Wikispecies:Village Pump/Archive 23

This is an archive of closed discussions. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this archive.

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Call for image filter referendum

The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of the Board of Trustees, will be holding a vote to determine whether members of the community support the creation and usage of an opt-in personal image filter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen particular types of images strictly for their own account.

Further details and educational materials will be available shortly. The referendum is scheduled for 12-27 August, 2011, and will be conducted on servers hosted by a neutral third party. Referendum details, officials, voting requirements, and supporting materials will be posted at m:Image filter referendum shortly.

For the coordinating committee,
Philippe
Cbrown1023
Risker
Mardetanha
PeterSymonds
Robert Harris

Cbrown1023 talk 20:18, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Personal image filter referendum: reminder

Hello. :) Though this is not local policy, the dates are approaching, and I wanted to make sure that your project was aware--as it is certainly far-reaching. (It seems like it might not have a lot of impact here, but might, and could certainly still be of interest.)

The referendum is scheduled for 12-27 August. You can read more about it at m:Image filter referendum/en; if you are interested in weighing in, you may especially want to review M:Image filter referendum/FAQ/en. Thanks! --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 13:36, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Various languages

I think Wikispecies would be better if it has been in various languages. According to me Wikispecies would have to take other information as well as the taxon navigation. That information includes vital functions by a table like this.

Breathing	Cellular membrane/Leaves/Skin/Windpipe/Gills/Lungs
Nutrition (for animals)	Herbivorous/Carnivorous/Omnivorous
Reproduction	Bipartition/Insemination/Viviparous

Another advise: in my opinion subspecies have to be in the same page of the main specie because specie is the smallest category in the Linnaeus' classification.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 09:42, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Please refer to the Wikispecies FAQ. This suggestion has been rejected many times, since that information is not about the taxonomic names. Information about the biology of each species is placed in a Wikipedia article about that species. We only cover the names and taxonomy here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:16, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages

This category is huge (currently 1,527 entries) and could usefully be subdivided and clarified with some change in usage in some cases. I'd like to suggest the following proposals:

• Author disambiguation pages (e.g. A. Machado) - split out as Category:Author disambiguation pages
• Valid inter-kingdom genus homonyms (e.g. Abronia) - split out as Category:Genus disambiguation pages
• Valid inter-kingdom species homonyms (e.g. Agathis montana; these are fairly rare) - split out as Category:Species disambiguation pages
• Valid names versus invalid later homonyms. Thousands of names have invalid later homonyms, but only a few of these (e.g. Actaea racemosa) have been made into disambiguation pages here. The valid species pages should not really be disambiguation pages (and in the vast majority of cases, aren't) just because of usually very obscure historical later homonyms; the valid name should occupy the 'headline' page, with I'd suggest a hatlink at the top to a separate page, something like e.g. "This name has been used invalidly for other taxa by other authors; see Actaea racemosa (homonyms) for a list of the invalid homonyms and their application"; these disambiguation pages can then go in a Category:Invalid homonym disambiguation pages.

Thoughts, anyone? Would it be possible to get a robot to do the task, or would it require manual editing? - MPF (talk) 14:39, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

The first thing to think about here is that that category link comes from a template, so we'd need to create separate templates for all the subcategories (that should not be difficult though). Once the templates were created, it would probably be an AWB job (but a doable one) to change all the pages over to the new (unless someone can suggest a qualifier string to separate them automatically, I don't see one). I agree with the idea of breaking them up. Your first 3 proposals sound quite reasonable to me. The fourth sounds a bit clunkier, especially as hatlinks aren't in general use here are far as I have seen, but I'll reserve judgement on that one pending what others think. There are also a few pages not covered in your categories, which are, for example, those where an author surname is identical to a taxon name. Some disambiguation pages are actually valid taxon pages with a disambig template added at the top (somewhat like a hat link), and we could also separate those out to separate disambig pages and correct the links. It would be a lot of work, but then we'd actually be able to clean out all the links to dab pages and point them where they belong. There is also a companion project (that I've already been working on a little at a time as I go through taxon pages, and which I may focus more heavily on later) to disambig the links to author disambiguation pages. This (I think) would be where the separate categories would find their real value. Koumz (talk) 16:59, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't see how separate templates would be feasible or practical. Also, the list above does not cover all the possibilities. For example, there are some author names that are also genus names. There are also many invalid names that are not later homonyms. Botanists may choose to conserve a younger name over an older one, and there is a long list of these situations now. In my own field, the problem is compounded by the simultaneous publication of three different "global" treatments in the 19th century by different authors who did not all agree on the same set of generic names. The list also does not account for situations where there are multiple invalid homonyms with no valid ones.

In the end, what need is there for subcategorization? Is the proposal put forward simply because there is a large number? What's wrong with a large category? --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:53, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Status quo is perfectly fine ... Stho002 (talk) 23:32, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I am fine either way. I don't usually look at that category but I do create a number of disambiguation pages. I am also starting to work on disambiguating authors. Open2universe | Talk 00:55, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

MerlIwBot

Since being approved, MerlIwBot has removed many (hundreds? thousands?) of vernacular names because of format misunderstandings of earlier editors. I've seen a common mistake (at least on the plants pages) where a user entered the vernacular name in the form of an interwiki link. Since there is no target for the link, MerlIwBot has been removing all of these. These need instead to be restored and converted to the correct format for the vernacular names. Who want to start the hundreds of edits this will take? --EncycloPetey (talk) 05:59, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I see that problem as unavoidable. How do you tell an iw that was intended to be a vn? Vns will all have to be manually entered in correct vn format ... Stho002 (talk) 06:40, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

I volunteer for the job. There are "only" a couple of thousand edits and not all need fixing ... tedious but doable, and I'll try to figure out a way to AWB it in the process. I think the block was a good idea at least temporarily. I have a couple of other ideas on the situation, but I want to do some research on its edits (by starting the job) to get information about those ideas. Koumz (talk) 14:07, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Preliminary findings based on edits: The bot is probably doing much more good than harm. The vast majority of the pages I've seen so far where iw links need to be converted to VNs come systematically from pages created by a couple of prolific contributors (User:Alperen and User:Keith Edkins) and from Slovak pages deleted due to copyvio. There are three users who added both IWs and VNs in Japanese and sometimes Chinese to many pages indiscriminately, and the bot is doing much good by removing these bad iws (User:NAGAI Eiji, User:MushiHoshiIshi, User Oldy nsw). I'd think if we ask Merlissimo to hold off running for a while until we can go through and fix Alperen's and Keith Edkins' pages, that should fix most of the problem. Koumz (talk) 16:16, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

If there is a way the bot can be set not to any remove non-Japanese links, and instead generate a skip list for the dead links so they can be reviewed, that would be the ideal case. I haven't found one problem with its actions on the Japanese links in the ~500 pages I've processed so far.Koumz (talk) 20:12, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Have you notified the bot owner to see if he/she can correct this issue? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 23:10, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Notified the bot owner at the user's Wikipedia talk page OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:50, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

The bot ran again several hours ago and generated another ~150 edits to check. That number does count as restraint on its part, I guess. Koumz (talk) 13:28, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I have processed its new edits. Still about 1000 pages to go on the original set. Koumz (talk) 17:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Note that the user's primary user page is on the German Wikipedia, not the English one. I've tried to explain the problem to him, as I have before. He doesn't seem to have understood the bit where I asked him to check on the problem here before running the bot again, or chose to ignore it. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:34, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Just a small piece of history. Wikispecies did not initially support interwikis, but we hoped to one day, so there was confusion between common names and what would eventually be an interwiki. Open2universe | Talk 12:02, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

That explains a lot of things. Koumz (talk) 13:24, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Hi, I started the bot to frist check all existing interwikis on wikispecies. The bot initially found about 7300 interwikis on wikispecies that link to not existing targets. Most of them are already removed. The bot also corrected interwikis if e.g. a page was moved or added missing interwikis.

After this is done the bot will add new interwikis at species. For this the bot reads data from the taxabox that is used to create a link to wikispecies. We have discussed this at the flag request. At the moment i have about 38000 hints on my database from threee wikis.

EncycloPetey informed me in the past that the bot has done some wrong additions. Of course if a human added a wrong interwiki somewhere the bot rely on this and will propagate this to all wikis. These are errors that must be corrected globally and not only on a single wiki. On a single wiki you could add interwiki in comments, that will prevent from adding a wrong interwiki again, but this won't help to improve the global interwiki quality.

The normal way is that the bot operator is informed and then tries to correct the wrong interwiki manually. My bot is running at a very high speed (800-1000 edits/hour on all 275 wikis), so of cource many errors are reported, but very few compared to the edits that were done.

EncycloPetey told me that i cannot use the latin taxa name for identifing that same species. That's why i ask him for help on grouping the different articles correctly for the reported error but unfortunately i got no help.

Most wiki are using the latin name and the year of discovery but not all. So how likely is it that the same latin name is used for different species? Or could you give me a hint how i can validate that two articles are about the same species?

I you want i could create lists of wikispecies articles having an interwiki to one language (e.g. en) but no vn parameter for this language. Merlissimo (talk) 16:49, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Can you tell us an approximate number of how many dead (non-existing) interwikis remain from the 7300? If we can get a list of articles with dead interwiki but no VN for the same language as the dead interwiki, that would help a lot, but a list of ALL interwikis with no VN would be flooded by Latin name interwikis and be too big to use well. Koumz (talk) 17:29, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

About 800 are not yet checked and about 3000 are not removed because of some error (page locked or the code position was suspect (in a sentence or after bullet)). But i still have all of them (including the removed ones) in my database.

I would like to ask kolossos if he could add specieswiki to templatetiger. Then i could use his data for checking the vn parameters. Merlissimo (talk) 17:51, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Merlissimo, the problem with Latin names and interwiki is not with species, but is with geners, families, orders, classes, and divisions (phyla). For example, Bryophyta here and on the English wikipedia includes just the mosses, and this is how "Bryophyta" is used on most wikipedias. However, other wikipedias use "Bryophyta" to mean a group including Bryophyta, Anthocerotophyta, and Marchantiophyta, while calling the mosses "Bryopsida" Here, "Bryopsida" is the arthrodontous mosses only, and that is a different circumscription. These two disparate uses of "Bryophyta" and "Bryopsida" are continual problems when bots link the wrong pages because one site did so. The same is true for Anthocerotophyta / Anthocerotopsida / Anthocerotales, where the name for that group varies from wikipedia to wikipedia.

Creating a list of these problems, or fixing all the existing such problems is beyond the ability of a single editor, and probably beyond several editors. I had to spend a great deal of my interwiki editing time just getting the Indonesian article on "Bryophyta" fixed, because they didn't understand the problem and no one interacting with me spoke English. It took more than a week to deal with that one instance. It didn't help that bots kept propogating their incorrect links, so that with every round of editing, I had to fix all the interwikis across several dozen wikipedias by hand. The fact that you think I can single-handedly solve this problem in my spare time shows that you do not understand how big and how common this problem is. When someone like me points out that a bot is propogating problems, it is the bot's owner who much correct the bot, not the discoverer's problem to conform to what the bot is doing. that;s backwards.

Now with species, there is a nother problem. Sometimes, different Wikipedias will use different Latin names for the same species. Look at the interwiki links for Harpago chiragra and you'll see a mix of Latin names. That's because some wikipedias are using the older name, before the latest round of synonymy. So, the Latin names for species may not match between projects.

So, the same Latin name may mean different things, and different Latin names may mean the same thing. You cannot go by the Latin name used. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:16, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

After you have solved the interwiki problem e.g. around Bryophyta, just should add notice on one of my or my bot talk pages with a permanent link to the correct version. Then i will make sure that your solution is globally propagated. My bot also checks if there are some reverse links left that could cause conflicts (this cannot be done manually). E.g. simple:Bryophyte or az:Mamırkimilər still links to id:Tumbuhan lumut, which i think is incorrect. I also hope this was correct. I just need a correct list of all articles that belong to one group. Everything else is easy for a script.

Could we create a project page where i could post my interwiki group suggestions after i tried to solve an interwiki conflict manually? So that s.b. could review this before i'll solve this conflict in source code? Merlissimo (talk) 21:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

VN lists and solutions

There are 2004 pages out of these 7300 pages with invalid interwiki target that have no vn template. I created a list at User:Merlissimo/VN with prefilled template code which is also used as sort order. So duplicate interwiki targets should be listed next to each other. Merlissimo (talk) 22:25, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I removed all cases where wikispecies page title = interwiki taget title. Now there are only 1396 cases left. Merlissimo (talk) 22:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

This list is EXACTLY what we need to fix these pages. THANK YOU! Can you set the bot not to edit the pages on this list so that we will have time to fix them? Koumz (talk) 23:03, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

The one situation the list doesn't cover, though, is when the VN template exists on the page, but doesn't contain the language of the dead interwiki (a lot of the bad sk interwikis are this way), so we'll still have to catch those by monitoring the bot's edits directly and fixing manually, I think. Koumz (talk) 23:56, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

That's why i already asked kolossos to add wikispecies to templatetiger as already mentioned above. After he has done the scan i can also create a list of dead interwiki with missing vp parameter in this language. btw are you using the iso code or the wmf language code as parameter name? On the template suggestions i used the wmf language code (=interwiki prefix). e.g. iso language of alswiki is gsw.

The bot is not using this list as starting point anymore, but it could be that some related page are checked. So no remove only edits. Merlissimo (talk) 01:19, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

As far as I can see, the VN template is using wmf codes, but for almost all of the languages we're likely to deal with in these lists the codes will be the same anyway. That list from templatetiger will be very useful also. I think that it is a good solution for the bot to not use the dead interwiki list and not delete until we are done cleaning up the VNs from the 2 lists you are supplying to us. Then once we have that all done, the bot can then rescan for any remaining dead interwikis and delete those. The bot did a really good job of knocking out all those useless indiscriminate Japanese links. Based on this solution as we have described it here, my concerns on the subject of VNs are resolved and I am OK with having the bot edit here again as far as the VN subject is concerned. I don't mean to minimize the other concerns EncyloPetey has, though; those also need to be addressed somehow. Koumz (talk) 02:30, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I have now completed processing on all edits done by the bot. Koumz (talk) 15:15, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

GLAM/ARKive: invitation to assist in adding or translating content about endangered species, donated to Wikipedia

Hi,

I am the Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador to ARKive, who have kindly agreed to donate an initial 200 article texts about endangered species from their project, to Wikipedia, under a CC-BY-SA license. Details are on the GLAM/ARKive project page. Your help, to merge the donated texts into articles. Guidelines for doing so are also on the above page. Once articles have been expanded using the donated texts, we are also seeking assistance in having those articles translated into other languages, to further raise awareness of the plight of the endangered species - and, of course, to grow our multi-lingual encyclopedia. Perhaps you know others who might be interested in this endeavour; for example students who are learning the target language, or English, and need practice? Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, on the project's talk page, or my own en-WP talk page. Andy Mabbett (talk) 13:51, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

ARKive

Possibly useful Does anyone think that it could be useful to create an external links template to ARKive? Koavf (talk) 08:29, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Huh I just came here and clicked on "New topic" and didn't notice what was written above. There you have it. Koavf (talk) 08:30, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

We don't find that particular donation to be useful since it's all text. One of our project's main objective is to sought after images of species. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 03:31, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Link templates

I've just constructed three new external link templates: Template:ION for Index to Organism Names, Template:NZ for Nomenclator Zoologicus, and Template:EoL for Encyclopedia of Life. Template:ION and Template:NZ are currently search links (rather than linking to a specific record via an id number) because that was the pattern I saw in existing links to those sites. The capability to also link to a specific record via an id number could be added to the template if it would be useful. Hopefully these will save some typing/pasting time. Koumz (talk) 03:15, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

New Vernacular names feature

I added a 3-column feature for the Vernacular names (which can extend to a considerable length) for the browsers Google chrome and Safari. Inrernet Explorer is not yet supported. Mariusm (talk) 16:50, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Fixing template request

I've made this template: Template:ReptileDB_species by copying wikimedia's similar template. I've tried to adapt with the span tag, but the result: still have the break gap between links. Help please. --Uondre (talk) 15:22, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

We already have templates for the New Reptile Database. They are Template:NRDB genus and Template:NRDB species Koumz (talk) 15:25, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Yours has better functionality and documentation than the existing one, so I'll try to move at least the documentation over. We want to keep the existing templates over yours only because there are so many uses of them already. Koumz (talk)

Author Page Help

Is there any help page for what should written on author page? I think we should make the standard, such as: full name, publications, interwiki, etc. Thanks. --Ultima.ramza (talk) 01:26, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

See Help:Author Names Koumz (talk) 01:30, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad. Because there's just a few information. Thanks, anyway. --Ultima.ramza (talk) 02:04, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

no author help

This author: Vinson, J., and J.—M. Vinson. 1969. The saurian fauna of the Mascarene Islands. Mauritius Institute Bulletin, 6:203-320.
No entry on Catalog:Taxon_Authorities/V. Help! --Ultima.ramza (talk) 02:00, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Vinson at Phelsuma edwardnewtoni,also Kaudern at Phelsuma guttata --Ultima.ramza (talk) 02:36, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

jean and jean-michel vinson MIRROR (talk) 21:15, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Template:Taxonav

No documentation on Template:Taxonav, so how and when to implement it? Thanks--Ultima.ramza (talk) 04:22, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

We use it only at the level of family to show/hide the classification above family, so as not to be distracted by irrelevant data ... Stho002 (talk) 06:39, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer.--Ultima.ramza (talk) 13:31, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Unidentified Lepidoptera

español: ¿Alguien sabría decir el nombre científico de este Lepidoptera: File:Lepidoptera 00.jpg, File:Lepidoptera 02.jpg, File:Lepidoptera 03.jpg, File:Lepidoptera 04.jpg, File:Lepidoptera 05.jpg, File:Lepidoptera 06.jpg? Muchas gracias

--HombreDHojalata (talk) 14:46, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Translation for non-Spanish speakers: Can anyone identify the moth in the images? Koumz (talk) 23:43, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Possibly belongs to the big family Cossidae ... Stho002 (talk) 03:36, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Thank you --HombreDHojalata (talk) 17:49, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Links to Wikipedia?

Was I correct in making this edit? Because I could find templates for linking to Commons and to Books, but not to Wikipedia (except the one I used). So maybe there's a policy against it? It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 20:15, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

We use interwikis, and there was already one on the Arthropoda page, like this [[en:Arthropoda]], which appears down the left hand margin of the page ... Stho002 (talk) 21:24, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Radical change

So here's a giant change. For every sucessful proposed change, we could move it at meta:. My proposal is mainly about the multilingualism of species.wikimedia. My proposed changes are to:

• Change "species.wikimedia" to "wikispecies"
  • This is since the preferred name is "wikispecies" and "wikimedia" sounds like a meta project.
    • The wiki would be moved, and this site will be here to redirect to wikispecies.org.
• Have different wikis for different languages
  • The primary language is English (en), and most articles are only in english. To have good coverage in other languages, I think that multiple wikis are the best way to promote other languages.
• Possible language wikis of wikispecies go to incubator:
  • The prefix would be W(s). The WikimediaIncubator extension would require a couple small changes though.
• For any page in other languages, we import them to the Incubator with the correct prefixes.
  • We would need the full history, and it must be in the XML file. Can be got with Special:Export. There are instructions for importing to incubator here.

Thanks for your time, Ebe123 (talk) 22:46, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. Ebe123 (talk) 22:46, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Oppose

1. pointless Stho002 (talk) 03:12, 15 October 2011 (UTC)
2. Agree it is pointless MKOliver (talk) 03:55, 15 October 2011 (UTC)
3. Multilingualism and forking are certainly politically correct and would draw more casual audience. However, our target audience are scientists and English has been the medium of communication for scientists and taxonomists for last two hundred years. Your proposal do not appear to have taken this into consideration. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:15, 15 October 2011 (UTC)
4. The point here is to have a single language-neutral reference point here. There really is nothing to translate other than the headings, and all these are known to the scientific community. Perhaps if Ebe123 was an editor/contributor here and had a full login, he/she might gain more influence. Accassidy (talk) 15:39, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Neutral

Discussion

I will be applying the incubator rule which is if no comment in 7 days, since no one found a reason to oppose, this is automatically accepted. Ebe123 (talk) 00:29, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Ebe123, mind if I ask which area (e.g. arts, science, business) did you study in? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 03:02, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Why do you want to know? Ebe123 (talk) 10:57, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Cause if you're not scientist, you may not be aware that all official species names are in Latin. Forking it into different languages is totally pointless. Keeping the project focused in English may not sound politically correct but this is how the taxonomy community functions. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:05, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

I know, but we also have pages about people here. Ebe123 (talk) 22:29, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Just like, chemistry is more based in english and in french, all is like reversed. Too the point that translating costs alot and if you are in a french university, you need english textbooks, and you get really badly confused. Ebe123 (talk) 22:31, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

I say forget it. We have Wikipedia in many languages, and all the info from Wikispecies can be put on Wikipedia pages, and we can link to those pages, so if you want it all in different languages, then get busy on Wikipedia ... Stho002 (talk) 22:46, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Threat to global biodiversity from "tabloid science"

see here: http://species-id.net/wiki/User:Stephen_Thorpe/Global_Biodiversity_Estimation

Special characters

Who can repair Special characters. It don't work more than a month.

Regards,

PeterR (talk) 08:56, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Stopping with additing species

For a while i am stopping with additing species. Reason: for additing species wiki is now a mist. You have wait a few minutes before you can additing a species. If you save the species it jumps to a species that you didn't save. Even the genus have nothing to do with the saved species. Special characters don't work etc. If I can ordently add species again I shall try again to add species.

Regards

PeterR (talk) 10:23, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

On my computer everything works fine, including the special characters. Maybe the problem is with your computer? (some kind of virus or a bad installation of software). Can you please try to edit from another computer and see if it works there? Mariusm (talk) 16:45, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Crosswiki spammer

Hi everyone. I don't know where else I should ask this, so that's why I'm doing it here.

• Allensmith (talk • contribs • block log • all projects)

Please block the account above locally for infinity. It's a crosswiki spammer and I globally locked many accounts today (see m:Special:Log/Trijnstel and search for the "spam-only accounts" of 20 October). Some are non-sul accounts and this is one of them (see here) and I'm therefore unable to lock it. Thanks in advance for your help.

Kind regards, Trijnstel (talk) 12:13, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

 Done by Ucucha (thanks!). Trijnstel (talk) 19:23, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

insertae sedis: corrections to incertae sedis

There are quite a number of wikispecies pages with the heading "insertae sedis" that have to be corrected to "incertae sedis", as "incertus" is the Latin word for "uncertain". Is a Bot there to do that work? Regards --Kempf EK (talk) 16:13, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

 Done. There were about 30 pages needing changes, which is actually quite small in bot terms. Koumz (talk) 20:56, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Reached 300,000 articles

Congratulations. We now reached over 300,000 species articles on Wikispecies. The 300,000th article is Megaselia mantuana, created by User:KoumzBot on October 22. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 17:45, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

• Excellent news. I'm therefore very glad to have been able to help set us forward on the road to 400,000!! Accassidy (talk) 18:23, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

How do we determine the number of Species articles as opposed to the number of articles in the Main Namespace? --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:58, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

• I suspect that we have 300,000 articles on taxa ranging from the sub-specific upwards. Ohana please correct me if this is wrong. Accassidy (talk) 10:54, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

  Does the number include taxonomic authority pages as well, or not? Wikisource separates the count, but their data structure is also much more complex. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:10, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

  Silly me, all of you are right and I'm wrong. I totally forgot about taxon authorities. The figure includes all articles in Main Namespace, including species, taxon authorities, disambig pages, and main page in different languages (but there're only 66 of such pages). I have amended the announcement by striking out the incorrect portion of the sentence. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 17:17, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

• I expect we only have pages for about 5% or so of all named species ... Stho002 (talk) 21:39, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

• Reliability should be the main pillar for the reputation of wikispecies. Therefore, not the quantity but the quality of articles is decisive. For the inclusion of taxa, the original publications should be used as a base. Kempf EK (talk) 12:11, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
  • Professor Kempf is absolutely correct. Quality, and therefore usefulness to any user, is vitally important. One of the advantages of a Wiki system is continual peer review, which will inevitably lead to improved quality. To this end, I would welcome input from more workers in my area, and feedback from other users on how to make articles better. For example, with older taxa it is now perfectly legal to include reproductions of images from original descriptions that are now in the public domain. See Arhopala fulla for example. Keep up the good work! Accassidy (talk) 16:10, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

    Possible, but not always desirable. Linnaeus' illustrations of seedless plants and algae leave much to the imagination. ;) --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:39, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Does anyone have an image of Megaselia mantuana? It would be nice to see something when people flock to this page after the announcement is spread to elsewhere. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:39, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

It is an obscure species belonging to a huge genus. I doubt very much if there are any images available of this species, but there are plenty of images of other species in the genus on Google images (all Megaselia species look very similar) Stho002 (talk) 05:42, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Crosswiki spammer (again)

Hi everyone. I have a crosswiki spammer for you (again) to block.

• Notebook (talk • contribs • block log • all projects)

Please block the account above locally for infinity and also delete the page Notebookdepo. This is again a nonsul account (link). Thanks in advance for your help.

Kind regards, Trijnstel (talk) 09:48, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

• Done. Accassidy (talk) 10:12, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

The Plant List

This project is rapidly expanding the status of accepted and synonymous plant names. I am sure you are aware of the project on http://www.theplantlist.org/ will we need to work through Wikispecies or is it being done? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Andyboorman (talk • contribs).

Is what being done? I'm not sure what you mean. "The Plant List" is still in its infancy, and is a database dump full of countless errors and many ommissions. It does not yet correlate the problems of different synonymous names from the different lists, and is not (yet) a reliable source of information. No expert I've talked to would rely on "The Plant List" for an area in which they were familiar. So, what is it you are wanting to do about The Plant List? --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:04, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Miselia

Miselia Boisduval, 1829 is preoccupied by Miselia? and is a synonymy of Allophyes. I can't find the genus Miselia in wiki. Who can help.

PeterR (talk) 11:22, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

The short answer is Miselia, but it may be more complicated... Stho002 (talk) 06:05, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

watch this page

By additing species I see watch this page (automaticly activated). Who is watching this contributions? I thought Wiki is a free media.

PeterR (talk) 12:51, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Wiki is a free media, but you have the option to watch pages. Some new people will watch pages they create, in order to learn how corrections are made and to learn format. Experienced users watch some pages of important taxa to make sure they are not vandalized, or to help keep added information in the correct format. I watch this page, so I will know when a new discussion starts and so I can help answer questions. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:58, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

and of course anybody can look at Special:Contributions/PeterR and know every single edit you've done (or mine). That's what accountability on Wikimedia projects means. Circeus (talk) 19:17, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

though it could take them a wee while to trawl thru all mine! :) Stho002 (talk) 22:13, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation "Answers"

Hi. :) I just wanted to let you all know that the Wikimedia Foundation is testing a potential new communication system intended to provide a central address to which community members who need assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation or who have questions about the Foundation or its activities can reach out and find answers. This system is being unrolled on a trial basis to test its efficiency and usefulness to communities.

What happens to your question will depend on what type of question it is. Many questions are general interest, and answers to these are being posted to wmf:Answers. Generally, at least to begin with, I will be writing these answers myself, although staff members have assisted with some questions already and I don't doubt will assist with more. Some issues will not be general interest, but may require attention from specific staff members or contractors. These will be forwarded to the appropriate parties. Questions that should be answered by community may be forwarded to the volunteer response team, unless we can point you to a more appropriate point of contact.

I imagine most of you are familiar with how the Wikimedia Foundation works, but it's probably a good idea for me to note for those who are not familiar that the Wikimedia Foundation does not control content on any of its projects. They can't help with content disputes or unblock requests, and they are not the place to report general bugs or to request features (that would be Wikimedia's Bugzilla). The letters I've answered already have included primarily questions about finances and the Foundation's work. I've been asked to get feedback from staff on diverse subjects ranging from the amount of latitude permitted to a project in drafting their "Exemption Doctrine Policy" to whether or not groups seeking grants need tax exempt status first.

If you have questions for or about the Wikimedia Foundation, you can address them to answerswikimedia.org. Please review wmf:Answers/Process for specific terms and more information. --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 19:33, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Couple questions...

Hi, first of all I am not a native speaker so excuse me if there are mistakes. I have 2 questions about species.wikimedia

1 : Will it be possible in the plant description to have things such as : Known pests, allelopathic relation, maximum and minimum pH, maximum and minimum temperature, the kind of soil where it grows, is it eatable... So that when someone fill up those information in a language, it can fill it up in other languages too.

2 : Is it possible to "call / parse" (I am not sure about the word to use) informations from species.wikimedia to another website / web application ? So that when we call the informations about a plant on another website, it's updated by species.wikimedia.

I am asking this, because there are other projects about plants and it's a pity not to share the informations... I know, sharing is the spirit of species.wikimedia, so I think it should be the reference for those projects. Futrthermore, there are many users in species.wikimedia, it's under CC Licence and it's multilingual... I think there are other projects such as http://www.tela-botanica.org/site:accueil in CC licence too, who are really interresting.

As every tool is based on some different use or interest in the plant, I think different tools are needed, but could be species.wikimedia the database for those project on a technical point of view ? Will there be more user / volunteers by doing so ?

That's the true meaning of my two questions. Sorry, it's a bit long to read ;)

--Benitron (talk) 13:30, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

I can answer both questions.

(1) Wikispecies does not have that information. It is a database only for scientific names and classification. It is not about the life or biology of the organisms.

(2) The information cannot be shared directly from Wikispecies to other projects. Not every Wikipedia uses the same classification system, so there will be differences. On the English Wikipedia "Bryophyta" is the mosses only, but on the Indonesian Wikipedia "Bryophyta" is mosses, liverworts, and hornworts together. There are many diffeences like this. Also, each Wikipedia article talks about one group by name. If the classification is updated, the article still has to be written again to change the text. Otherwise the classification and the text will not match. There are also technical problems, since one Wikipedia article might match with several pages on Wikispecies. On the English Wikipedia Amborellaceae and Amborella are together on one page, but on Wikispecies they are two pages. This makes it difficult to match pages and their information.

--EncycloPetey (talk) 22:34, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanations ! So my dream of multilingual worldwide Open DataBase is dead...

--31.32.156.26 17:12, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Templates for bibliographic information?

Hi there!

Rod Page's recent blog post points out that the Cite* family of templates haven't been ported to Wikispecies yet. I would personally love to see original descriptions linked clearly from Wikispecies. For instance, on genus Nesopelops, I'd love Hammer (1973) to be written in a format which could be easily parsed. This would open the door to increased linkages to the actual species descriptions, whether in private repositories such as JSTOR, or freely available repositories such as the en:Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). Such information could be used to analyze those outgoing links, provide credit and support to modern taxonomic publishers like en:Magnolia Press and en:PenSoft Publishers (both redlinks, if anybody is interested!) and historical archives such as the BHL, and could eventually be used to create a mapping between nomenclatural acts and species names. Exciting stuff!

I wouldn't like to see too much time wasted on this! There is no available digitised scan of Hammer (1973), so it doesn't really matter. Stho002 (talk) 22:42, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Stho002: someday, there will be :). For now, as EncycloPetey pointed out below, there are a lot of biologists already represented at WikiSource, many of whom have written taxonomic descriptions. I think it'd be worth it to link those descriptions to their species entries on WikiSpecies (and vice versa) in addition to citing the article as is currently being done. If nothing else, it'd be a start to link species up to their descriptions in Systema Naturae and Species Plantarum, both of which are available for upload to WikiSource. Do you think that would be a worthwhile endeavor? -- Gaurav (talk) 03:41, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

As an aside, this dovetails neatly with my project to bring more BHL content into the WikiMedia Commons: in the future, we could have freely available descriptions of species names linked with public domain transcriptions (en:WikiSource) of historical nomenclatural publications (perhaps on the Commons!), complemented with illustrations from BHL on the Commons. How cool would that be? -- Gaurav (talk) 08:57, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Gaurav, if you want to see how Commons is already used by some editors for the upload of images from original descriptions, look at this category below. There are many species of Arhopala with such images. Accassidy (talk) 22:23, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

For more multimedia, look at Category:Arhopala hercules on Wikimedia Commons.

Accassidy: Thanks! I didn't know about that template. What do you think of linking the entire original description, though? As an example, I've just created Zygoballus optatus (see this version) which links to its own original description on WikiSource. -- Gaurav (talk) 03:41, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Gaurav, For textual descriptions I think it is sufficient to make a link to a whole paper that can be viewed online. Cutting out each individual description for each taxon and posting an image of the text to a repository like Commons would seem to eb redundant work. Regards, Alan. Accassidy (talk) 15:00, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree. Why reinvent the wheel? Non-profit, unrestricted sites like the Internet Archive [www.archive.org], the Biodiversity Heritage Library[1], the Hathi Trust [2] and Gallica [3] have online viewers that easily allow linking to individual pages- click on the link, and you're looking at the page itself (a random example,Brachypeplus magnus Gerard 1854 [4]). Why go through the download-and-upload-to-commons process, when it's already online? The coverage is pretty good for western Europe and North America before 1923, so resources could be targeted more toward those areas that are still unavailable online.Chuck Entz (talk) 03:27, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Wikisource has a number of historical publications. For example, the British and Australian editors have been busily adding sources by the great botanist Robert Brown, with page scans and interactive electronic versions. --EncycloPetey (talk) 05:36, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

EncycloPetey: Thanks for the pointer! I'll definitely check him (and the other botanists on WikiSource) out. -- Gaurav (talk) 03:41, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi everybody, thanks for all your responses! My apologies for my late reply; end-of-term submissions and the like got in the way. I should be replying much faster now, or you can contact me directly. Cheers! -- Gaurav (talk) 03:41, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

RecentChangesCamp 2012

Just a reminder RecentChangesCamp 2012 is coming up soon! :D Please consider attending. :) It is a great opportunity to network with your fellow Wikispecies contributors. :) Invite all your wiki friends. :) You may be eligible to apply for a a WMF Participation grant or a WM AU grant if you're from Australia or New Zealand. If you're considering coming from over seas and you're female, you may also be interested in the ADA Camp, which could help better justify the last minute trip to Australia. :D We'd love to see you at RecentChangesCamp. :D --LauraHale (talk) 10:11, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Check new pages

Can someone spare a minute to check up on new pages created by a new member of the community? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 14:01, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

They're all on butterflies and many are very badly formatted. I've no idea whether the nomenclature is valid or correct, and so am hesitant to make changes. It might be for nothing. Who are our lepidopterologists? --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:54, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

FEI (for everyone's information): The user who is creating these is Vladimir V. Dubatolov, who has published many papers in the areas of Lepidoptera for which he is creating pages, so it's almost certainly only the formatting that needs to be worried about, as the taxonomy is from a reliable source. He actually created quite a number of pages several weeks back as well, so he's not quite as new as he seems at the moment. Various of us have tried to help him with his formatting issues, but he has had trouble picking that part up. The formatting issues are systematic, so they can be fixed systematically. I was fixing them myself for a while. The most frequent workers in Lepidoptera are User:Accassidy and User:PeterR. Koumz (talk) 17:50, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the information. I may be able to assist as well, albeit not much for the next few days. Lacking expertise in insect nomenclature, I wasn't willing to draw a conclusion about the validity of the edits, especially in light of recent edits by another user who has been adding patent nonsense. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:10, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Oops! I did warn User talk:Fadams, but forgot to follow it up ... Stho002 (talk) 22:49, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

I haven't been too familiar with the new layout after the major revamp. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 08:26, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Vernacular names

Are there any statistics on VN's by language? Rich Farmbrough (talk)

Not that I've seen or can find. However, because we code them in a template using standard language codes, it should be a simple matter for a properly constructed code to generate that information. Sadly, I lack the skills to accomplish such a feat and do not know whether anyone here could manage it either. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:06, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Identifying photograph of species

Is this the place to ask if I need help in identification of a bird that was photographed recently? Or is there a specific help area for such assistance requests? VasuVR (talk) 07:50, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

You can post the image here and see if we can identify it. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 13:39, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Meanwhile, have been able to identify the species as Female Asian Koel, Eudynamys scolopaceus. In future I will post them here. VasuVR (talk) 01:09, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

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The above discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this archive.