{{Documentation}}
</noinclude>
<!-- this is Template:R to scientific name -->

Thank you in advance! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 11:56, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Done --Redrose64 (talk) 22:32, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

I just don't do this often enough! 01:35, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Recent edits

To editor Peter coxhead: Hi, Peter – I have two concerns in regard to your recent modifications to this template:

1. There are almost 5,000 redirects in Category:Redirects to scientific names. I accept that most of them that are not organisms can probably be recategorized (I recently did one – see atom smasher); however who will go through that category to find and change all that are not organisms?
2. It seems that there should be a way to accomplish what you want and still keep the text of the rcat at the top of the page. I almost reverted your edit, but did not want to break anything. The text really should be there, don't you think? (if for no other reason than to remain consistent with all other rcats) – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 16:15, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

@Paine Ellsworth:

1. I am slowly working through Category:Redirects to scientific names, doing a bit each day. There aren't that many which aren't for organisms. However, note that I didn't in any way alter the purpose of the template, just tried to clarify the documentation. The very first version created by Stemonitis was for redirects from a common name as defined by the link. The problem is that the name of the redirect doesn't make it clear that it's only meant for organisms.
2. I agree that the text should be there. However, when the text is made to appear, so far I haven't found a way to stop the large message appearing saying that it should only be used in the main namespace. I'll continue to investigate. I've now made it appear, although I don't really like the way I've done it because it introduces redundancy between this template and {{R to scientific name/aux}}. There's no really nice way that I can think of to stop the large error message saying that it should only be used in main namespace.

Peter coxhead (talk) 11:34, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

To editor Peter coxhead: I've placed code in the sandbox that seems to work. Will that help? – Paine  17:04, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

To editor Peter coxhead: I just altered the sandbox code linked to above. I called the /aux template, and there is no error box. That box shouldn't appear on the main template page, either. The reason is found at this template, which is used by {{Redirect template/core}}. I just added the science rcats to that template in a way that will subdue the error box on their main pages. – Paine  18:36, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

To editor Paine Ellsworth: Yes, that seems to work better; I understood that it was ultimately caused by {{Redirect template/core}} but didn't want to tinker with it myself. I'll fix the "/aux" templates later if you haven't (not just this one but also {{R from scientific name}}, {{R from alternative scientific name}}). Peter coxhead (talk) 08:31, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

I have already noincluded the /aux templates on the three science templates, as you've probably found by now, and they appear to work just fine, don't you think? – Paine  19:11, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, you've definitely fixed the underlying problem that caused the error message to appear. Great! Peter coxhead (talk) 19:40, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Also Peter, what to you think about giving this a default "Printworthy" state? So far, every time I have either added this template or added the "plant" parameter, I've also added the printworthy rcat to the redirect. I remember a discussion long ago about it, and the printworthy state was removed (not necessarily from this specific rcat), but I can't find that discussion, nor do I remember why the default printworthy state was taken out. It seems that it should be there just as it is in {{R from scientific name}}. – Paine  20:00, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

"Printworthy" was removed a long while ago because too many (indeed the majority as far as I can see) of the redirects were from alternative typographies. Thus on the first page of Category:Redirects to scientific names there's "African Banded barb", "African banded Barb", "African banded barb" and "African Banded Barb". There are seven alternative forms of "Bristly Ox Tongue", 11 of "Creeping Soft-grass". It would be a really bad idea to make the default printworthy when the majority are not.

A separate but related issue is that only one of the typographic variants should be picked out as printworthy. In many cases the one marked in some way as "correct" (e.g. by being the only one included in a separate printworthy category of "English names of ..." or marked as "printworthy") is the one in title case, which used to be the de facto default for most groups of organisms before the MOS de-capitalizers won their battles. So in many cases the variant form of the common name picked out as the only one that should be printworthy isn't what is now the right one. There's also the contentious issue of which is the right one when hyphens, apostrophes, etc. are present. The standardized British name for Holcus mollis is "Creeping Soft-grass". I can accept that it can be changed to "Creeping soft-grass" here, but not that the hyphen is removed. Yet sources like USDA or the Flora of North America generally don't use hyphens in such English plant names. So who chooses which is correct typographic version to be the printworthy name? Where is the sourcing for the choice? Peter coxhead (talk) 08:31, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Excellent! I hadn't thought of the variants. You may not like my answer to your question of "Who chooses...". If the only headings are British, American and typos, this seems like a monumental task for one editor to perform. One would have to check the sources, both the correct British spellings and the American variants, and make both of those printworthy – any other variants could then be tagged with {{R typo}}, which defaults to the Unprintworthy redirects category. That would seem to be the best way to handle it. And one would have to be careful about saving the sources used, in case of future disagreements raised by other editors. Thank you for reminding me of the variants and the reason why the printworthiness of this template was altered long ago! – Paine  19:11, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, a monumental task indeed! Not one I intend to tackle. :-) (I have to say that I'm very doubtful of the value or practicality of printed versions of Wikipedia, so I'm not enthusiastic about "printworthy" in the first place.) Peter coxhead (talk) 19:40, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Well, your level of enthusiasm is understandable and shared by many editors, to include Jimbo himself. Since I spend a lot of time sorting redirects, my main concern is to do so as correctly as I can, and this includes choosing between "printworthy" and not. My understanding is that printworthiness was a factor in selecting the content of the CD versions, so I believe there is some merit in a correct sort. Thank you again for your reminder, and I hope you continue to have a lot of fun while you edit this encyclopedia phenomenon! Joys! – Paine  04:54, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Purpose of this template seems to contradict WP:COMMONNAME

I have seen this template used to redirect an article to the very UNcommon scientific name of an very common animal (the blue crayfish). Is this how it is supposed to be used? Because my understanding is that the titles of articles about animals should be their most commonly encountered name, not their often much more obscure scientific ones. I was involved in a rather long discussion on this for the article on scallops and we ended up titling the article "scallop" and not "Pectinidae". Thoughts? KDS4444^Talk 08:18, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

I've always thought that this rcat existed to "capture" the common-name redirects so that the articles with scientific names would be moved to them. That seems like a big job, though, since this rcat is transcluded to more than 37,000 pages. Also there are cases I've seen where there are more than one common name for a given binomial. Be prosperous! Paine  18:46, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

@KDS44: There seems perhaps to be some misunderstanding: the use of this template has nothing to do with the article's title. The template isn't used to redirect an article anywhere; it just identifies what kind of redirect it is. (On the substantive question, note that WP:AT is about balancing five criteria, of which commonness of use is only one. English names often fail precision.) Peter coxhead (talk) 19:59, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi Peter – I was referring to the fact that this rcat also sorts to a maintenance category, which I thought was used to "capture" the redirects in order to move the targets to the "common name" if that were plausible. Not being an expert, I could very well be wrong. Be prosperous! Paine  03:09, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

@Paine Ellsworth: sorry, I didn't make it clear that my first response was meant forKDS4444, not you. It's just a maintenance category, with no "hidden agenda" to either approve or deprecate article titles. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:26, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

And Peter, I understood this. I saw the template being used on a redirect page, not as a tool to implement the redirect but as a kind of "note" on why the redirect exists— in this case, as a redirect to a scientific name and away from a common one. We are on the same page with regard to this, but see below. KDS4444^Talk 10:58, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

This is a frequent misreading of WP:COMMONNAME. The scientific name is rarely more obscure, not often more obscure. Wikipedia has almost 318,000 articles on organisms, the vast majority are titled with scientific names and only known to professional biologists (or non-professionals who are perfectly comfortable with scientific names). Some are known to specialized segments of the population that aren't professional biologists (e.g. birders, and aquarium enthusiasts in the case of blue crayfish), but these specialist groups often include people who are comfortable with scientific names. A tiny handful of the total are well known by the vast majority of people. Many of the species that are familiar to non-biologist specialists and the general public are known by multiple common names (woodchuck/groundhog, orca/killer whale, cougar/moutain lion/puma). And a single common name may often refer to more than one species.

Blue crayfish is indeed more widely term used than Procambarus alleni (63k Google hits to 41k hits). However, it's not clear that all "blue crayfish" in the aquarium trade are that species. The top Google hit I get for "blue crayfish" (bluecrayfish.com) is actually selling "papershell crayfish" (apparently Orconectes immunis, with "calico crayfish" as another common name). What should we call the article on that species? Papershell crayfish gets 1090 Google hits, calico crayfish gets 1730 and Orconectes immunis gets 6210. Other pages that I find when searching for "blue crayfish" use that term for Cherax quadricarinatus, Procambarus clarkii and Procambarus monongahensis.

What is the "blue crayfish" that many people have in their aquaria? I have no idea, but if they're ordering it from the top page-ranked retailer, it's not the species currently at that title. The only common name given in the sources cited at P. alleni is "Florida crayfish". What is the justification for going with "blue crayfish" over "Florida crayfish"? If we are trying to use common names as title, we need to use sources that attempt to standardize them and should go with "Florida crayfish".

We aren't serving our readers well by knee-jerk titling organisms by common name. The scientific name is often more commonly used than a grab-bag of ambiguous common names. Many of our readers will be eating turkey meat tomorrow, which usually comes from domestic turkeys. Anybody looking for Turkey in the next 24 hours probably doesn't mean the country, but the almost certainly don't mean the genus Meleagris with a widespread North American species, an uncommon Central American species and an extinct species. But at least we're not scaring anybody with a horrible scientific name title like Meleagris. Plantdrew (talk) 04:09, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Bene factum, Plantdrew and gratias tibi! Be prosperous! Paine  04:29, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Plantdrew, I take some umbrage at the suggestion that I have misunderstood WP:COMMONNAME. I have read over the COMMONNAME article very carefully, and my interpretation/ summary of it above seems to me to still be reasonably congruent with it. What confuses me is that you state, "The scientific name is rarely more obscure" but then go on to state, "the vast majority [of biology articles] are titled with scientific names and only known to professional biologists." Isn't that the very meaning of obscure? As in abstruse? Recondite? And isn't the purpose of the naming policy to have a preference for article names that, ceteris paribus, are natural and familiar to readers, and NOT those known only to field professionals? I understand what I see as a much more common "knee jerk" to name biology articles by their scientific names as an effort by sometimes inexperienced editors (I don't mean you!) who think that "of course" Wikipedia will want me to use the scientific name for this animal, because it's an encyclopedia and it's scientific! That is not actually the case: we want articles with titles that are recognizable and natural as long as they are also reasonably specific (and neutral, and not vulgar, etc.). Scientific names are seldom recognizable (Physeter macrocephalus? Odocoileus virginianus? Cimex lectularius? You would better know them as the sperm whale, the white-tailed deer, and the bed bug, the articles for which are all appropriately located under their "common" (familiar) names). If the knee jerks, it is much more definitely towards the scientific (and nearly always unrecognizable) name for the title of the corresponding article— you provide the evidence of this tendency in your comment above, and it is a tendency which WP:COMMONNAME is meant to contravene because it is often unhelpful/ disorienting to the lay reader. While I certainly grant you that there are commonly-encountered names for animals which are problematic (and which are therefore better served by the use of a scientific name for purposes of precision), these seem to be much more rare than commonly-used and readily recognizable and plenty precise common names for many things, at least with regard to biology... But who is going to argue with a scientific name for a Wikipedia article when it is so much more "scientific" than a mere common name?

What I am saying is that it is easier and convenient to see the argument for using a scientific name for an animal on Wikipedia than it is to see the argument for the use of a common name which opposes it on grounds of unrecognizability/ unfamiliarity/ infrequency of general use. If I were the current world expert on scallops and happened to be the first person to write the Wikipedia article on them I wouldn't hesitate to give the article the scientific name because that seems like the "right" name, even though only me and four other guys will recognize it. But for Wikipedia's purposes, the "right" name is "scallop" (and "sperm whale", and "bed bug"). Which is why I was surprised to see a template for marking a redirect as being towards the kind of name which in many cases should be avoided unless no other name exists (and in that case, such a redirect template would never be necessary in the first place). I hope I have laid all that out clearly enough, and if you still think my interpretation is incorrect, please and for God's sake tell me so! KDS4444^Talk 10:58, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

@KDS4444: it's the aim of most WikiProjects concerned with organisms that ultimately there should be an article on every known species. This is doubtless unrealistic, but nevertheless a worthy aim. The overwhelming majority of organisms don't have vernacular names and won't ever have vernacular names, since they are only of interest to specialists, both professional and amateur. This is how I read what part of what Plantdrew wrote.

You wrote unless no other name existed. This definitely is to misinterpret WP:AT. The name does not merely have to "exist", it must be precise. As Plantdrew pointed out, many vernacular names are common, in the sense of being widely used, but they do not unambiguously identify a taxon.

Bed bug is an interesting example. It currently redirects to an article about the family Cimicidae, which I think is almost never the meaning intended in everyday English. But is a "bed bug" a member of the family Cimicidae, or a member of the genus Cimex or the species Cimex lectularius? If there were articles on the genus and species, which one day there will be, which should be called "Bed bug"? There are clear-cut cases where the vernacular name is precise, including across all variants of English, and no-one disputes its use. But very often editors think that a name that they know and use is precise, when actually it isn't. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:46, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 11 February 2016

Am requesting that this template be expanded so that {{R to scientific name|fungus}} (and {{R from common name|fungus}}) would place these in a separate category, similar to what is already done for plants. Thanks, Sasata (talk) 18:34, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

 Not done Sasata Please make your exact edit in the sandbox, verify, then reactivate the edit request. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:44, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a template editor, and don't want to mess up things I'm not familiar with. Was hoping that it could be done easily, like my similar request here. Sasata (talk) 19:09, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Ok tried this. Does this work? Sasata (talk) 19:11, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

 Done It looks correct, moved to main, please check some entries where it is actually used. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:33, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request 30 May 2017

See related discussion: Template talk:R from alternative scientific name § Template-protected edit request 30 May 2017

I've mocked up adding insects as a group in the sandbox, and checked testcases. There are a ton of insects in the main category, and a lot more that have likely never been tagged. I've created the category for the pages to be sorted in to already. M. A. Broussard (talk) 02:54, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

I can switch this template over to use Module:Science redirect, which supports plant, fish, fungus, spider, crustacean, reptile, and insect redirects. I have already switched {{R from alternative scientific name}} over, but I wanted to wait a week or so to see if any problems arise with that template before switching any others over to the module. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:45, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

 Done --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:36, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Do we mean to link to Nomenclature codes?

This template says: "This is a redirect from a vernacular ("common") name to the scientific name of an organism (or group of organisms)."

That second link, [[Biological nomenclature|scientific name]], redirects to Nomenclature codes. Shouldn't it go to Binomial nomenclature? Thanks,  SchreiberBike | ⌨  02:32, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Biological nomenclature has previously targeted binomial nomenclature and biological classification (now merged with taxonomy (biology) before being targeted to nomenclature codes. I see absolutely no reason to pipe the displayed text "scientific name" (which redirects to binomial nomenclature) to biological nomenclature. Whether the targets of the redirects scientific name/biological nomenclature are appropriate is another question (scientific names for ranks above/below species aren't binomial). Plantdrew (talk) 16:53, 7 July 2018 (UTC)