Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora)/Draft

Comments on intro

The 1st paragraph of the intro currently states this:

This naming convention addresses how best to name articles about plants. It should be interpreted in the context of the general naming conventions policy, which recommends using the most common name in English, provided this is unbiased, sufficiently precise, and sufficiently unambiguous. The most common name is determined by seeing what reliable sources in English call the subject.

I'm okay with that. The 2nd paragraph is:

In applying this broader convention to plants, the main issue that arises is when to use the botanical (i.e. scientific) name versus when to use a vernacular name.

To be consistent with the 1st paragraph, the issue is not whether to use the botanical or vernacular; it's determining which is used most commonly.

Vernacular names, when they exist, vary from place to place.

This is true for many subjects besides plants. I'm not sure why this is worth mentioning here.

A plant often has many vernacular names, and a vernacular name is often reused many times to refer to different plant taxa or subtly different circumscriptions of a plant taxon. Thus the adoption of a vernacular name is often fraught with issues of imprecision, ambiguity and regional bias. Experience has shown this issue to be a constant source of conflict.

Whether all or any of this is true in general is irrelevant to determining the appropriate name in any particular case. The only thing that should matter in any particular case is whether in that case the Latin or one of the vernacular names is most common, whether there are multiple vernacular names fraught with imprecision, ambiguity and regional bias for the topic of that article, etc.

Botanical ... are consistently the most commonly used names when this is "determined by seeing what reliable sources in English call the subject."

That's just plain false, unless you're conflating "reliable sources in English" with ONLY purely scientific sources.

If that second paragraph is supposed to be consistent with the first paragraph and establish the basis for the guideline, it needs a lot of work.

It's interesting that you're inclined to make an argument on these general terms. That would be relevant if your intent is to ignore the general guidelines (contrary to what the first paragraph says). I suggest picking one approach or the other. --Born2cycle (talk) 01:35, 27 December 2008 (UTC)