Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Animals

Request: Handbook of the Mammals of the World Vol. 9 - Bats

I am currently in search of the "Handbook of the Mammals of the World, Vol. 9 - Bats" to aid in improving related articles. Unfortunately, due to the high cost, obtaining a copy has proven challenging for me. If any members have access to the handbook and are willing to share it, I would deeply appreciate it. I'm currently working on trying to improve the bat articles and I think the handbook would be a great reference to have. Myth Sys (talk) 03:14, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

I own it; shoot me an email if you still need this. Note that the species accounts are also available at https://plazi.org/treatmentbank/. Ucucha (talk) 03:45, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

A very useful resource, although I'm surprised that this allowable under copyright laws? Plazi also has the range map images and species plates, available at high resolution. The difficulty is finding them as the search system is quirky. The family pages such as Vespertilionidae are good starting points. —  Jts1882 | talk  16:01, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Their position is that taxonomic treatments are not copyrightable (https://riojournal.com/article/115466/). Whether that would hold up in court I am not sure. Ucucha (talk) 13:19, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Taxonomic treatments , maybe, but what about the text and images? They seem to have most of the text and illustrations, including high resolution versions of the plates. The information is there, although not in an easily navigable form. I'm not complaining as it's very useful, now I've worked out how to navigate it. A Plazi version of HBW would also be helpful. —  Jts1882 | talk  15:29, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

@Ucucha: As you have the book, can you answer a question for me. Plazi content seems restricted to family and species treatments. Does HMW have sections describing genera and other ranks (order, superfamily, subfamily)? —  Jts1882 | talk  09:11, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

It's basically just families and species. There is some introductory material at the beginning of each volume, but no full order-level accounts. Ucucha (talk) 15:29, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

I did bit of digging because I was curious about what they were providing and the copyright issue, with the help of pages provided at Lynx Edicions and that provided by Plazi. The Plazi family treatment for Felidae (volume 1) is essentially the infobox at the start of the chapter. Then the book has 70 pages on the general biology of felids, including Systematics, Morphology, Habitat, Food, Breeding, Social Organization, and Conservation. None of this is available on Plazi. The Plazi species treatments are the Species Accounts the make up the last 40 pages of the chapter. Not the whole book by any means, but still pretty useful, especially the newer volumes like bats. —  Jts1882 | talk  16:48, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

The Plazi treatment can be viewed in a more use friendly manner on Checklistbank. Here is the entry for Glauconycteris alboguttata J. A. Allen, 1917. @Myth Sys: If you're still interested this might be a useful starting point. You can navigate to other Vespertilionidae from that page. —  Jts1882 | talk  14:22, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Socks (cat) naming ambiguity

An editor has requested that Socks (cat) be moved to another page, which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion. -- 65.92.247.90 (talk) 20:22, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Fossorials!

Hello fellow Wikipedians! I have just created a new WikiProject, WikiProject Fossorials. If you can, please join, as we are in desperate need of members! Fossorials are animals that spend much of their time underground, so if you are interested, please join!

Thank you, UserMemer (chat) Tribs 00:30, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Man-eater#Requested move 30 January 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Man-eater#Requested move 30 January 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 15:18, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Discussion at List of wealthiest animals

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:List of wealthiest animals#Disputed worth, which is within the scope of this WikiProject. Spinixster (chat!) 06:24, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Rewilding (conservation biology)#Requested move 4 March 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Rewilding (conservation biology)#Requested move 4 March 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 15:09, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

review of coverage of animal sounds

I quite like listening to audio in Wikipedia articles, so I thought I'd take a look at how our coverage of the audible side of Animalia is doing. Putting it here since the media wikiproject is inactive. — Arlo James Barnes 00:34, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

current status

• list of animal sounds  List — de-facto main page for the topic, unfortunately has an unintuitive organisation; see also list of onomatopoeias § Animal and bird noises List
• vertebrates
  • birds — bird vocalization B
    • turkey call  List — article trying to be two things at once, merge non-animal content into game call?  Stub
  • mammals
    • carnivorans
      • bark (sound)  B
      • roar (vocalization)  C
      • growling  Stub
      • howling  Start
      • meow  Start
      • purr  C
    • primates
      • gecker  Start
      • girneys  C — should be WP:SINGULAR
    • cetaceans — are tail-slaps covered somewhere?
      • dolphin § Vocalization B
      • signature whistle  C
      • whale vocalization  C
      • list of whale vocalizations  List
    • ungulates
      • bellow (sound)  C
• inverts
  • stridulation  C
  • Jerusalem cricket § Communication Start

suggestion for reorganisation (will continue to revise)

• new root page, name depending on format
  • animal sound production
  • index of animal sound or maybe plural 'sounds'
  • outline of animal sound

discussion

There are quite a few other pages in category:animal sounds —   Jts1882 | talk  16:28, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, I added the ones you highlighted. I'll take a look at the some of the others tomorrow. — Arlo James Barnes 16:54, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Fancy group names & misinformation from reliable sources

Some species or groups of animals have commonly accepted group names. Think of a "flock" of birds or a "pack" of wolves. Others, like a "murder" of crows or a "clowder" of cats are less well known, but firmly supported by major dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary. However, I'm dealing with a problem involving unsupported and even fake group names circulating on the internet that are now finding their way into "reliable" sources. Allow me to explain. And sorry in advance for the length of the post.

The group that concerns me is lemurs. Years ago, I was a major editor here, writing extensively about lemurs and their relatives, taking my work all the way to FA status. Having not only collected vasts amounts of information about them for the Wiki articles, I also worked with lemurs professionally, both in research and as a zookeeper. Therefore, I knew it was commonly accepted that a group of lemurs was called a "troop," just like all other primates. However, none of my copious sources explicitly came out and said this basic fact. After all, most lemur species don't live in large groups. Without a source explicitly stating it, I was unable to include this detail into the Lemur or Ring-tailed lemur articles. Yet there are many published works that use the term "troop," not only in their title, but also in their text. On Google Scholar, there are zero results that show "conspiracy" used for lemurs. But again, without someone explicitly stating that "a group of lemurs is called a 'troop,'" I was unable to include the information.

In the years since, the internet and social media have done what they do best: spread misinformation. A new term for a group of lemurs, a "conspiracy," has started to dominate popular culture. There are now dozens of blogs and other informal (but fancy looking) websites that make it look official that a group of lemurs is called a conspiracy. All of them feed on each other, parroting one another's term use and explanations without due diligence.

The worst and most troubling offender is the BBC, which published an an article that not only backed up these claims, but also parroted some of the websites by claiming that the term originates from a book called "The Book of Hawking, Hunting and Blasing of Arms" from 1486, also known as Book of Saint Albans. The obvious problem is that lemurs were not known to Europeans back then, and they weren't even named "lemurs" until 1758, when they were formally described by Carl Linnaeus. I wrote to the BBC recently asking for a correction, but because the article is older than 30 days, their policy is to let the misinformation that they published remain online. This allows it to be used as a reference on Wikipedia since the BBC is considered a reliable source. In fact, it has already been used at least once as a bloated footnote for the relevant and mostly unsourced article Collective noun.

This problem with the lemur group name is widening. Search "group of lemurs is called" on any major search engine, and they will all return "conspiracy" in large, bold letters. Yet from what I can tell after hours of combing the web, the name might have started with a 2007 Reddit post or shortly before. In the years that followed, it spread like wildfire on social media and through blogs.

I would like to address this in the lemur articles, and I think wider action should be taken as a part of this project. I've tackled a problem like this before when another respected Wikipedia editor and I worked with Colin Groves to publish an article with lemur etymologies. In it, we debunked decades of speculation about the origin of the term "lemur." At the time, we found the primary source (in Latin, by Linnaeus) that contradicted all the sources that came after. However, since Wiki doesn't allow us to use primary sources to override decades of published, reliable secondary sources—despite their obvious errors—I needed a peer-reviewed, reliable secondary source. But for today's case with "conspiracy," I don't have the means to do this. A simple group name won't merit a published rebuttal.

While I'm still filing complaints with the BBC over their article, I have little hope of having it corrected. I can, however, cite Merriam-Webster, which does define a "troop" as a "a flock of mammals or birds." In other words, it's a general term. However, I feel I'll be powerless to stop someone else from hopping on and adding "conspiracy" with a citation pointed at the BBC (like search engines). Edit wars will inevitably ensue.

What can we do, not just for the lemur articles, but also for other animal group names that were probably included in this mess of misinformation based on some jokester's whim from pre-2007? Is there any way we can ban that single "reliable" BBC source?

Personally, I have issues with its reliability from a second standpoint: it's practically a children's article. Its "Newsround" section is included with others such as "Games" and "Puzzles." Over-simplified (and factually incorrect) children's material shouldn't be used as a sole reliable source for academic Wikipedia articles.

Other thoughts?

Sorry for the long post. I like to be thorough and clear. —Maky (talk) 21:10, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

I was recently in a conversation about raccoons, when the topic of a collective noun for them came up. I searched Google for "name for a group of racoons", and Google suggested brace/gaze/smack/committee/nursery/troop. The first webpage result was a wildlife control blog that stated that the internet will tell you that "nursery" or "gaze" are terms. The blog post went on to mention the Book of Saint Albans, and notes that raccoons wouldn't be mentioned in the book. There are a lot of dubious collective nouns for various animals. The Book of Saint Albans may provide a baseline for some "real" (albeit fanciful and actually little-used) collective nouns for some animals. The Internet (circa 2007 or any other date) is only going to spew out more fanciful and little-used collective nouns. Plantdrew (talk) 02:50, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it's a problem... a very broad problem. The BBC article mentioned above lists wildebeests, giraffes, and others that couldn't have been known to Europeans in the 15th century. I'm glad others have seen this issue, too. The question is, how do we deal with it? Again, for the lemur articles, I can add a general reference to Merriam-Webster, but that's tenuous since it doesn't mention lemurs. I could pick a random research article that talks about lemur "troops," even if it doesn't say explicitly that "troop" is the correct word, but that won't stop someone from adding "conspiracy" and pointing to that horrible BBC article. It might help if someone could fix up the Collective noun article, but finding sources might be a pain. Once again, so many sources point to the Book of Saint Albans, but we can't debunk that because it would be original research. —Maky (talk) 05:39, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

There comes a point where a word is used widely and it become part of the language. This might be a case.

I did a Google search with a restricted date range. There is nothing before 2008 (1990-2008). The earliest result I could find was a result on slideshare dated August 2008. However this contains an advertisement for a book published in 2023 so not a use of the term. The first result for the collective noun is in 2011 (search), which picks up an article on BuzzFeed, 36 Bizarre Group Names For Animals, which just has a few selected examples with no sourcing. In the years that follow it becomes more widespread, well before the article on CBBC.

The book I mentioned in the ad is called A Conspiracy of Lemurs, which is an autobiography by the woman who set up the Lemur Conservation Foundation, and she uses the term as a collective noun in this interview. —  Jts1882 | talk  09:59, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia has no control over this; we simply add what the sources say, even if they are factually incorrect. The term's debunking will take time. We can wait for more reliable secondary sources to disprove the term in the interim. To put it succinctly, nothing can be done. When something lacks credible sources, we shouldn't include it, in my opinion. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 11:38, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

I suggest reviewing Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth. It is not a good solution, but I think it is better than any alternative.

In the Bronx Zoo article, I'm quite sure there is false information, but false information is what was reported by the supposedly reliable sources (probably because it made a more attention getting headline). See Talk:Bronx Zoo/Archive 1#Snouted cobra vs Egyptian cobra. SchreiberBike | ⌨  13:06, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Personally I think most of these "group terms" are silly and virtually nobody uses them in reality. I would ignore them as much as I can. I am pleasantly surprised that our Wikipedia articles reflect that reality (List of animal names#Usage of collective nouns; Collective noun#Terms of venery).

As others have said, at Wikipedia we should be concerned with verifiability, not truth, so we can't necessarily ignore a "reliable" source such as the BBC. However, we also have a concept of undue weight. I would point to the references in List of animal names#Usage of collective nouns as establishing that terms like "a conspiracy of lemurs" have little real-world importance, and it would be undue weight to discuss them unless they are routinely used in sources that are specifically concerned with lemurs. Ucucha (talk) 15:47, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Copulation (zoology)#Requested move 6 April 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Copulation (zoology)#Requested move 6 April 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. SilverLocust 💬 03:40, 18 April 2024 (UTC)