User talk:Leo Breman/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

July 2013

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• or "reed". The [[Arabic language|Arabic]] word قَلَم‎‎ (qálam, meaning "pen") and [[Sanskrit]] कलम (kaláma, meaning "reed used as a pen", and a sort of rice are thought to have been borrowed from

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Dear Mr. Bremen,

This situation with bird taxonomy, classification and nomenclature has reached the absurd. I hear "bollocks" and all sorts of other insulting and superior comments from LAYPERSONS IN MY AREA!

I am not voicing an opinion. Latin and English standards have been in place in ornithology for 200 years! WIKI overrides them quite incorrectly; amazing stuff to hear someone say I have no right to claim confusion because scientific conventions have been overriden and disrespected. Yes! I lose quite a bit of time wandering around because I have been misguided by bad language.

Bacteriologist cannot tell us how to use language in ornithology. Astronomists cannot tell us how to use language in ornithology. WIKI opinion has no say whatsoever in how we describe species! No right whatsoever to dictate OUR STANDARDS!

Almost all comments that have come in under the names "elmidae", "jts1882", and "Leo Bremmen" are uneducated. You may or may not be scientists but you are clearly not ornithologists. In fact, almost all references made by you three use EXACTLY the conventions I describe.

This is not opinion. This is existing convention sacred to our work since the time of Linneus. English names change quite precisely to corresponding changes in the Latin. If WIKI would just use English the same way it uses Latin there would be no problem. So, why not just do that? OTHER COMMON LANGUAGE DOES NOT OPERATE LIKE LATIN AND ENGLISH!

DK, a published ornithologist

P.S. Please remember I am still brand new to this talk format and cannot figure out how to respond directly to discussions. Douglas Knapp (talk) 21:38, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Just another bit on English with birds

Leo (If I may),

I am not suggesting English replace Latin. I am saying it correlates 100%. English changes when the Latin changes, and YES! That goes many many years back before 2003! (Forgive me if I exacerbated with the 200 years) But 2003 was not when standardization of English bird names began. How about: 100 years?

Virtually all bird guides and all lists of bird species use the same conventions. Exactly the same.

No-one seems to have read the reference I gave: Clements Checklist, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

That's it. Period. They are what we use. Ask all of the pre-eminant world ornithologists (Several of whom are colleagues) and they will tell you the same.

This is NOT opinion! It's not me or some esoteric group; it's just the standard we use. Once again, please go to source and don't use ME as a reference.

When I publish, I go to the standard in the "industry", so to speak. I don't make up rules. I voice no opinion. I simply mold my own material to the existing conventions.

Be very very careful when quoting any popular-source material on this subject. That is the whole purpose of my signing up for WIKI and starting to edit. I thought I could make a contribution when I saw so much confusion and ambiguity. Purely nepotistic. Even "Nature" it turns out, has inconsistent ornithological language. But then it's not surprising wqhen you realize it is a sophisticated version of pop literature. Yes, it is science for the layperson, and that's where the mis-applied language interpretations begin to enter.

Clements Checklist. Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Birders regulating birders. Using "bollocks', you must be a Brit, so realize that Oxford has exactly the same standards in this area. Exactly. It's not Doug Knapp. It's Cornell, Oxford, Cambridge and Louisiana State. Shall I continue with Yale, Harvard, Michigan, etc?

DK — Preceding unsigned comment added by Douglas Knapp (talk • contribs) 20:47, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Dear Douglas,

Of course you may disagree with me! But I am convinced you are simply wrong. It is possible that the conventions as recommended by Cornell are considered sacrosanct in particular bird guides, but remember that this is not a bird guide; it is an encyclopaedia -which should adhere to the grammatical and orthographical conventions of English, nothing more. And even in this there is a problem: English as a language is not even standardised between British, American or Australian. A bird name containing the word "colour", for instance, would correctly be spelled differently depending on for which audience it was written. And to wit; English as a living language is no different from IsiZulu or Mandarin, a vernacular/common name in English is simply that name by which people call a particular organism in English -no scientific rigour involved. If a majority of Australian lay people want to call their version of the sacred ibis a bin chicken, then that is a vernacular name for the animal, irrespective of scientific positions on the taxonomy of the creature.

As far as I can tell, Cornell simply recommends a standardised naming, spelling, orthography -nothing more. The rhetorical argument you are using, appeal to authority, is unconvincing. The rhetorical argument I used earlier, reductio ad absurdum, apparently didn't work on you either.

The essence of your argument is that the English language must correlate 100% with taxonomic nomenclature. The essence of my argument is that no lab in New York can impose how I or anyone using the English speech use the English speech, or any other (asides from scientific Latin) -natural language is inherently messy and ambiguous and dynamic. Furthermore, if every discipline in the world come up with their own conventions on orthography, writing would get extremely tiresome. Elmidae also made the point that for the average reader, the most important thing is that he is able to educate him/herself on the subject, whatever that is. As we are diametrically opposed on this subject, it would be best to broaden the discussion with other people to get more viewpoints. But as you may have read at the Tree of Life page this has apparently already been discussed ad nauseum and your position seems to have lost out before either of us joined Wikipedia. You say "mold my own material to the existing conventions"... well, it looks like in this case there are existing conventions for Wikipedia to which you will have to mould your material, even if you feel it is like swallowing a fly. If I cannot convince you to join team natural language, that is too bad, but no point in belabouring the issue, and we will have to agree to disagree!

But let us try to agree on something -it is more important, is it not, that the public be educated in that which we are apparently both interested in, the natural sciences, than silly orthographic or phylogenetic conventions in English. There are many things more pertinent to the existence of an organism than how a couple of people would like to capitalise it in a certain language, no?

I am in fact not British, I am Caribbean Dutch, I just use this spelling convention as I live in Europe, and furthermore consider it the most universal form, with most of the Caribbean, Africa and India using it. Linguistics is hobby, and I am quite aware of projects in languages such as Dutch, Afrikaans, Estonian, etc.. to standardise organism names -all nonsense in my book, for the reasons I have elaborated above.

Cheers! Leo Breman (talk) 23:16, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

From WikiProject Tree of Life:

@Douglas Knapp:, almost everybody watching this talk page is aware of the capitalization convention for birds promoted by organizations such as the IOC and AOU. This capitalization issue has been discussed many many times on Wikipedia. More people aren't commenting because we're either sick of this discussion, or recognize that Wikipedia has taken a stance against capitalization. That stance was established in a discussion at WP:BIRDCON. There is an incomplete catalog of some of the hundreds of discussion regarding capitalization of common names of organisms at User:SMcCandlish/Organism names on Wikipedia. Plantdrew (talk) 18:14, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

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Article style

Hi, I've put back some Main links, and I've stopped another editor from using Vancouver format for authors (yuck!), and formatted quite a lot of refs. Still much to be done, and in the numerous linked Main articles too. Happy to discuss. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:22, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Oh, I'm not wedded to my edits here. Seemed over the top to repeat links like that, but if you think it's better with some of them in, no discussion from me. Yes, I don't like Vancouver format either. I have a proposal in the talk section about what to do with Intensive animal farming and Intensive crop farming -renaming those will solve many issues. People want to write about "factory farming", let's just let them, as long as they do it properly. I've also been checking out Holistic management (agriculture), as there links everywhere in wikipedia going there. My big beef there is that unrelated references are being used willy-nilly which don't corroborate the concept. It seems to be mostly authored by one Redddbaron, who appears not too active these days except for over there and, just looking in a very cursory fashion, does appear to make good edits. It could be the references were from before his time, I don't know. I'd like some response from him.Leo Breman (talk) 19:35, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

I've removed a whole lot of overlinks from the text; we prefer to have Main links so that navigation down the article hierarchy is simple and obvious.

The policy on author style in refs is that if it began with Doe, Joe R. it stays that way, with very few exceptions. One is in medicine where they always use Vancouver, good luck to 'em.

All the "wholistic" stuff is penny-dreadful. I rewrote one or two of those articles but they pop up like mushrooms and are often barely cited at all, or cited to low-grade sources like blogs and agitprop websites. Anything you feel like doing to improve the quality of their refs would be very welcome. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:40, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Haha, but in all fairness, I do remember the word "holistic agriculture" being mentioned almost two decades ago in a course called "sustainable something something". So it exists. I remember that I never understood what it really means in practice, or any the practical benefits except for angling the hippy dough or grant money. So it just needs better references, because right now it's bad. Hey, in my country there are university courses on something called "biodynamic agriculture" which is something connected to the anthroposophical movement and involves planting by moonlight and a dowsing rod. There's a market for these products, it is just product diversification and added value, to niche consumers with enough disposable income. Like ham radios or heavy metal LPs, some people buy the stuff. Yikes, there is an article in English Wikipedia on "biodynamic agriculture".

Another thing I'm noticing -most of these Agriculture articles have rather high quality ratings. I'm used to the biology articles where people cite everything to the bone and still only give each other "C"s, at best. What's up with that? Circle-jerk, hehe? People rating their own work? Leo Breman (talk) 20:09, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Wow, the biodynamic agriculture is really long and looks pretty well done, how come conventional agriculture techniques can't attract that kind of dedication?Leo Breman (talk) 20:12, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Sectional interests, I guess. I got Agriculture and Animal husbandry to GA standard so I hope they're ok; it's all pretty bland stuff. I'm a bit puzzled how the grazing diagrams can be taken as either partisan or giving advice; since I have no axe to grind and wouldn't dream of advising anyone on farming, it's a surprise. The diagrams are intended just to represent the existing cited text. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:45, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, Chiswick. My feeling here, but I might be a too curmudgeony prick. The diagrams at grazing imply RG is more profitable than continuous, at least, that is how it comes across to me. I don't think that is always the case, as I mentioned just now, it depends on the costs of fencing, piping, labour, logistics. That is my opinion, I am sometimes wrong or contentious! Leo Breman (talk) 19:55, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

I might be extra critical about the Grazing article at this juncture, because I feel it is coming along nicely and is nearing completion, just the history section needs some work.Leo Breman (talk) 20:22, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Feel free to tweak the captions there, then, and if need be add refs to those, preferably same ones as used in text. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:38, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Yes, tweaking is what I wanted to do -removing a clause. Meanwhile I was looking over Livestock's Long Shadow -There is an enormous essay on a magazine article which claims that the report in question is too easy on the meat industry, but not only that, the references about it don't check out. The whole Wikipedia article is more about that non-peer reviewed magazine article than it is about the report. That's what you call coatracking around here no? Unfortunately I am a bit busy the coming week, so I'll likely be less active around here. Leo Breman (talk) 10:52, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Well the caption of the rotational grazing diagram at Grazing just says "Diagram of rotational grazing, showing the use of paddocks, each providing food and water for the livestock for a chosen period", while the continuous one just says "Diagram of continuous grazing, a low-input, low-output system", so I'd be hard pressed to see anything that might need to be cut, or could sensibly be removed without damaging the meaning? As for the LLS report article, it's pretty clear that the Veggie Good/Meat Bad brigade have put the article there for one reason only; not so much WP:COATRACK as WP:PROMO really. Certainly could do with upgrading. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:00, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Sorry man, I haven't even looked at it since last week. Give me a minute here! Maybe I will reread it and think "Jeez, nothing wrong here, spoke too soon".

... Okay, I looked at what it was that arose my ire; it's not the captions, it's the diagram itself. The diagram says rotational grazing will give "higher output", that is specifically what raises my objection, because I am unsure if that is true (see Briske et al.). You understand I am a very sceptical prick, and am not criticising anyone personally, just whatever it is I'm reading.

Someone is supposed to pick me up at any minute I thought, I need to prepare, but I already made some notes regarding the LLS article, I'll see if I can some of that done in a bit. "Promotion", okay, good tip, I'll use it. What I immediately noticed over there is that it was written as if solely about the meat industry, while the report in question is actually about livestock in general, including wool and dairy. Leo Breman (talk) 11:20, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

I'll tweak the caption to say "possibly higher"; if it wasn't possibly higher I can't see why anyone would bother really.

Thanks. Lot of discussion for an adjective, eh? True, but people do silly stuff. Also, I mentioned reasons like cost of fencing or labour that could impact outputs/profits. With seasonal rotation in dairy around here, people say the cows are more comfortable indoors in the winter; they don't talk about outputs (although that is likely the real reason). Leo Breman (talk) 11:32, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Well, the more specific the description the easier and quicker the fix. I've tweaked the label. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:10, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

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Ecoagriculture

I keep finding more all-fluff articles around the fringes of agriculture. This one's almost citation- and content-free. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:00, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Sigh! I just looked it over, the entire article seems like an advertisement for the new book the external links in the "history" bring you to. Only the first 2 of the 5 references used are actually about "ecoagriculture". Furthermore, the concept of "ecoagriculture" as described seems exactly the same as conservation agriculture. Would you like me to go over it? There are large parts of text I would get rid of, like that incoherent pseudo-philosophical part about farmers not being stewards but actually partners, you know, maybe we could theorise about this, but how is it established that this has anything to do with the subject? But it could take a bit, and there are so much of these articles around, it would be nice to clean up a big important article like sustainable agriculture. Leo Breman (talk) 14:11, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

So much to do, so little time ... but that one is quite the icing on the cake. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:20, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Right, I'll have a go at it. Leo Breman (talk) 14:41, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

I note with surprise that the article's talk page has an OTRS ticket stating that the text is copied lawfully from http://www.ecoagriculture.org/page.php?id=228&name=FAQs%20about%20ecoagriculture. See for yourself. I think what we could do is to add a citation to every paragraph showing that's where the fluff is from; then we can feel free to edit it properly and use additional sources. Right now, free or not, it's a bit of a puff-piece. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:47, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Shucks, forgot to check the talk. Go for it! I still am not convinced this shouldn't just be merged with conservation agriculture. How come intensive agriculture gets merged with factory farming, but this doesn't? The picture, by the way, is familiar to me as an example of a buffer zone -I wrote a few of the articles on national parks in Costa Rica. It's not that certain conservation methods are adopted by the farmers here, it is that the government has implemented certain restrictions on further development.Leo Breman (talk) 15:06, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

I was wondering much the same. This seems to me a particular investigation of Conservation agriculture, where it might get one section? Oh, and the URL above is now a dead link. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:13, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Dead link =well that tells you how serious or well-funded the owners of that site were about this. Let me reduce it, then we can move it. From the definition, it seems like a synonym to me, not even a specific viewpoint. Leo Breman (talk) 15:37, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

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Authority citation

While I definitely agree with you that the Curtis mentioned as authority of Gynaephora rossii is John Curtis, he is also referred to by the abbreviation "Curtis" in various sources. See e.g. http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/species.php?hodges=8290, which bases itself on the MONA/Hodges list. Furthermore, the ICZN does not state a requirement in its code to use initials or full name to separate multiple authors with the same surname (and indeed in its very examples shows it does not consider such to be a requirement, as one of the examples (51.3.2) contains "Goniocidaris florigena Agassiz", even though Goniocidaris florigena's authority is indubitably Alexander Agassiz not Louis Agassiz)

While I don't disagree with the use of the full name here and have no intention to revert you (if nothing else, it is good practice to make clear who exactly is meant) either an unlinked Curtis or a piped link such as Curtis would have been perfectly acceptable authority citations. AddWittyNameHere 11:16, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Right, thanks. Actually a botanist. Moth people should obviously conform to us superior botanists, haha. No, just unclear on practices outside my field. Ook Nederlands trouwens. Regarding citation: I just wanted to link it to someone. I am a taxonomy nerd, getting the whole picture makes understanding the species easier. But you're right, it doesn't really matter what is written as long as it follows standard abbreviation usage and you can click on the wikilink anyway. I'll emend. Cheers and thanks for the thank, Leo Breman (talk) 11:32, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

You're welcome. I figured as much, it's mostly botanists who are used to a more rigid author citation system. (As for being a fellow Dutchie, can't say I'm surprised. Us Dutchies are everywhere on the web, plus for some reason "Leo Breman" just sounds Dutch to me) Conforming to botanists... Kidding or not, I can't say I entirely disagree. Sure, it's got its downsides too, but anyone who claims the zoological version doesn't should take a long, hard look at the ICZN's code.

We could use a taxonomy nerd (or for that matter, any kind of nerd with a stronger focus on updating/maintaining articles than creating them) over at the moth/butterfly side of things. WikiProject Lepidoptera is full of BEAUTIES (That is, Backlog Everywhere, Article Updates Terribly Infrequent, Endless Substubs). There's maybe half a dozen folks running around doing any significant amount of work on existing Lepidoptera articles, and half of those are the same ones doing so for just about the entire tree of life. With some 100k+ articles, that's...well, I'll never have a shortage of things to edit, let's put it that way. Cheers, and again, you're welcome! AddWittyNameHere 18:40, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I do not know the ICZN code well enough, but it looks like there are a number of conventions in botany that are handier as opposed to zoology: it's easier to see what's going on, who exactly is being cited, which subspecific rank we're talking about, etc. Unfortunately I likely won't stay around in Lepidoptera, I'm also entire tree of life guy: sort of randomly hopping through different genera, just came over from a starfish genus. And while we're talking starfish, that's a group of organisms which is even more devoid of dedicated editors than Lepidoptera. Outside of Wikipedia too. Aside from a handful of people, if an article about an invertebrate or plant gets written, it's often about it being invasive, endangered or dubiously useful. People forget that species don't really exist, they are simply taxonomic interpretations. Few people go into the detail I do in taxonomy, but I find it useful for figuring out where info like distributions or habitat comes from. You are of course free to edit/correct me. But you know, I just spent a few months trying to improve the science in the agriculture part of Wikipedia; compared to that, straight biodiversity science of obscure species is much less frustrating! See you around! Leo Breman (talk) 20:07, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Yup. Zoology is more of a "hey let's put a couple dozen groups who all used to have their own conventions together, then distil something out of that that's more-or-less workable for everyone (but ideal for exactly none)". I probably would be a tree of lifer with a moderate focus on Lepidoptera if not for the sheer size and maintenance backlog of the latter. As result, I'm effectively more a Lepidoptera gal with the occasional foray out into the wider tree of life (at least, as far as my taxon-related edits go; I also work in some other subject and maintenance areas--but even there tend to focus on insect-related stuff nowadays).

And yeah, I see what you mean about starfish, and taxon articles in general. (Lepidoptera is at least blessed by an incredibly large amount of open-access and/or digitalized resources available. Just wish we also had enough folks to actually use them to update articles...) And yeah, the low impact of taxon articles is why I tend to focus on large-scale small updates across entire swaths of articles over expanding and rewriting single articles. Both are fairly low impact, but one reaches just a dozen or so readers per month and the other a couple hundred to a few thousand.

Long as your information is correct and sourced (and it certainly seems to be from a quick glance), adjusting it is probably my utter last priority. Even if you end up over-focusing on taxonomy (I doubt it, but who knows), well, that's still an obvious improvement over articles consisting entirely of "[Taxon] is a [taxon rank] of moths in subfamily [subfamily] of the family [family]." + (possibly outdated, likely unsourced) taxobox + (possibly outdated, generally unsourced) specieslist + barelinked EL that really should've been a ref.

See you around, and thanks for the nice chat,

AddWittyNameHere 22:03, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

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(talk page stalker):  Done - happened to spot the bot leave this message on my watchlist, saw you haven't edited in a few hours so probably are offline, figured I might as well fix it. Cheers, your friendly neighbourhood talk page stalker AddWittyNameHere 08:41, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! Yes, I'll edit just a tiny bit more now and then leave for a bit. Tonight I should be able to expand Gynaephora rossii more. There's a lot of info in the original description. Maybe finding something Inuit would be nice for local colour. Parasites are always interesting. And some pics would be nice. Also who moved it to Gynaephora and when? Leo Breman (talk) 10:42, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Same here, hanging around for a little bit but I'll be logging off soon. No clue from the top of my head as to who moved it, if you can't find it I'll dig into things tonight/tomorrow, see if I can find anything. Images of obscure moths under compatible license can be hard to come by, actual pictures even more-so, sadly. AddWittyNameHere 10:50, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Zoological authority specification

Hey again! Unlike on the botanical side of things, the zoological side of things does not mention the author who moved a species to a new genus as part of the taxon authority. ;) AddWittyNameHere 19:22, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

I know, but it makes things so much easier... For example with Dasorgyia, it would have been much clearer in the beginning it was a synonym of a different genus... is it specifically disallowed? Then I will follow the rules. But if it is just not necessary or only discouraged, why not? The notation is basically shorthand for a sentence or more of prose.Leo Breman (talk) 19:35, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

It's not strictly disallowed by the ICZN I believe, but it's really, really uncommon to the point plenty of folks who are only interested in the zoological side of things will have no clue what that shorthand means. I'd recommend using something like "transferred to genus by [name]" on the first occurrence in an article, then simply "transferred by [name]" for the rest of them. It's a little longer, sure, but certainly not a sentence or more of prose, and should convey the intended meaning decently well. AddWittyNameHere 19:43, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

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(talk page stalker) -  Fixed. AddWittyNameHere 09:41, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks again friend! About the above, by the way, I forgot to get back to you; I will abide by zoological conventions, but frankly I don't like it. Regarding these moths I'm working on, taxonomical notation in entomology is so full of mistakes -dates are sometimes wrong (Strand 1910 is certainly a typo, but it is repeated in different works, and I found 2 others that must be wrong), the spelling of authorities is all over the place (Kozhanchikov had 4 different spellings (ha also had an entomologist grandfather who used the pre-reform spelling), combined with the wrong dates -very hard to untangle! I'm going with English transliteration instead of German as most other in Lepidoptera are using, but have no idea what the rule is), everyone is confused as to who moved what where, or when genera/species were validated (using the ex. construction), and the databases aren't maintained: LepIndex claims to have 95% of the names, but it is missing quite a lot of synonyms in the small sample size I'm looking at, and it is quite outdated already. Winge, winge.

The articles are moving ahead no? I want to rewrite some more later today to make clear how absolutely little times these species have been seen -often times all of our information is from one or a few specimens the 19th century. Lachana selenophora has apparently only been unambiguously collected by three people in the last 150 years. To my surprise there is absolutely nothing on these moths at the GBIF, which means none of the specimens have been databased -that makes things like distribution harder than starfish. I was able to find a copy of Kozhanchikov in a huge pile of Russian biology books I once downloaded (no url, but you can maybe find these djvu files on a webpage of the University of Kazan, but I'm not sure about the legality), and have been able to translate lots of useful info from that. Cheers, Leo Breman (talk) 14:11, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

You're welcome! I don't think anyone likes it, necessarily, but you've seen the kind of mess entomological taxonomical notation is by now, yes? That's not something that will improve by partial implementation of other notational methods, I'm afraid. At least if we all follow the zoological code, we know what a certain notation is supposed to mean, meaning it's at least theoretically possible for it to be determined as "ahem, that's not right". Within zoology, entomology has the additional complication of involving an incredible number of taxa, and at least for Lepidoptera (probably Coleoptera too, but I'm less well-versed in those) that is very definitely not helped by not having a single database trusted over all others, nor by having had several authors notorious for introducing huge numbers of synonyms, several authors with a bad habit of introducing unwarranted replacement names, several authors (especially in taxonomy's earlier days) with a bad habit of dumping everything into huge wastebin taxa, several major collections and thus types being lost to museum fires and other sorts of damage, a significant amount of work being or having been done by people who might be experts but who aren't strictly speaking professionals, and—at least from personal experience—attracting a disproportional number of folks with very strong feelings about how things should be done and who, although certainly knowledgeable, are not exactly known for being particularly capable of compromising or getting along well with others who don't share their view. So then you get things like the Netherlands alone having something like four or five different organisations and groups focused on the so-called "microlepidoptera", with most of those having at least partially overlapping membership but also having central figures that really don't get along with central figures over at some of the other groups...sigh (Or at least that's how it was a decade or so ago, and I really doubt it has changed much since)

As far as the databases go, it's not so much that they're not maintained at all, but when you've got some ~180,000 species, hundreds more described each year, thousands getting moved to different genera, demoted to subspecies, or entirely synonymized yearly, not to mention huge reclassifications the past decade-and-a-bit what with phylogeny, staying up-to-date is effectively impossible. Especially considering the huge backlog each of those databases had to start with due to the taxonomic mess I mentioned above. That said, yes, LepIndex generally lags a fair bit behind. Usually the geographically-limited databases are a bit closer to up-to-date, though not all of them are exactly reliable. Depends a fair lot on who is running them.

And absolutely, you're making great progress on those articles! You're right that some of those species are just about never recorded, and even less if only looking at unambiguously identified specimens. For that matter, even the distribution of certain species that are collected more frequently remains a bit of a mess—more-so in some areas than others, both geographically and taxonomically—which is again not helped by the sheer taxonomic mess that is Lepidoptera and the lack of well-maintained, up-to-date database. AddWittyNameHere 16:11, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Huh. Yeah, no wonder Lepidoptera taxonomy is so confusing. Still, it's surprising things aren't more organised. As well, almost no one designates types, Trofimova was the first to formally do so in this group as late as 2008! LepIndex is used as the basis for Species2000, which is itself the basis for many databases such as the GBIF, so I expected it would be better. The distribution given for L. selenophora is almost entirely based on Grum-Grshimailo's four expeditions, comparing what Kozhanchikov writes to what Grum-Grshimailo does, and it is hard to find the modern names for the places he mentions (apparently archa bakhi means "juniper fort/garden", kara-kuzun "black lamb", but that doesn't help me any). Kozhanchikov's distribution is also prone to misinterpretation I now see, he includes a city as collection locality, but when we read Staudinger, he just says that the man who sent him the specimens lived there, which means it is not certain this species occurs in Uzbekistan. I'm going to have to change that.Leo Breman (talk) 17:33, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Yup. I wouldn't necessarily call it surprising, but unfortunate certainly. So folks might get around to untangling taxonomy for a subfamily or family, a specific author's work, or the species occurring in a limited geographical area, but for 180k species around the world? I...strongly suspect there's not enough hours in a human lifetime for that. And LepIndex has some benefits over most other databases, but well, see this page for a bit of an explanation of its many downsides. As for distribution: yup, that's a well-known issue with various species known only from a few records. Plus too many species to independently verify everything, so things become a bit of a game of telephone where A repeats what B said that C had said. Same happens with host plants from time to time. AddWittyNameHere 22:41, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Yo

Just a quick message/question: we happen to be running into each other a fair bit on Lepidoptera-related articles these days. Most of that is me happening to come across your edits one way or another (particularly catching them across my watchlist). While I don't think it's a problem, considering you tend to thank me for my edits, I just wanted to verify that you're not getting the feeling I'm WP:WIKIHOUNDING or otherwise harassing you, because that's definitely not my intention. If you do get that feeling, or I'm otherwise making you feel uncomfortable or bothering you, please let me know so I can back off a little. AddWittyNameHere 18:06, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Ha, no worries. No, I agree with you on everything so far, otherwise I would open my big fat mouth. For example, Savela's database is the best out there, but it is not authoritative. And the edits you made to that New Zealand moth yesterday, I actually didn't notice the first, at first, but I very much think those edits were obvious improvements. The late-night sentence I had written was ugly, and I actually prefer a "common name" section after "taxonomy" for epistemological reasons -I was earlier inclined to bundle both together in a section called "nomenclature", and also go in depth in pre-Linnaean classification in taxonomy, but Peter Coxhead didn't like the latter (I can live with calling that "history"), and a convention for the former is still fluid for me...

With some organisms the taxonomy section gets really long, and non-experts don't care all too much about that. There are a number of aspects regarding vernacular names for organisms where I have opinions... In short, I think it isn't the job of Wikipedia or any other organisation to standardise common names, common names should not have taxonomic interpretations, many of these common names are nonsense invented by 1 person and never used in real life (renaming the golden jackal to "golden wolf" on Wikipedia because a few British boffins think the DNA means it now needs a different name, despite everyone in Africa and all other sources using the common common name, is missing the point about common names), and I disagree with the practice done by some monolingual purists around here of assigning no informational value to local non-English names and deleting such info. "Fred the thread" for example is pure nonsense, it purely exists as cute online copypasta and only two people have likely every used it vernacularly.

Eh? Where was I? Little rant there. Right, no let me reassure you, if I'm annoyed it will be more obvious. Cheers! Leo Breman (talk) 19:04, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Glad to hear so! Guessed as much, but also figured it couldn't hurt to make sure. Ahaha, no worries about the rant. I've got opinions on that too, and mostly agree with you there. Vernacular names are only useful if 1. used by authoritative sources (because in that case, such a name can be useful in finding relevant sources. Especially on species of cultural or agricultural importance—because many sources on that side of things go with vernacular name over binomial if one's available) 2. have demonstrable actual use (that is, are actually common or part of people's vernacular) or 3. have historical significance.

I suppose that names that have been "standardized" or otherwise decided upon by an organization can be useful, but only if such an organization is actually authoritative rather than of the one-guy-and-his-blog variation. (Even then, if the species in question is so obscure only folks with a taxonomical/entomological background are aware of it, a vernacular name remains essentially useless because such folks are comfortable enough using the proper name. My apologies, I of course mean binomial name. Even worse when it comes to vernacular names in languages that have little international use, for species that very rarely occur in the area where that language does get used. The concept that every species should have a vernacular name appears somewhat nonsensical to me, or at utter least means a different term than "common name"/"vernacular name" should be used for it. "Nederlandse soortnaam" is at least a little bit better in that regard (at least it doesn't make a pretence of being "common") though the usefulness of giving such a name to a species found all of once so far in the Netherlands remains, ahem, dubious to me)

That said, Lepidoptera articles have enough issues that so long as a supposed vernacular name is at least sourced (and sourced to something that's not Wikipedia nor derived from Wikipedia at that) I'm willing to leave it be. Those are at least valid for a certain definition of valid. No more useful for it, but... shrug

As to monolingual purism, that's a somewhat complex issue. On the one hand, this is the English-language Wikipedia, and yeah, if a species occurs in English-speaking areas and has a perfectly valid English name that's actually frequently used by folks to refer to said species, that should probably be our go-to. On the other hand, if a species doesn't occur in English-speaking areas, giving an English vernacular name but not the name used by folks who actually encounter the species is, pardon my French, utter bullshit.

As to how much non-experts care about such things as complex taxonomy...I suppose that depends a little on how one defines experts, but you're generally correct. At utter least, anyone who is knowledgeable enough about taxonomy to care is knowledgeable enough about taxonomy to find that information themselves without Wikipedia delivering it straight to them. Then again, for the great majority of Lepidoptera species, non-experts aren't going to care at all. Big, beautiful and colorful? Sure. Very common sight in its actual range? Sure. Exotic species with a sudden population explosion outside its range? Sure. An actual pest, whether indoors, garden or of agricultural relevance? Absolutely. Looks like something a bit more dangerous, like a wasp? Maybe, but probably only in so far as "can't sting? kthxbye". Everything else? Nah. AddWittyNameHere 20:13, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

(O)ecology and distribution

Fair enough. You've expanded the distribution section and added a habitat section, and that works better than my attempt. In either case, we no longer have a loooong string of level 2 section headers with only two lines of text between them (which looks terrible), and more importantly, the information that should be contained in the ecology section is now there (just not defined by human-made boundaries). As for oecology/ecology, yup, but our concern should be "which of the two is better understood by/more familiar to the reader", and that'd be ecology simply because folks who are familiar with the spelling 'oecology' will also be familiar with 'ecology', but the same doesn't necessarily go the other way around. AddWittyNameHere 10:28, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Sure thing; no point in using terminology no one understands. Same thing with abbreviating Greek aspirants in genera: Rhododendron and Philodendron should be Rh. and Ph. but no one does that here. I use the same section titles for all organisms, whether plant or starfish, never put distribution in ecology, but many people here merge habitat info with distribution, so it often takes some rewriting. It's a content thing, irrespective of style. I'm very interested in distributions, how they change, but it's rare to find good info. I don't much like writing descriptions, so it's good there are already short ones at these moth articles. Leo Breman (talk) 17:35, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Yup. In the end, the subject might be a pretty specialist subject—especially where rare, obscure species are concerned—but Wikipedia is not a specialist source.

Makes sense to have a set style of content ordering when dealing with many taxon articles. Mine's a bit more fluid and dependent on both what is already there and what I can easily find information on, but then, I am not first and foremost a content writer. I do sometimes create or expand articles, but much of the time I deal with infrastructural maintenance and gnoming instead. Part personal preference, mostly habit. Around the time I joined Wikipedia, Project Lepidoptera had several prolific (stub)-creators, fewer actual content writers/article expanders, and very very few people with the patience to create/template/categorize redirects, diffuse oversized stub categories, and the likes. Nowadays, the balance lies mostly in the other direction: multiple maintenance/gnome-inclined folks, still fairly few content expanders, and almost no creators. (Considering the sheer number of stubs and amount of maintenance/gnomish backlogs we have, not necessarily a bad thing though...)

As for descriptions at the moth articles, most of our actual stubs not sub-stubs, yeah. The sub-stubs though...ugh. Plenty that consist of nothing more than taxobox + "Binomial name is a moth species in family [Family]." + a taxonbar, a stub-tag and if particularly lucky, a barelinked non-inlined ref and two or three of the applicable categories. Probably half of them are taxa of dubious validity or outright invalid. Not too easy to handle those, as each of 'm needs a fair bit of research to figure out the status. Just like you describe with distribution, figuring out the validity of obscure moth taxa isn't exactly easy either. (But well, we've both vented our frustration with having dozens of outdated, contradictory databases already, yeah? ) AddWittyNameHere 20:07, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Yah, especially LepIndex has proven unreliable and disappointing. The higher taxonomy in Batrachedridae is all messed up, it was last updated in 2014, but it looks like they are mostly following Hodges 1983, but they don't provide any references... Apparently they never saw Hodges 1998, at the same time genera which do not occur in North America, i.e.Batrachedrodes is classified according to Zimmerman 1978, except they're mistakenly using his subfamily as a family, and Epimarptis is still in the 1914 classification... but it is actually just guesses on my part, because they don't provide references.

And yes, no one is keeping track of synonymy in general in Lepidoptera, that makes sorting out validity difficult. With plants this started getting sorted out in the 2010s, with basically the work of one man (Govaerts) being essential. Lepidoptera needs a bioinformatics & taxonomy specialist and a big dollop of funding. At least Lepidoptera is spared trendy political splitters as in ornithology or primatology, where apparently a SNP, colour morph, diet or differences in morphological measurement ranges is enough to claim a population is a new species and needs legislation.

As to these stubs, well, I prefer brevity to bias. One of these moth articles had a polemic on how great biological control was compared to chemical control -this is uncited opinion, demonstratively false (cane toads, anyone?) and there are no biological control products approved for use in that particular species. As soon as we talk agriculture, impartiality goes out the window. If the stub is very short, it can only be wrong if the species doesn't exist.

Lastly, I note you placed the Houdinia article in "start"; besides the summary description, I'm not sure how an article like that can get much better. There just isn't much more known about the species, and it's already more than one could hope for compared to most other moth species. A picture or a map would be nice, but is that really necessary for an article to be complete? I am ambivalent regarding the grading here on Wikipedia, it doesn't entirely make sense. Regarding organisms, people gave much higher grades for worse work 10 years ago, and right now the situation looks, well, skewed -a number of people angling for "GA" or whatever clog up the very same people grading each other, and length of prose and appeal to systemic bias (i.e. conservation info (rare, invasive) is deemed much more important than for example economic uses (forestry, pest in agriculture, etc)) appear to score points. Meanwhile, in the agriculture section articles are automatically placed much higher on the scale -that's not wrong, just shows scales are not in sync. Pseudo-scientific, topical polemics, like that nonsense of the Insectopocalyps, are given high marks mostly because reviewers agree with the bias. The grading system is hard to implement for most and the grader should be very familiar with English & the subject in order to gauge how complete the article is. I say all this, but I've only ever graded an article once or twice (downward). But Lepidoptera has, looking at the table at the project page, the lowest amount of C, B, GA, etc., of all the projects I've been involved in. But considering the arbitrary nature of these grades, an argument can be made it's not good, but also not bad.Leo Breman (talk) 19:22, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Regarding LepIndex, ugh, I know. For families that are taxonomically fairly clear and stable, it's okay-ish, but otherwise... Main issue, even more than their inability to stay up to date, is indeed their utter lack of clarity what source they're basing their taxonomy on. (Much less actually making clear when a source was considered and discarded versus simply not considered at all)

Savela's funet certainly isn't always up to date either—hell, in all honesty, in certain obscure areas he's seriously, chronically outdated—but one huge benefit is that at least with him you know who he's following, who he's aware of but purposefully chose not to follow, and what resources simply haven't been considered (or not yet, at least). Pretty typical of Lepidoptera: many of the actually useful sources are those that barely skirt by Wikipedia's reliable sources policy, while plenty of those that would fit squarely into what Wikipedia would call a "reliable source" are about as useful as wet tissues.

One-man efforts are a thing in Lepidoptera too (see:Savela's funet, among many others), and some efforts in that direction are being made for Lepidoptera as well, but so far are mostly focused on very specific subgroups (usually families, subfamilies or superfamilies) and no one's actually managed to do the same on a larger level or combining all those efforts into one reliable database. (Plenty of folks have tried, but well...that's how you get things like LepIndex)

Hm, regarding those trendy splitters...when it comes to politically-motivated splitting, yeah, you're right. On the other hand, Lepidoptera has its own set of problems. More than a few of those are related to the fact that the line between professional and amateur isn't always that clear where Lepidoptera are involved, especially historically. There's a significant number of species that have been described by folks who haven't studied anything entomology-related at any university, probably most of the distribution data out there is based on similar efforts of passion, and more than a few host plants have similarly only discovered because of folks home-rearing caterpillars. Then add in the history of lepidopterology, with most of the early descriptions being in a very limited number of genera, leading to absolutely massive wastebin taxons. Additionally there were also some fairly early lepidopterologists with a tendency to give just about everything its own genus, plus several who described the same species several times. (There's a couple of species I can think of that have multiple synonyms by their very taxon author, and they're not mere misspellings either) Result: there's species and genera with literal dozens of synonyms if not more. sigh It gets to the point that if I see a stub on a species described prior to, oh, let's say 1900 or so and I don't see a synonym listed, I almost want a source for that.

Additionally, almost no one in Lepidoptera is focused on the entirety of Lepidoptera. Either they're focused on specific groups, or on specific areas. As a result, information is so ridiculously scattered it's not even funny. I occasionally dabble in spider articles and man...I long for the day Lepidoptera gets something even just remotely similar to the World Spider Catalog. Makes things so. much. easier.

Regarding biological versus chemical control: both have downsides, both have benefits, and it's far, far too situation-and-context dependent to declare one or the other better. Better for a specific purpose or situation, maybe. (And even then, it's not unusual for it to turn out a couple decades later that whoops, nope, it wasn't because it reduced the wrong insect's population, turns out to not actually be harmless to humans in the long run or because maybe, just maybe, introducing a species with no local predators to get rid of another species with no local predators is asking for trouble.) Regarding the insect apocalypse: let's just say my reply is large enough without an in-depth response here. I'll summarize it as "there are significant issues, including humanity-caused issues; the newspaper(-style) reporting on them is, ahem, frequently incorrect in various ways and more focused on getting a headline and promoting charismatic species than actually useful".

As for stubs being wrong, you'd be surprised... I've found stubs that listed the wrong taxon author, wrong year, wrong taxonomical placement and had a mispointed bareurl as sole reference. At least it did correctly identify the taxon as a species of moth, I guess...

As for Houdinia and start: it almost certainly deserves higher, but I'm too involved with the article to feel comfortable ranking it, especially with how difficult it is to sensibly rank obscure, sparse-information taxon articles. At the same time, it was clearly not a stub, and it makes little sense to remove the stub tag but leave the project banner claiming stub. So...start it is. Probably should be reassessed by someone uninvolved, but well, almost no one in Lepidoptera is particularly interested in assessing articles, I think, especially not with how much work there is to do. If you want someone to come along to assess it, just remove the rank and someone at some point will show up to put an arbitrary letter in there, I guess.

As far as general Lepidoptera ratings: they're probably...mostly correct. That is, almost everything that's labelled a stub probably is a stub. However, there's probably a fair bit in start that might deserve a C or B, who knows. I suspect it functions mostly as a "well, this is not a stub and everyone's probably too busy to waste time assessing it and trying to figure out whether the information in the article that is not there isn't there because no one's added it or because it simply doesn't exist...but I'm involved and really shouldn't be ranking this at all...oh well, no one will object to me IAR-labelling a non-stub as non-stub...start will do" rank. Which means it's just transposing backlog, but well, so be it. At least it gets the article out of the stub categories. We can all start focusing on what exactly an article should be ranked at when we're at a point where a further division than "stub" vs. "not a stub" is useful, or when we get project members who actually care about arbitrary letters on the Project Banner on a talk page. AddWittyNameHere 22:19, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Ratings: Okay, your explanation makes sense. In plants someone rated all of their own Eremophila articles really high, seems like cheating in a way. No, I don't care enough about the ratings to do anything regarding them, just made a curious observation.

Regarding biological versus chemical control: Yes, of course, it is not black and white. The insect apocalypse story is just a theory based on a handful of very local studies, many very problematic. People are confusing biomass loss with biodiversity loss -two different things entirely. I tried to point it out, but people reverted everything I did, including removing good scientific studies refuting the premise, because they prefer to wallow in sensationalist millenarian reporting in popular media. An Australian entomologist guy here on Wikipedia even got a temporary ban due to this article. Oh well... But money and livelihoods are impacted here, and these are real issues, so it would be nice to stick to impartial science.

Stubs: well, you should be happy to know all I've seen so far are good species, so I guess you guys have done a good job so far on that.

Regarding general Lepidoptera taxonomy. Well... wastebin taxa are found all over. And both plants and spiders had at least one weirdo over-actively describing and re-describing species in their thousands. I do notice no mega-large genera in Lepidoptera so far, unlike Senecio in plants for example. There are quite a lot of small genera and families, at least some taxonomic problems could easily be solved by lumping, but that really only moves the ball into the court of subgenera. It's really a question of perspective this.

Wikipedia's policy on primary sources is useless in taxon articles and I always ignore it.

Yes, we must be very careful on the host plants info -is it from in situ or the lab/home-rearing?

Yes, the World Spider Catalog is very nice. I also find the AntWiki beautifully well done.

Now for something useful: I really think Batrachedrodes should be placed in Batrachedridae, along with Enscepastra, following the latest taxonomy. You will have to do that, as I don't know how these automatic taxobox things work. Regards, Leo Breman (talk) 23:29, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Yup, there ain't no "ratings patrol" other than GA/FA, where someone will come along to point out that hey, this article didn't actually go through the process involved. While I do think that ideally, no one would rate their own articles at all, I also recognize that where taxa are involved, the sheer number of them means it'd be a huge burden on those who do assess. I mean, sure, I wouldn't be in the wrong if I decide to wait for others on every stub I write to confirm that, yup, a taxobox, taxonbar, three sentences of prose and some references does indeed a textbook stub make—but it's easier on everyone if I'm pragmatic and decide "yeah no let's not waste people's time like that".

Exactly. There's absolutely cases where pesticides caused a lot of harm, and then there's absolutely cases where biological control did the same, and absolutely no one (well, other than those with a direct financial interest) is served well by pretending the one or the other is perfectly harmless in all circumstances. And yeah, considering Wikipedia is not, as a rule, written by experts, I can't say I'm surprised those articles of a more general interest tend to lean more towards "what the media say is the case" and less "what the studies the media base themselves on ACTUALLY say", much less what other studies say.

Glad to hear so. My maintenance work leads me to articles where the last non-maintenance edit has frequently been 5-10 years ago. Doesn't really inspire one with confidence in the quality of our articles...

Yeah, on overdescriptive weirdoes... did any of the plant & spider ones have (admittedly unsigned) obituaries about them published starting with anything along the lines of "More than twenty years too late for his scientific reputation, and after having done an amount of injury almost inconceivable in its immensity, Francis Walker has passed from among us"? (Admittedly, he made a mess of more insect orders than just Lepidoptera...)

As for wastebin taxa, fair enough. Many of the ones in Lepidoptera were broken up (thus the ridiculous number of synonyms Lepidoptera is prone to), but we still have some. See, for example, Coleophora and its 1350 or so species.

Yup. And just as with most other information, good luck finding a source on host plants that actually bothers specifying what source(s) they've collected the info from.

As for the taxobox stuff: sure, I'll do that for you (provided the source agrees, though I have no reason to doubt that), but I prefer to immediately add/update the refs there too. Saves me from having to try to remember later what I based it on. Any chance you could put them here so I can just copy 'm? (I know, I can just hunt them down myself, but with the lack of central database where I can easily find that information, it'll no doubt take me longer to figure out what the most recent classification even is than you, since you've already looked it up and know exactly what ref states that) AddWittyNameHere 01:14, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Francis Walker: Haha, ok, got me there.

Maintenance: yeah, by my calculation Wikipedia can never catch up with the speed of new taxa being described. With plants the same issue persists, with proportionally less stubs and more redlinks.

taxobox stuff: Well, you know, this is not as easily answered as we may hope. Hodges published the Batrachedrinae of the Batrachedridae in 1999 with 5 genera -I've finally figured out which those were (the same in Hodges 1983: Batrachedrinae of the Coleophoridae). Sugisima & Arita moved Idioglossa there in 2000. Baldizzone 1996 transferred the genus Corythangela to the Batrachedridae of Hodges 1978, he seems to have missed Hodges 1983, and his own transfer seems to have been either missed by Hodges in 1999, or not treated, along with Batrachedrodes, because they do not occur in North America, but is treated in the Batrachedridae in the Australian Faunal Directory based on Baldizzone. Houdinia was added to the Batrachedridae in 2006. Van Nieukerken et al. included 10 genera in their Batrachedridae in 2011, which they don't name. By deduction, the 2 extra would have to have been Batrachedrodes and Enscepastra, and moved between 1999 to 2011, but I am unaware who exactly formally moved these genera or when. In the case of Enscepastra they were published as in the Batrachedridae in Wolfram Mey's 2011 Basic pattern of Lepidoptera diversity in southwestern Africa, which can be used as a source, however I suspect they were actually moved by Sinev in the 2006/2007 The Lepidoptera of the Brandberg Massif in Namibia, or an earlier work of his in Russian. Batrachedrodes is more complicated; it is a Hawaii endemic and as such has not been party to the revisions in North America, Australia, etc. Zimmerman moved the Batrachedridae of Walsingham 1890 (and Hodges 1978?) to the Momphidae in 1978, and split Batrachedrodes from the Batrachedra; logically if we recognise Batrachedra in the Batrachedridae it would be odd to leave out Batrachedrodes. Furthermore, Zimmerman's synonymisation of the Batrachedridae to the Momphidae is taxonomically problematic and has not been followed by anyone it seems, as opposed to the more similar Coleophoridae. No one seems to have formally moved Batrachedrodes to Batrachedridae as far as I can tell, but van Nieukerken et al must be referring to it as the 10th genus, and it is listed in the Batrachedridae at the Arthropods list of the Bishop Museum (Hawaii). So I can't give a single source for the family taxonomy, and looking over this I see I made a number of errors and false assumptions, and I also see some odd discrepancies in van Nieukerken et al. and other sources, and mistakes in Brown, so the family still needs a lot of work. Maybe you should wait a bit. Leo Breman (talk) 16:36, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Re:Francis Walker: yup. Now, for his era he really wasn't that much more sloppy than others, but well... most of those weren't asked by the British Museum of Natural History to catalogue and describe their entire insect collections, nor were they as remarkably productive in publishing work after work.

Re:Maintenance: not with the current numbers of editors working in the ToL area, no, and especially not in areas (like Lepidoptera) with both high speciosity and high degree of scattering of information.

As far as Lepidoptera goes, most of the current Lepidoptera editors are not primarily focused on the creation of new articles. Probably not a bad thing considering the bad, bad backlog on the already existing articles. Better to focus on ensuring the extant articles have actual references and represent either valid taxa or are notable historical taxa and a much lower rate of stub creation with stubs that are actually well-sourced, than rapid and somewhat careless, unsourced mass stub creation. That happened a lot in the project's earlier days, and is the main source of synonyms and other invalid Lepidoptera taxa hanging around (which there's no doubt more than a few of, considering that practically every time I start working on one of the larger, obscure genera I find at least one or two species stubs that should not exist. Now, if they're cases of "has since been transferred to a different genus", that's one thing. Fairly easily solved, and additionally not just a wiki problem—the databases really are no better—but those aren't the sole source of invalid species hanging 'bout. I've found taxa that never existed in any form at all other than on wiki, species listed under genera they haven't been considered part of since long before the internet even existed, species that were synonymized decades ago, and other such gems. Some of the bulk creators in WikiProject Lepidoptera's earliest days weren't necessarily all too great at verifying the validity of the taxa they mass-created two-line stubs about. (Not helped by the fair batch of created-by-bot articles back in the days before en.wiki decided that no, mass article creation by bot is a bad idea)

Regarding Batrachedridae: yeah, that sounds like I'm better off waiting. Or putting up a discussion on either WikiProject Lepidoptera or WikiProject Tree of Life. Too many conflicting sources to have an easy one to point to, and skirting the edges of WP:SYNTH and WP:OR. Probably not something I should be unilaterally, boldly changing, even on request. AddWittyNameHere 17:15, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Concerning Bos planifrons

Hi, according to this paper, in the section about the origin and evolution of Bos, Bos planifrons is probably a synonym of B. acutifrons.--Mr Fink (talk) 16:48, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Hiya Mr.; thanks, yeah, I read that one already, and added it to one or two prehistoric Bos articles as well. As others pointed out, I sorta jumped the gun on this: shoulda simply made a "redirect". Annoyed at myself now, figuring out this complicated AfD stuff was hard enough, now there's a long list of steps to retract it. Argh! Cheers! Leo Breman (talk) 17:35, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

And a happy moo to you, too.--Mr Fink (talk) 19:29, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Hahaha. Nice surprise to find out others had already done most of the work. Moochas gracias! Now back to cow taxonomy ... something I'm at least reasonable at. Leo Breman (talk) 19:46, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

wasp anatomy

Hi, Leo. I've been intermittently looking over some of your edits and for the most part you seem to be doing fine; your editing style isn't the same as mine, but as long as the information is accurate and not misinterpreted, I generally don't second-guess other editors. As for anatomy, you asked "I'm especially concerned about the concepts (second) tergite, pronotum, mesonotum and mesoscutum... See this picture here. Is the second abdominal dorsal segment with the two large yellow patches the second tergite? Are the pair of thin yellow lateral lines on the pronotum? How about the two thick yellow lines? Would you mind explaining using the image I linked to, or maybe going over the description part of the article to see if I screwed up?" - you don't quite seem to have the parts correctly recognized. The pronotum is the strongly arched "collar" just behind the head. The large plate that comprises most of the dorsal thorax has two narrow yellow lines, and is called either the mesonotum or mesoscutum, depending on who you ask. Behind that plate are two narrow transverse sclerites, the scutellum (the posterior part of the mesothorax) followed by the metanotum. Behind the metanotum is what is actually the first abdominal segment, called the propodeum, which - in higher hymenopterans - is fused to the thorax, and this is why hymenopterists who are being meticulous use the terms "mesosoma" and "metasoma" instead of "thorax" and "abdomen". The propodeum, the last mesosomal segment, is technically the first segment of the abdomen, and the first segment of the metasoma is the second segment of the abdomen. The propodeum has two very broad yellow stripes in the linked photo. The dorsal sclerites of the metasoma are called tergites, and the corresponding ventral halves of each segment are called ventrites or sternites. The largest tergite, with the largest spots, is the second metasomal tergite. The first tergite is usually referred to as the petiole; in some families of wasps it is fused with the sternite to form a slender tube, or the sternite is shrunken or lost altogether. I think some of this is covered in other wasp-related articles, but I don't think it's covered well in illustrations, only in the text; the image used in some places, here, doesn't quite get it right, because they sort of cheat by having the background suggesting something in between the thorax and the abdomen, but it isn't named and it doesn't line up right; the propodeum in the illustration is nearly vertical, and they omitted the scutellum entirely, so I don't like this drawing. I'll try to find some time later today to review the apachus article. Dyanega (talk)

Thanks so much Dyanega. Your explanation is just what I needed! Like I suspected, I got it wrong. I looked around on internet but just couldn't find an image of a wasp with all the names on it which explained it to satisfaction. I know nothing of wasps, I'm actually a plant guy, but I'm wandering around. I'm best with taxonomy and distributions.

It looks like the first source I used used some iffy wording regarding the pronotum, and I've been mixed up since then, and the tergite stuff is my own mess. So I need to rewrite the morphology section, and must look at the P. carnifex too -I translated lots of morphology stuff from French (Saussure speaks of abdominal rings; terminology differs, but I'm sure I translated everything right) & Portuguese (weak in this language) there... I assuredly got some things wrong. The ambiguity in terminology you mention regarding thorax/mesosoma is indeed confusing for a newcomer, but I get it now.

Regarding differences in editing style -no doubt. My edit comments are really silly. My firefox crashes often so I save very often. I, for one, second guess other editors, myself (luckily in this case), and source materials (Bohart).

I'll likely stay on Polistes for a while, then see some new thing and wander off. Thanks so much again for taking the time to explain. Cheers, Leo Breman (talk) 20:44, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

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February 2020

Hi, and thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. It appears that you tried to give Anguilla Bank anole a different title by copying its content and pasting either the same content, or an edited version of it, into another page with a different name. This is known as a "cut-and-paste move", and it is undesirable because it splits the page history, which is legally required for attribution. Instead, the software used by Wikipedia has a feature that allows pages to be moved to a new title together with their edit history.

In most cases, once your account is four days old and has ten edits, you should be able to move an article yourself using the "Move" tab at the top of the page (the tab may be hidden in a dropdown menu for you). This both preserves the page history intact and automatically creates a redirect from the old title to the new. If you cannot perform a particular page move yourself this way (e.g. because a page already exists at the target title), please follow the instructions at requested moves to have it moved by someone else. Also, if there are any other pages that you moved by copying and pasting, even if it was a long time ago, please list them at Wikipedia:Requests for history merge. Thank you. Cheers, Polyamorph (talk) 18:59, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

So I did screw up? The problem is that the title I wanted to move it to was already a redirect. This is supposed to explain what to do: Wikipedia:Moving_a_page#Moving_over_a_redirect, but I must be stupid, because I just don't understand what it says I must do. I explain myself here: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Amphibians_and_Reptiles#Common_names...._sigh and here: Talk:Anolis_gingivinus. Surely there must be some quicker way to move these articles to the scientific names? Leo Breman (talk) 19:09, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

No worries, I agree it's not immediately obvious. If you paste {{subst:RMassist| current page title | new page title | reason = reason for move}} into the Wikipedia:Requested_moves#Uncontroversial_technical_requests section then someone will move it for you. Cheers, Polyamorph (talk) 19:21, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Right! I already just did that. Sorry for taking up your time. Thing is this was the first of likely many more, must I rely on others to do this for me all the time? Someone in 2010 used the photo website of a person, Father Sánchez, to create dozens of articles titled with the names Sánchez invented -he specifically states so on the homepage and discourages their use. Furthermore, he was never properly attributed. As I explained earlier there are a few other reasons not to use these names for these animals, like actual vernacular names existing in English locally, and Sánchez using Spanglish to invent non-existent terminology. The scientific names will turn up more hits on a search engine anyway.Leo Breman (talk) 19:35, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Not a problem at all. If there is no page history on the target then you should be able to move using the "move button". If there is page history at the target you will not be able to do this, but you could try to request the Wikipedia:Page_mover user right, I have it and just completed your request :). This way you can move pages by using a round-robin swap procedure (I used an automated tool to do that). Otherwise, you can list a batch of articles in the uncontroversial moves section, although I guess it depends how many. Cheers, Polyamorph (talk) 19:43, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Okay, thanks Polyamorph, I understand the concept of the round-robin thingy, but I'll try the batch thing first, maybe first compiling a list by going through the history of the 2010 editor in question. The "move button" doesn't work because a bot has a single edit on all his redirects. A good evening to you! Leo Breman (talk) 20:03, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Who doesn't love lizards?

Hi Leo! I was wondering if you could help me try to identify this lizard.
He lived in Hawaii. Could it be the same as this one who is from Honduras? Cheers, --TEP (talk) 15:43, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Sure! My pleasure! You are right, it is an anole, but it is not the species A. allisoni. It is Anolis carolinensis from the continental USA, a very common species in gardens in Texas, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. Here's a website explaining more. I lived as a kid in Texas for a while, used to catch these guys all the time as a kid. Over there people called it a "green anole" or a "chamaeleon".

I would have answered you immediately, but my Firefox crashed, just as I was about to add a bunch more info to the Puerto Rican anole -which I've now all lost. I completely rewrote the lede to make the animal sound more friendly. Grrr. Oh well, start from scratch again! Leo Breman (talk) 16:28, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks!! --The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 18:20, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

List of anole articles I feel should be moved to a Latin name

Rationalisation: 1. Common names which are ambiguous -more than one for a species. 2. Where the species does not occur anywhere where English is spoken and the species is not common in the pet trade. 3. Where there are no references provided for the common name. 4. Where the "common name" is (likely) spurious; i.e. invented by someone in a document/website =Father Sánchez photo webpage (see homepage for his own opinion on the matter), Henderson & Crother (='standardised common names', why should we accept their dictates? Why do their names differ so from those of others?), Malhotra & Thorpe (Reptiles & Amphibians of the Eastern Caribbean -source of many of the common names in Wikipedia, why are two people from Wales deciding how a reptile in the Caribbean should be named? How come their names differ so from those of others?).

• Anolis agassizi  Done
• Anolis allisoni  Done
• Anolis barbatus  Done - common pet in Germany, but qualifier "western" is not "common", people in Cuba speak Spanish, in Germany German.
• Anolis bartschi  Done
• Anolis bimaculatus  :  Already done
• Anolis biporcatus  Done
• Anolis carolinensis  Done - having personally caught many of these as a kid in Texas, the "common name" promoted here by Wikipedia may be less ambiguous than the actual common name, but it is not the most common common name: chameleon or green anole; no one calls it "Carolina anole" in my experience (maybe pet stores in Britain?), and it is misleading as it doesn't occur only in Carolina, it doesn't occur in much/most of the Carolinas, nor is it as common there as elsewhere in the USA. I note also we have a taxonomic interpretation problem here with some more recent authors splitting certain populations (Cuba, Bahamas, Mexico) of these anoles and info being mixed up now.
• Anolis carpenteri  Done - Let's please not use Norops on Wikipedia until everyone is doing it. I hate it when Wikipedia immediately jumps on the newest taxonomic bandwagon; give things time to matriculate. In this case, there are phylogenetic problems with how Norops, leaves the rest of Anolis clades. Savage, Frost and their US ilk love splitting big herp genera, but the scientific merits are not always that clear to me. Using morphology in cladistics (2012, 2018) is problematic here anyway considering the whole ecomorph concept with multiple iterations of convergent evolution. It makes it easier to produce monographs, sure, but that has nothing to do with natural classification. If it ain't broke...
• Anolis chlorocyanus  Done
• Anolis cuvieri  :  Already done
• Anolis cybotes  Done
• Anolis ferreus  Done
• Anolis garmani  Done
• Anolis kemptoni  Done
• Anolis leachii  Done
• Anolis luciae  Done
• Anolis marmoratus  Done
• Anolis occultus  Done
• Anolis pogus  Done
• Anolis polylepis  Done
• Anolis porcatus  Done
• Anolis pulchellus  Done
• Anolis richardii  Done
• Anolis roosevelti  Done
• Anolis roquet  Done
• Anolis rubribarbus  Done - As mentioned above, let's not use Norops until it has wide acceptance.
• Anolis sabanus  Done - A bit on the fence here. This is a reasonably common species in the pet trade in the Netherlands and Germany, but I severely doubt this name has much common usage.
• Anolis serranoi  Done - As mentioned above, let's not use Norops until it has wide acceptance. I just found a nice paper to back me up here: Poe (2013) New genera of anoles (Squamata: Dactyloidae) are unwarranted
• Anolis terraealtae  :  Already done - Note: Who recognised this? I thought this was a synonym?
• Anolis trinitatis  Done
• Anolis wattsii  Done

Common names we're keeping:

• bronze anole - seems unambiguous and native to areas where English is spoken
• knight anole - this name/species is common in the pet trade (calque from Latin), at least in Europe, but a bit on the fence here: "iguanito" seems to be the most common name in Florida, not unambiguous, and people speak Spanish in Cuba...
• Barbados anole - appears unambiguous

Done the first one, is that how you wanted it? Cheers, Polyamorph (talk) 21:19, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Hiya @Polyamorph:. Thanks for helping out! Super. Only I wouldn't bother with actually getting rid of the common names entirely -Just moving them to the Latin name would be good enough for me. In the case of A. agassizi one of the common names, not Malpelo anole as the article was first titled, appears validated by one of the sources (I just now added the url) - perhaps it is me being anally pedantic, but ideally each common name should be referenced; having said that, in at least half these anole articles there are big chunks of unreferenced text, so it's hardly a salient point. In one article I found measurements which were completely off by 250%, and a number of the photos are misidentified. So, just moving these articles to the Latin would be a major improvement. Again, thanks so much! Leo Breman (talk) 22:03, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I haven't reviewed all of these, but I agree with your rationalization, and support the moves in principle. We should generally avoid common names as titles when multiple common names can be attested. Species that don't occur in English speaking countries are unlikely to have English vernacular names that are more commonly used than the scientific name (species in the pet trade are an exception, but my sense is that pet species are likely to have multiple common names). Species that occur in English speaking countries of the Global South may have commonly used English vernacular names, but they are not necessarily the names invented by taxonomists in the Global North. Rare species with restricted ranges, and very recently described species are unlikely to have commonly used vernacular names. Plantdrew (talk) 22:14, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Cool. We are in agreement then. If you or others have some rational objections that is obviously fine. I mention the pet trade in Germany and the Netherlands because I have terraria books from those countries (I bred geckos for a bit (and sucked at it)), I am unfamiliar with the exact situation in the UK or USA. Regarding the Global South bit, yes, I think this is very important -a common name needs to be useful. If some kid in Guyana wants to know more about the lizard everyone calls, I don't know, "green foofoo", and conversely, if some researcher were to go to Guyana and ask locals for info about that specific lizard, then "green foofoo" is the vernacular name which Wikipedia should record, not some vain exercise in 'standardisation'.Leo Breman (talk) 23:09, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Most of them done now, I will leave the few that remain for people who can better review the rationale. Cheers, Polyamorph (talk) 11:48, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Okay, that's great Polyamorph! I guess I added a few  : which were already using the scientific name inadvertently. Sorry. Must have not been paying attention. I'll move the remaining species down here for clarity. By the way, I found another list of common names for Puerto Rican anoles from Puerto Rican researchers: again, the names are different than those of the lists listed above! Leo Breman (talk) 16:31, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

• Anolis gorgonae Not sure about this one

Regarding this one, I can see both ways. The name "blue anole" is 1. certainly unambiguous, and 2. it is sourced, but 3. the source is Monga Bay - a popular media web news site (they may have just invented the name for their piece) & 4. Gorgona is an uninhabited island belonging a Spanish-speaking country, with almost all research on this species done by native-Spanish speakers. Also, the Monga Bay writer, is not entirely correct: A. allisoni is quite blue, as is Anolis conspersus. Maybe a Google Hits thing is needed.

• Anolis nubilis - on the fence here, but name uncited
• Anolis sagrei - "brown anole" is a quite common and unambiguous name in the continental USA where it is introduced, but the species has other names in the pet trade as well as where it is native. That being said I am not wedded to changing it.
• Anolis vanzolinii - As mentioned above, the taxonomic interpretation as promoted by Nicholson, Savage, etc. is not in wide use and has little acceptance as yet. Specifically this genus has little taxonomic validity, as I understand it, and is merely a new wastebasket taxon created in order to split off better defined clades.

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