Talk:Rubber boa

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2020 and 31 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Emkiwi.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 08:25, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Rubber boa" or "Coastal rubber boa"?

So as what is this thing really (or most commonly) known? "Rubber boa" or "Coastal rubber boa"? The introduction should agree with the article title for obvious reasons, the most important being avoiding reader confusion. PaladinWhite 13:31, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Move proposal

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was no consensus. JPG-GR (talk) 22:35, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Would anyone be opposed to moving this article to "Charina bottae", in line with the rest of the articles in this series? --Jwinius (talk) 09:18, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure what you mean by "the rest of the articles"; the first two I looked at were located at Rosy Boa and Calabar Python, where I see you also have move requests pending. Taxonomic names don't appear to be the standard... see Gray wolf or Great white shark, for instance. We should be using the most common name, which in this case I don't think is Charina bottae. Kafziel ^{Complaint Department} 09:25, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You have to look a little further than that. For example the series on pythons, true vipers, pitvipers, shield-tail snakes, dwarf boas, etc. The problem is that common names are not nearly as well established for snakes as they are for some other kinds of animals and too many of the names refer to different species. --Jwinius (talk) 09:36, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But the common name for the Rubber Boa is pretty well-established. I think that's more important than having them all match. In fact, maybe some of those other articles should be renamed. But I'm not really an animal guy (I only have this on my watchlist because I took one of the pictures) so if other people think it should use the other name, I'll still help with the move. Kafziel ^{Complaint Department} 15:08, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, according to Wright & Wright (1957), both Charina bottae and Lichanura trivirgata (now Charina trivirgata) have been referred to by that name, so you can never be too sure. IMO, pretty well-established means it will eventually prove to be more trouble than it worth. There simply is no body to regulate common names as there is one for scientific names. Besides, if we move all these articles to their scientific names, we'll be able to do this:

Mind you, many of those common name redirects are disambig pages; a percentage that continues to grow. --Jwinius (talk) 22:18, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing ever proves to be "more trouble than it's worth" on Wikipedia; we're not paper, so we can always change the name with no problem if and when the need arises. I'm just not convinced it has at this point. But you can certainly get better opinions than mine - you should post these articles at requested moves to get some more input. Kafziel ^{Complaint Department} 00:45, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've been helping Jwinius out with some of these snake articles (mostly like you with photos), and I really think this approach will make things clearer in the long run. Snakes do tend to have many common names, which means picking one of them for an article name is problematic. Tim Vickers (talk) 02:07, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But how does that fit in with WP:NAME's statement that "The names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists"? A specialist might call this Charina bottae, but our general audience certainly doesn't. Yes, it makes it hard to determine the name for each article, but according to Wikipedia policy that's just a problem we editors have to live with. We have to take the time to determine the most common name—not the most scholarly name—and that's what we have to use. Kafziel ^{Complaint Department} 03:32, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Consider WP's botanical project: they also started their work according to that principle, but as the number of plant articles increased it eventually got them into too much trouble. They now work according to this naming convention. The situation is the same with snakes, but it's as if WP:NC is not yet ready to admit this. Anyway, if this article is eventually reformatted to look like Vipera berus, will it really be so hard for readers to find its common names? --Jwinius (talk) 10:42, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The real question is: If it isn't reformatted to look like Vipera berus, will it really be so hard for editors to find its taxonomic name?

There are times when the taxonomic name is correct, and times when the common name is correct, and we should not be disregarding that for the sake of easy editing through uniformity. The more I look into this issue and its history, the more I'm convinced a move here would violate Wikipedia policy and the more I think these mass proposals might need to be reviewed at a higher level. Kafziel ^{Complaint Department} 07:17, 3 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, per above. Kafziel ^{Complaint Department} 07:28, 3 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I feel that consistency and improving encyclopaedic value of Wikipedia will benefit users more in the long run than trying to keeping name articles down to simplest denominator. AshLin (talk) 04:29, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose per Kafziel. The long-term solution may be linguistic articles for each common name, explaining which species it applies to, and in what contexts; but a mass switch from English to Neo-Latin is pedantry. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:11, 1 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NCFauna does not demand that all articles be located at scientific names, only those where one common name refers to several species or where one species has several equally well-known common names. User:Pmanderson's comment that "the long-term solution may be linguistic articles for each common name, explaining which species it applies to, and in what contexts" is worth pursuing, too. — AjaxSmack 16:47, 3 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Conservation status

Kafziel, 75.164.228.158 is correct: the IUCN currently lists this species as LC (Least Concern). In contrast, I believe the US has afforded it more protection for at least the last couple of decades and the article should mention that, but apparently the IUCN is not as concerned. It's high time somebody with a little knowledge of the subject rewrote this article. Kafziel, this article seems to matter to you, so are you willing to give it a try? Why don't you do your damnedest, show us what you're made of! --Jwinius (talk) 18:36, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

After the IP changed the status again today, I looked it up myself and I saw it was correct so I left it. For the record, though, the burden of proof is always on the person who makes a change. Other editors aren't required to do more research before reverting an unsourced change in data.

The article doesn't matter to me; it's on my watchlist along with thousands of others, and possible vandalism matters to me. Kafziel ^{Complaint Department} 18:50, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, you're right. The right honerable 75.164.228.158 did not include any references whatsoever, in keeping with the time-honered tradition that is the hallmark of his countless colleagues. Lazy bastards, all of them! Usually, I revert such edits, but not allways. Since so much of Wikipedia consists of contributions of this nature, I first spend a little time on each to consider whether there may be some truth involved. If it seems at all reasonable, I let it stand... at least until I find reliable information to the contrary. By the way, this is is also Wikipedia's greatest weakness: the quality of its articles depends not so much on the people who write them as on those who maintain them. I sincerely hope that Wikipedia 2.0 will make some sort of attempt to address this issue. --Jwinius (talk) 22:59, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How does it get its rubbery skin?

I was wondering how it got its rubber skin, or has that not been discovered yet? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.64.47.19 (talk) 18:05, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]