Talk:American bison

Template:WAP assignment

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the American bison article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1: 90 days

This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Template:Vital article

Mammals B‑class High‑importance

	Mammals portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mammals, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of mammal-related subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.MammalsWikipedia:WikiProject MammalsTemplate:WikiProject Mammalsmammal articles
B	This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Agriculture: Livestock B‑class High‑importance

	Agriculture portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Agriculture, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of agriculture on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.AgricultureWikipedia:WikiProject AgricultureTemplate:WikiProject AgricultureAgriculture articles
B	This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Livestock task force (assessed as Low-importance).

There is a request, submitted by Catfurball, for an audio version of this article to be created. For further information, see WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia.

The rationale behind the request is: "Important".

picture caption in second section of article

Although a minor issue, the picture on the left currently states "wild bison and calf" when it is plain to someone who can identify sex that the two bison in question are an adult male, and and adult female bison.

Inaccurate Map

The map completely misses the populations living in Oklahoma. There are several thousands living in Oklahoma. 021120x (talk) 02:01, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, the map is 10 years old, I assume a lot has changed in revitalization efforts. Here's new data (for the US) if someone can make an updated map Bison by the Numbers, Center of Excellence for Bison Studies, South Dakota State University, August 2021. They even have a State Data csv if that could be utilized to generate maps? oncamera _{(talk page)} 02:22, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Genus

Surely the article needs to be edited to refer to the species being part of the genus Bos and not Bison due to recent studies showing that bison are nestled within Bos? I ask here instead of editing the page itself because surely this has been asked before but I think we really need to decide what binominal name to use because the current one is inaccurate! Maykii (talk) 18:54, 15 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Maykii: First off, stop edit-warring now. WP:BRD still applies, and not getting a response to your initial foray does not imply that no one objects. I do, and am herewith reverting to the prior state. It is now your business to demonstrate why your change should be implemented.

Second, the taxonomic study in question is already covered in the article, and it should give you some pause to consider why over the course of four years no one of the many people watching this and the other bison articles has seen fit to change the taxonomic framework used. The reason is not because you are the very first to hear of this, but because regular taxonomy editors are aware that in these articles we do not institute classification changes following every study that comes up with a new interpretation. We follow the broad consensus in the literature, where from what I can see the usage is still overwhelmingly Bison and not Bos. To whit, three of data sources most frequently used here: Mammal Species of the World, IUCN, ITIS.

You will have to make a case for why replacing Bison with Bos reflects current scientific consensus, and please do so on a talk page and without further edit-warring (which will be reported). --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 12:41, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Calling it edit warring after a single undo is harsh, and yes I assumed this hadn't been discussed because looking through the archives there hasn't been any solid debate on this at all so forgive me for assuming that keeping the genus as Bison was consensus, I had assumed that it just hadn't been changed due to a lack of will in editors or it was an oversight.

As for the taxonomy, is using the IUCN as a basis really that solid? A lot of the names they use are outdated (they didn't even accept the African elephant split until last year though Wikipedia had them listed as separate species long before then)... HMW is already accepting that Bison is a subgenus within Bos. Is anybody actually disputing that Bison falls within Bos? All studies show it is deeply nestled within the genus, it feels much more like a case of things not being updated rather than people believing this is bunk. I'd like to hear what other editors have to say about this. -- Maykii (talk) 19:32, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To add: also it appears that the help of someone else would at the least be needed to edit the taxoboxes - doing a blanket replace of terms in the text while leaving the box unchanged is not an option. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 12:51, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]