Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biology

Template:Outline of knowledge coverage

Epigenetics

• Epigenetics - main article
  • Epigenetic theory - overlapping content
  • Transgenerational epigenetics - overlapping content
  • Soft inheritance - overlapping content
    • Inheritance of acquired characteristics - negatively characterized as outdated and disproven Soviet dogma that had disastrous administrative consequences
    • Lamarckism - categorized as an obsolete scientific theory, despite contemporary re-analyses within the mainstream scientific community
    • Lysenkoism - depicts Lamarckism, and, specifically, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as being a textbook example of pseudoscience among Lysenko's many bedlamitic absurdities

This interrelated series of articles is one of the most disoriented, contradictory and factually compromised sets that I've encountered on our project in quite some time. Moreover, the overlapping nature of content and lack of adequately unambiguous central navigation is confusing, even for someone who has existing familiarity with the general topic. I'm not certain of how much available manpower WikiProject Biology has to offer at the moment, but I'd like to get the ball rolling on a collaborative effort of some sort.   — C M B J   04:56, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia Discord has a Biology Channel!

It has recently come to my attention that not only is there a highly active Wikimedia Discord Server, it also has a #wpbiology channel! See Wikipedia:Discord for more details.

I hope to feature a link to this on the main page after the redesign is complete, but for the time being I wanted to advertise it here. I would love for more people to join, and I hope it will prove a major resource to us going forward as we improve WP:BIOL and it's subprojects. I cannot emphasize how refreshing it can be to talk in real time (or even in voice channels!) rather than in talk pages.

@Evolution and evolvability and Alexmar983: This also should serve us nicely for the user group discussions--they have a #meta channel as well.

Encyclopedia of Life

Is Encyclopedia of Life a reliable source?CycoMa (talk) 19:37, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

It seems like it is just a biology version of Wikipedia, so likely not. The digitized stuff might be, but in that case, just use the original sources. Silverseren^C 19:38, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi all, I started a discussion on the reliable source noticeboard about EOL here, I think it would be useful to have an informed discussion about it, I'll collate some information about the sources it collates there. Thanks, John Cummings (talk) 11:26, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

RNA motifs at COIN

Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Hundreds_of_RNA_motif_pages would benefit from more biological input. SmartSE (talk) 15:27, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

WP:FASA for Menstrual cycle

Featured Article Save Award nomination at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review/Menstrual cycle/archive2. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:41, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Notability for things like genes, gene/protein/rna families, cell lines, species etc

This discussion on the notability of RNA motifs over at WP:MolBio has expanded to be the broader question of notability for sets of topics like genes, gene/protein/rna families, cell lines, etc. Since ppl in this group will have had to grapple with similar questions on microbial species, I'd be interested in your input. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 10:11, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Biology content in a device article needs moving to something biology-related

In the article Depth gauge, section Light based depth gauges in Biology, there is some content related to eyes of biological things (bristle worms?). The article is about "devices", not biology. So this needs moving somewhere else. I'm sufficiently "biology challenged" to be clueless about this. Just letting this wikiproject know that there's content to be had... before it gets deleted from the Depth gauge article. Platonk (talk) 23:56, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

How about moving it to a new subsection under Sense#Not human analogues? One reason why I'm hesitant is that that article already has over 12k words, amounting to a pure reading time of 85 minutes. ◅ Sebastian 16:45, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Help with Dysgenics?

• Dysgenics (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Until I stumbled upon it, this article consisted mainly of WP:PROFRINGE primary sources. I've essentially reduced the article to a stub, but it could be substantially expanded based on legitimate scientific sources, e.g. [1] and [2]. Any help from this community would be greatly appreciated. Note that I've also raised this issue at FT/N. Thanks, Generalrelative (talk) 22:15, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Rfc about the periodic table in the lede of the PT article: 18 columns or 32?

Should the periodic table in the lede of the periodic table article have 18-columns or 32?

The rfc is here.

I thought I'd ask given the relevance of the periodic table to biochemistry.

Sandbh (talk) 22:17, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Invitation to discussion: FAC 4 nomination of nonmetal

Please accept this note as an invitation to participate in the discussion of this latest FAC nomination for the nonmetal article.

Thank you. Sandbh (talk) 07:28, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Showing both ranked and unranked clades – is that confusing?

In this article, professor János Podani (translation) writes “Many articles in Wikipedia refer to classifications in which clades and ranked categories are intermingled — thereby triggering taxonomic chaos rather than clarifying the concept of a natural genealogical order, which confuses the readers of this popular digital encyclopedia.” Personally, I don't feel confused by that (as long as all “ranked categories” are monophyletic – that is, clades, too), but I thought I'd bring it up for consideration here. ◅ Sebastian 20:07, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I think "confuses the readers" is a projection of personal aesthetic displeasure here. It's really up to a future revision of APG to deal with this, not Wikipedia. Choess (talk) 18:19, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Please help save the evolution article

This critical article is rated an FA since 2007, and needs an overhaul to maintain its FA status. Please see the discussion at Talk:Evolution. (t · c) buidhe 17:59, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

How to decide for a synonym?

I frequently encounter lemmata whose preferred binomial name differs between different Language versions of Wikipedia. That often has negative side effects. E.g. Lactuca muralis, although a common plant in Europe, shows only four links to the article in other languages (Cebuano, Español, Íslenska, and Italiano). That's not because other languages don't have an article for it, as can be seen e.g. in German. German WP simply prefers Mycelis muralis; so much so that it didn't even have a redirect from Lactuca muralis until now. While there are ways to fix those problems individually, I think ultimately the best solution would be to agree on a preferred binomial name. What would be the best (internationally used) source to go by? ◅ Sebastian 17:08, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

In what sense is lemmata used in this inquiry? Aside from that quibble, the important thing is that circumscriptions are properly attributed, variation can be founded on a Db such as IPNI without elevating the name that happens to occupy the title. ~ cygnis insignis 17:51, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Let me look that up in Wikipedia for you. Here you are: “Lemma: Headword, under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appears”. ◅ Sebastian 20:14, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Oh, the title! ~ cygnis insignis 13:16, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

@SebastianHelm: The global all-species databases (GBIF, Catalog of Life, Encyclopedia of Life) often have errors or are outdated. There is consensus on en.wiki to follow particular databases for particular groups of organisms: Plants of the World Online for plants; International Ornithological Congress for birds; Fishbase for fishes. (however, en.wiki may not necessarily be up-to-date for any given species in following a preferred database).

Wikidata prefers to have all the inter-wiki links for a species on one item. For any given language, that item may be a name that is treated as a synonym in that language Wikipedia. The item should be the one that the majority of languages treat as a valid species. Some of the languages linked from the Mycelis muralis Wikidata item accept Lactuca muralis; I'm not sure if the majority of languages accept Mycelis muralis or Lactuca muralis, but per Wikidata practice all of the articles should be linked to one item (however, there are cases where a language edition may have multiple articles on the same species under different names; this is most frequent with the languages that have large numbers of bot generated articles on species (Cebuano, Swedish, Vietnamese, Waray)).

Some countries have national databases of species, which may not be in 100% agreement with the databases en.wiki prefers to follow. I wouldn't presume to force the French Wikipedia to follow a global database for species that occur in France and are listed in the national database (INPN).

It is not realistic to expect all language editions of Wikipedia to agree on which species names are accepted and which are synonyms. The global all-species databases are not of sufficient quality to follow. The are often other high-quality databases for particular groups of organisms that aren't the one that en.wiki has chosen to follow (e.g. Catalog of Fishes is a good database, but doesn't 100% agree with Fishbase). Wikidata does expect articles in different languages that represent homotypic synonyms to be linked to a single item. Plantdrew (talk) 19:29, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your extensive reply. You're right that one shouldn't “expect all language editions of Wikipedia to agree [...]”, and it wouldn't be appropriate to force any Wikipedia to use the same lemmata that another Wikipedia uses. But that's not why I'm asking; all I'm looking for is a basis for understanding and discussing the discrepancies. If two Wikipedias use different lemmata for the same species, then it might well be that at least one of them doesn't follow any official database, it might e.g. just use whatever the person who started the article knew best or encountered first. In such a case, suggesting a name change could be a good idea. ◅ Sebastian 20:14, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Eukaryotrophic

The article Archaeplastida currently contains the statement “[T]he non-photosynthetic lineage Rhodelphidia [is] a predatorial (eukaryotrophic) flagellate”. While “predatorial” is not a term known to Wikipedia, “predatory” redirects to “Predation”, which defines the term by the killing. That could fit to the description of Rhodelphis as “a heterotrophic predator that feeds on bacteria and smaller flagellates”.

On the other hand, “eukaryotrophic”, for which I could find no article, when derived etymologically, has quite a different meaning: feeding on eucaryotes. That contrasts with the above description in two ways: It excludes bacteria, and it includes many categories other than croppers, such as lectivores. The latter would fit to another interpretation of the description of Rhodelphis: Maybe it feeds on dead resources, too.

This leads me to the following questions:

1. Is my understanding of the terms correct?
2. If so, which term is correct for Rhodelphis?
3. Do we need the term “eukaryotrophic” at all?

◅ Sebastian 20:28, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Merge proposal: autism and autism spectrum

An editor has requested for Autism to be merged into Autism spectrum. Since you had some involvement with autism or autism spectrum, you might want to participate in the merger discussion (if you have not already done so). Averixus (talk) 00:25, 27 February 2022 (UTC)