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florawiki.org

Hi folks!

Is there a new (experimental) Wiki project, which allows to mark taxons with morphological data, and allows identifying taxons by these data. Please take a look at http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikispecies:Village_Pump#Florawiki.org Pipi69e (talk) 14:33, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Probably misidentified Monarda photo

I'm fairly sure that File:Bee_balm.jpg is Monarda fistulosa not Monarda didyma based on (1) the color, (2) the length of the petioles (based on the illustration in my Peterson guide), (3) the white hairs [1], and (4) the lack of red bracts at the base of the inflorescence. By comparison, a photo which I believe to be M. didyma is here. The reason I'm asking here rather than just fixing it is that I'm not 100% sure that the diagnostic characters I'm using are reliable. There also exist M. clinopodia and about a dozen less common species, which I haven't made a particularly serious attempt to rule out. Kingdon (talk) 12:55, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Your right, and partly off too. Its a hybrid that includes both M fistulosa and M didyma in its linage. Hardyplants (talk) 19:04, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
Thanks, I've made suitable edits to commons:File:Bee_balm.jpg and Monarda didyma. If anyone has a M. didyma photo which they can confidently identify and which doesn't have a hummingbird in it, it would be nice for the taxobox (for now, I just put the hummingbird one in the taxobox). Kingdon (talk) 20:59, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Scientific names in genus categories

[fromthe archive] Rich Farmbrough, 15:35, 3 August 2009 (UTC). There seems to be a bit of confusion when it comes to sorting scientific names in genus categories. Here are some examples:

It would be nice to have consistency within and between categories. Any thoughts? Melburnian (talk) 03:26, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Is there a Bot that can do the sorting? Once a uniform way to do the sorting is worked out.Hardyplants (talk) 04:50, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I think they really have to be sorted by specific epithet, else you end up with every article listed under the first letter of the genus, which is no help at all. The remaining issue is whether to sort by lower case letter or upper case letter. I tried the former for Category:Banksia taxa by scientific name, and I thought it looked crap, so I settled on the latter. Hesperian 05:00, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I liked lowercase myself because it allows a neat separation of species from non-species article, but maybe that's just me. throw in Category:Acer under lowercase. Circeus (talk) 05:51, 17 September 2008 (UTC) Circeus (talk) 05:48, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I personally prefer sort by lowercase species epithet. I'm mid-sort on Category:Stylidium after having finished the sort at Category:Utricularia. --Rkitko (talk) 22:01, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Circeus makes a good point. I'm happy to change to lower case if that's what most others are doing. You haven't told us what you prefer, Melburnian.? Hesperian 23:43, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Agree, the separation of species from non-species articles mentioned by Circeus leads me to favour lower case. Additionally, this reflects the lower case of epithets. Melburnian (talk) 00:44, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

These are easy enough to fix, I am doing Category:Abies as a sample, and am happy to do them all if there are no objections. Rich Farmbrough, 15:31, 3 August 2009 (UTC).

I just finished part of Quercus (everything except a weirdly titled hybrid and IUCN-bot creations). Circeus (talk) 23:21, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
Seems good to me. The eponymous category should appear at the start of the category by using a space (" ") as the sort key per Wikipedia:Categorization. Two that I have done are Category:Eremophila (plant) and Category:Grevillea--Melburnian (talk) 01:30, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Quercus prinus

Anybody want to write up something about the nomenclatural mess surrounding this, Q. montana and Q. michauxii? I'd do it myself, but I'm unwilling to do so without having seen the Committee's opinion on proposal 1683 regarding rejection of Q. prinus (Taxon 52(1):213-214, 2005)—my university only subscribe to JSTOR for Taxon, as they have the paper copies, and report 57 (Taxon 56(2):590-594, 2007) is not free content). Circeus (talk) 21:16, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Cryptospores

I have attempted to de-orphan the article Cryptospores by adding links to it from the pages Spores, Paleobotany, and Evolutionary history of plants. The page Fossils also links to Cryptospores. I would appreciate it if someone would review these edits and work them in a more appropriate manner if necessary. Thanks, --Sophitessa (talk) 06:03, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Splitting Hawaiian lobelioids in several articles

No objection to creating the genus articles (and keeping Hawaiian lobelioids for the clade as a whole, per WP:SUMMARY). One complication is that the clade originated from within Lobelia, but as far as I know the researchers in this area are OK with a paraphyletic Lobelia for the short term, and long term are more likely to break up Lobelia into smithereens than to move all the Hawaiian plants into Lobelia (even if they did the latter, having separate articles for what are now genera would still make sense). Kingdon (talk) 19:42, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Youtan Poluo

I came across Youtan Poluo while working on WP:DEP, and this could use an expert eye. There are just enough hits on the internet that it's not a hoax (at least, not on the part of the author), but zero hits on gscholar and gbooks make me suspicious. Is this already under another name and just needs a redirect? Is it really that obscure? Thanks!--Fabrictramp | talk to me 17:56, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

I suspect it's not an active hoax, but it is utter nonsense. I deleted the article as such, but for anyone interested, the only reference was this article, which linked to other websites. The image used in that article was of lacewing eggs, taken from this website, which specifically states they are lacewing eggs. The article itself doesn't pass WP:RS since it's a blog with many other blatant errors. Folks at a more appropriate project (the Buddhism WikiProject?) might want to recreate the article regarding it's historical mythology, if there is any. As it is, I don't think it passes WP:Notability, either. --Rkitko (talk) 18:27, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
Glad to know my Wikisense wasn't tingling for nothing. :) --Fabrictramp | talk to me 18:54, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
A google scholar search for Udumbara seems to mostly point to Ficus glomerata (sometimes other figs). See Udumbara (Buddhism) which also mentions lacewing eggs as "flowers" (although I couldn't tell whether the relationship was any deeper than a shared or similar sounding word in Japanese). The other plants at that blog post seem to mostly exist, although I wouldn't take it as a reliable source either (e.g. regarding the native range of Kadupul, probably Epiphyllum oxypetalum). The blog post even takes their Drosera capensis photo from wikipedia, which I'll take as flattery. Kingdon (talk) 20:32, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Banksia prionotes FAC

Since the ArticleAlertBot is dead, I thought I should drop a mention here that Banksia prionotes is at WP:FAC. Hesperian 12:28, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Families

It took me a while, but I'm finished with this list. There's still quite a few redlinks toward the bottom of the page. I suspect many of those just need to be redirects. I'll create a few, probably later today. Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 15:38, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Recent work has Cytinaceae in Malvales (sister to Muntingiaceae), and Rafflesiaceae in Malpighiales (nested in Euphorbiaceae). Lavateraguy (talk) 17:47, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, there's been some changes since the 2007 Heywood ref this is taken from. The one change I was aware of was Hydatellaceae, so I placed a note next to it. We could do something similar to that with these you mentioned. --Rkitko (talk) 18:13, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
More stuff - Cynomoriaceae is in Saxifragales, Dipentodontaceae is sister to Tapisciaceae (combined as Huertales), and Balanophoraceae is in Santales. You can check the Angiosperm Phylogeny Website for other previously unplaced families. We'd have to look at the primary literature to see how stable these placements are. Lavateraguy (talk) 18:36, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

A for Buxbaumia

I can't recall the last time someone requested a project-internal evaluation of an article for "A" status, so I'm not quite sure what this request should look like. The article on Buxbaumia is currently a nominee for GA, but that process is now taking a month or more, and doesn't always end happily anyway. So, I'd like to gather opinions on the quality of the article I assembled on this weird little genus of mosses. In particular, does it meet the requirements to be rated an "A"? If not, then please suggest improvements. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:33, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I've given it a cursory reading and I do think the article could use quite a few prose improvements, but contentwise it seems okay. Right now I doN,t really have the time (catching up after a busy weekend), but if you poke me this week on my talk page, I'll be happy to do a thorough copyedit and note my issues. Circeus (talk) 02:11, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
I've given it a look and it looks pretty nice. Thanks for all the hard work, EncycloPetey. We need more photos. The two there are nice enough, but are both of B. viridis. We don't have any microscope photos of the gametophyte, for example. We should try to say more about what eats it (if known). I'm undecided about whether it is up to "A" standards but it definitely is a solid B. (One nit on process: we probably should be talking about this on the article's talk page, per Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment/A-Class criteria#Basic method). Kingdon (talk) 02:44, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
What eats it? The plant is so rarely seen or collected, I'd be surprised if there were any information on that. This is one of those genera that even bryologists rarely see. The rarity also makes photos very difficult to come by. In any case, bryology books have traditionally used drawings, even the textbooks, because the scale of photography makes focus extremely difficult to get right, and often isn't that informative anyway. Only in the past decade or so have photographic books of bryophytes started to come out (there are nice ones for Hong Kong and British Columbia). I've seen only three "photos" of Buxbaumia in all the resources I examined in preparing the article, and they were SEM images of antheridial plants. All other illustrations were line drawings. Frankly, I was very surprised that Commons had any photos of this genus at all, and their existence (and the genus' key phylogenetic position among the mosses) prompted me to get the article going.
Thanks for pointing out the "Basic method" link, by the way, as I was unaware that information existed. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:51, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, I suspect the "completeness" part is one of the trickiest parts of the criteria for GA, A, or FA (especially where the sources don't seem especially complete themselves), so I'll pass on trying to apply that. Anyway, in an attempt to track down some data myself rather than just complain, I did run into two things which have at least some source and which are probably worth adding (conservation status and maybe pathogens). One is that at least one, maybe two, species are on the red list of many countries (but not the IUCN list). No doubt many of the details in the following articles belong in species articles rather than the genus one, but the fact that it is considered endangered is presumably worth a mention at the genus. Regarding B. viridis: species action plan, [2] (left sidebar), Biological Conservation 59:2-3, pp. 151-154, Phosphorus concentration and pH in decaying wood affect establishment of the red-listed moss Buxbaumia viridis, A bryophytic community with Buxbaumia viridis on rotting logs in Switzerland, Substratum preference, spore output and temporal variation in sporophyte production of the epixylic moss Buxbaumia viridis Regarding B. aphylla: An update on the status of Buxbaumia aphylla on bings in central Scotland. Part of what makes me unsure of what to make of this is that it seems like a hard plant to accurately survey the occurence of due to its small size. Oh, the other thing was even more lacking in context - apparently the plant pathogen Cladosporium herbarum can infect Buxbaumia (along with other mosses). I don't know if any of your sources attempt to give a better idea pathogens than just one mention of one of them. Kingdon (talk) 02:07, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
Note: "completeness" is not one of the GA criteria, although many people mistakenly believe that it is. An article must be "fairly complete" for A status and "thorough" for FA status, but the GA criteria do not require completeness, merely "broad" coverage and "no obvious problems".
I'm aware of the country-specific redlistings. In general, bryophytes are very difficult to accurately assess [3], and the rarity of a taxon in one country does not mean it isn't common in another. Consider: the fern Dennstaedtia punctilobula is redlisted in Arkansas, but is common in the northeastern US. A redlisting in one or more countries merely describes local distribution patterns, and is only indicative of the one or two species anyway. The fact that certain species are redlisted by some countries is not pertinent to an article on the genus as a whole (unless the genus is monotypic), and instead should be noted on the individual species pages.
With regard to Cladosporium herbarum, why should that information be on the Buxbaumia page? If the pathogen affects multiple moss genera (in four orders in three different subclasses), then how is that relevant to the one genus? It looks to me more like trivia than article content. It's relevant to the fungus article, since that's ow it was discovered, but why should that matter for the articles about the host plants? If someone discovers a new species of bacterium in the gut of humans, pigs, and walruses, does that bacterium deserve mention on the articles about each host organism? --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
Agreed on all those points, which is why I didn't add those things to the article myself. I suppose I was hoping that you (or someone else) had conservation/pathogen information which was in a usable form, but if not, no problem. As I said before, thanks for all your work on this article. Kingdon (talk) 11:23, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Gardenia jasminoides

Hi all, I am pumping this up for DYK (cntrl-F to find on the T:TDYK board), I didn't intiially think of it as I figured it would surely have something bigger than a stub, but it didn't/hasn't so I am buffing it. I am not hugely familiar with non-oz plants. If anyone has any background on the taxonomy and how the names got sorted I'd be hugely appreciative. Casliber (talk · contribs) 05:55, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Ugently required - a WikiProject Barnstar

Our large, active and accomplished (60 articles Featured/Good) WikiProject desperately needs a WikiProject barnstar. Please will someone make one & put it up for public adulation and brickbats? AshLin (talk) 11:19, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Looking at existing awards:
  • The former "barnstar of Life"
    The former "barnstar of Life"
  • An alternate barnstar for life sciences
    An alternate barnstar for life sciences
  • A "Botany barnstar" apparently from nl: (from our dear Brya, no less)
    A "Botany barnstar" apparently from nl: (from our dear Brya, no less)
None of these are entirely satisfactory, but I'm not quite in the mood for creating one ATM (which would not necessarily be difficult. You can do some interesting stuff with kaleidoscopic filters on a palmate or digitate leaf, or using a fern frond). Circeus (talk) 17:56, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
The similarity to a whorl of leaves or petals is impossible to pass up. Is there a 5-partite flower with narrow yellow-brown petals and big colourful sepals? i.e. the reverse of File:Blaue Borretsch Blüte, Borago officinalis.JPG. Hesperian 23:40, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
Trillium species come to mind, but have only three petals and sepals. Solanum flowers, if one showing the right angle can be found, might do the trick. Looking through a few genera I can remember:
Circeus (talk) 16:20, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
Some Oxalidaceae fruits are also cool for that. A starfruit section could work, as would the dehiscent fruit of Biophytum sensitivum if there were a picture available. Aquilegia would also be nice, when the flower is turned to face the viewer.
--EncycloPetey (talk) 04:55, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
I think we should leave the starfruit for WikiProject Food and drink. Maybe someone should suggest it to them.... Hesperian 05:09, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
On the other hand, the Aquilegia is just about perfect. Note the ring in the middle, especially.
  • A circle inside a five-pointed star
    A circle inside a five-pointed star
  • A circle inside a five-pointed star
    A circle inside a five-pointed star
Hesperian 05:16, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
  • the best one
    the best one
  • or a frangipani...
    or a frangipani...

hehehe, Casliber (talk · contribs) 07:47, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

I'll see about doinfg something with one of those:

Circeus (talk) 00:48, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Adnation

I just discovered that if you type "adnation" into the search box and hit Go, you'll be presented with search results consisting of two articles, one of which contains the word "bingo-fest". Hesperian 13:54, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

The plain English translation of the above is "does someone who understands floral anatomy want to turn adnation into a stub or redirect somewhere?" Hesperian 23:28, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Done. Now we need connation, which if it's still red later, I may make. And then someone can suggest merging the articles.--Curtis Clark (talk) 04:22, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Connation done.--Curtis Clark (talk) 04:53, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
You rock, Curtis. Adnate and connate were redirecting to conjoined twins for reasons that are not explained and which I'd rather not think about. I've done an extremely clumsy and ignorant job of converting them to dab pages. Hesperian 05:13, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Cool, thanks (I guess it depends on whether the twins are joined by their petals, or stamen to buttock). But neither "adnate" nor "connate" exist in that article. Since they are adjectives, which is not the ideal form for an article name, perhaps they should be speedied.--Curtis Clark (talk) 13:33, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Damn...that almost resulted in coffee all over my keyboard and clothes. Need something equivalent to a "not safe for work" warning. :) Guettarda (talk) 17:05, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
A wikt:drink alert, perhaps? --Una Smith (talk) 06:00, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

At times I have tried to do something constructive about Conjoined twins and related articles, but I found them to be watchlisted by editors who seem determined to drive as many viewers as possible to those articles, by any means. I do understand where adnate and connate come in; medical authors sometimes use the terms, although not necessarily with any great precision. Medicine concerns one species, us, and our ordinary variation is rather limited, so when it is necessary to describe something out of the ordinary, vocabulary can be a challenge. I think this underlies much of the mess in the medical literature over Fetus in fetu. Even in peer reviewed journals, some authors write as if they believe any knobby whatnot qualifies as a fetus. It follows that they must also believe a fetus is a knobby whatnot. Ie, they have no knowledge of developmental biology. --Una Smith (talk) 06:00, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

AFD

FYI - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of horticulture and gardening books. I'd have added this to the main project page but didn't want to mess with the alertbot. Colonel Warden (talk) 19:42, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Common Metric Conversion Errors In Many Wiki Plants Articles

I have noted and corrected a number of Imperial to Metric conversion errors on Wiki Plant articles. As an example, the article for the American Smoke Tree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_tree) listed dimensions of 10 to 15 m (meters) in height. This would have converted to between 32 and 50 feet. The actual numbers should have been 3 to 5 meters and 10 to 15 feet. Clearly this is a significant conversion error and is, apparently, very common in Wiki Plant articles. My assumption is that contributors listed Imperial/US measures and subsequent editors (or a conversion bot?) added the "m" to reflect the Wiki's metric standard. In any event, I would suggest that all Wiki Plant articles be reviewed by their respective editors/maintainers for correct conversions. Additionally, I would suggest that both a primary Metric and a secondary Imperial measurement be listed, as there are still hundreds of millions of Wiki users who are familiar with Imperial/US measurements. (MOB)DeadMeat (talk) 16:46, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Appreciate the corrections. I have a feeling someone came along and just altered the units or if both are listed, modified one metric but not the other. I've seen that happen on a number of pages I watch. There are entirely too many plant articles for us to check manually (nearing 35,000 and those are just the ones that have been tagged with our banner), but I'll keep an eye out. In articles I create, I tend to use the units associated with the country where the plant is found as primary and use the {{convert}} template to calculate the other units. Some units have no meaningful translation to the imperial system, e.g. smaller millimetre measurements can't be conceived of as 1/10th of an inch. Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 17:35, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, people change tree heights a lot and sometimes don't change both metric/english (I suppose {{convert}} is the solution to that). For tree heights, I'd agree with both metric and English (well, at least for places like the United States, I'm not as sure about trees which are only found in countries which don't use English units). For other measurements, metric-only sometimes makes sense (for example, in describing the size of cells or ultrastructures, where micrometers are ubiquitous and "millionths of an inch" and the like are not going to help anyone understand what is going on, as much as it might be intended to help a certain class of reader). Kingdon (talk) 19:38, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
We don't convert units of measurement for the tree but for the reader of English, not knowing which system he's familiar with. --Milkbreath (talk) 19:50, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
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