Talk:Entomologica Americana (New York Entomological Society)

Proposed merge with Journal of the New York Entomological Society

This is the previous name of the journal now published as Entomologica Americana (New York Entomological Society). The content of both articles is largely identical and needlessly complicated. Normal practice for academic journals is to redirect former names to the new name and present the journal history at that place. Randykitty (talk) 02:20, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

• I think it is useful to have separate articles for different journals. It means we can include key data such as ISSNs, links to scanned content, publishers, etc. in Infoboxes for all journals. All of these things can change when journals are renamed, but relegating this to the text of the article about the current journal loses this information. This also facilitates links between Wikidata and Wikipedia (each instance of the journal links to different Wikidata item). While some users of Wikipedia may only be interested in what the journal is called now, others (such as anyone working with content from those journals) is likely to benefit from having separate accounts for each journal. Yes, the content of the articles in question overlaps, but they have just been started. "Needlessly complicated" they may be, but the history of these journals and their publishing societies is also complicated.--Roderic D. M. Page (talk) 07:07, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

• Journals often change names. And like with people, we have only one article for them, not different articles for the periods that they had different names (The Artist Formerly Known as Prince appropriately redirects to Prince (musician), for example. We have hundreds of articles on journals that underwent sometimes multiple name changes. Wikidata is no problem: the redirects can have entries there with the ISSNs and whatever other info is particular to that specific instance of a journal. Similarly, we sometimes have multiple infoboxes for articles on closely related journals (e.g., journals that have the same main title, but are divided into different series -generally indicated by capital letters: A, B, etc) and, in any case, any important information like previous ISSNs can be listed in the infobox or, if necessary, in the text. At this point, I see no reason at all to change this practice. And as far as "complicated" goes, I don't think that this is very complicated at all: originally there were two different journals, at some point they merged and now there is one. --Randykitty (talk) 12:55, 20 May 2016 (UTC)
  • To be pedantic, it's not the case that we have two journals that merged, we had two journals published by two different societies, one ceased, then later on other journal adopted the name of the ceased journal. I don't see the harm in maintaining different articles for different journals (or names of journals). Your argument simply seems to be that "we don't normally do this", which seems more an appeal to tradition than an argument about whether what I've done is reasonable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rdmpage (talk • contribs) 14:40, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

• Looking at JSTOR (here and here, click "title history"), for example, shows that they, too, consider this journal the same as the current iteration of Entomologica Americana. And my argument really is based on more than just "we don't normally do this": rarely do we have enough sourced content to write an article about an academic journal that is much more than a stub. There is simply no need to split off different articles for the different names that a journal had during its life. Combining what we have here into one article will put related information into context and make it easier to describe the relationships between the different iterations of the journal without awkward repetitions in a series of different article. Instead, we now have a slate of articles for this really very minor journal (New York entomological journals, Entomologica Americana, Journal of the New York Entomological Society, Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society, Entomologica Americana (Brooklyn Entomological Society), Entomologica Americana (New York Entomological Society) - hope I got them all) all consisting of a few lines of text at most and the same awkward table. --Randykitty (talk) 16:29, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

• Another solution is to edit the translcuded table to also include a text-based history of the journals so that this is consistent across the different articles for each journal. Yes, the text for each article is short but they are stubs, pretty much every Wikipedia article has to start somewhere. The phrase "really very minor journal" depends on how you measure importance. Do these journals have high impact factors? No, but between them they contain the descriptions of some 5,700 new species of arthropods, and I suspect that articles in these journals will be cited long after most of the contents of a high impact, short citation half-life journal such a Nature is forgotten (the taxonomic literature is essentially immortal). There are likely Wikipedia articles for species that cite papers from these journals (or, indeed, could be improved by citing such papers). I understand that you do not see a need for separate articles, that doesn't mean that there no value in doing so. --Roderic D. M. Page (talk) 00:08, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Entomologica Americana (Brooklyn Entomological Society)

Journal published until the society merged with the NY Entomological Society, which then renamed its journal "Entomologica Americana", indicating that the new journal was a merger of the two journals, taken the title of one and continuing the volume numbering of the other. Again, the content of this article largely duplicates that of the other two. Randykitty (talk) 02:24, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

• This is not an accurate summary of the rather complicated history (which I've simplified in the trancluded timeline). The Brooklyn Entomological Society merged with the New York Entomological Society in 1968, but Entomologica Americana (Brooklyn Entomological Society) was still being published (post 1968 by New York Entomological Society), so until 1975 the New York Entomological Society was publishing two journals. Entomologica Americana (Brooklyn Entomological Society) then ceased, and in 2009 the New York Entomological Society revived the name for its journal Journal of the New York Entomological Society.--Roderic D. M. Page (talk) 07:07, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

Two societies merge. After some time, they discontinue publishing two journals and merge them, too. Seems pretty straightforward to me and I don't think you have made a good case (or actually any case at all) that the current iteration of the journal is different from the historical ones. As I argue above

• even if they would be different, it makes sense to cover what we know about them in a single, more meaty article. BTW, I propose centralizing the discussion in the above section. --Randykitty (talk) 16:34, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

• The journals have had different publishers, and have different ISSNs. I agree that it makes sense to have a centralised article covering the history (in addition to the articles about each journal). The transcluded table could be used to do this). --Roderic D. M. Page (talk) 00:13, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society

Same as for the other iterations of the journal. Randykitty (talk) 16:24, 21 May 2016 (UTC)