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Useful or not?

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I've created this page as something of an experiment. I've not seen a disambiguation page of this kind before and wondered if other editors felt it was at all useful? I'm anticipating a range of opinions from "Wow! Why had no-one ever thought of this before" to "Yuk! That's horrible". If the majority opinion is something like the latter, I'll just delete it. Alternatively, if it's generally quite well-liked, it could be used as a template for other specific epithets (but good luck to whoever decides to do "vulgaris"!) SP-KP (talk) 10:08, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's an interesting format. I'm not sure about usefulness. I can't see myself using a page like this as a navigation aid, instead of for browsing, but then contents aren't determined by usefulness. --Danger (talk) 10:37, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ugh, don't like this. None of these things are known specifically as "Tristis", so this is not a disambiguation page at all. This violates WP:PTM. Hesperian 11:11, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I also don't think it's very practical to disambiguate specific names unless they are actually used widely to refer to the organism. If we did, we'd probably get thousands of articles listed under dab pages of more common specific names like major, minor, sativum, vulgaris or for colors/patterns like rubra, viridis, alba, flavus, punctatus, variegatus, etc. etc. --Obsidi♠nSoul 11:23, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hello SP-KP, I saw your note on the gastropods page. While I admire your enthusiasm and the amount of work you put into this disambig page, I strongly disagree with the principle of making disambiguation pages for specific epithets or including specific epithets on disambig pages.
Specific epithets such as "tristis" are never used by themselves as a single word in biology. They are always used as part of a binomial name, like this one for the human species: Homo sapiens or H. sapiens (but the latter only if the full name has been spelled out previously in the same paper.)
Calling a species "Tristis" is like calling New York City just "New" or like calling Los Angeles, "Los". It doesn't make sense as an isolated word, it is intrinsically part of a name. A lesser but related point is that "tristis" would never be capitalized as "Tristis" even if somehow it found itself at the beginning of a sentence; instead you would have to say: "The specific epithet "tristis"".
You may also want to ask User:JoJan about this. He is an admin and has deleted disambiguation pages that were lists of specific epithets previously.
Many thanks, Invertzoo (talk) 11:20, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There are some "dab" pages of the form "G. epithet" surviving, but they weren't exactly greeted with open arms. People do use epithets in isolation in conversation where the context is clear, and at least one instance escaped into usage as a vernacular name (japonica for Japanese quince, Chaenomeles japonica, but "dab" pages could only be justified under extreme inclusionism. However they would be a pain to maintain - vulgar/e/is occurs in over 1000 names, and alb/a/um/us is commoner. Lavateraguy (talk) 11:40, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the responses; some helpful points made. I agree that you'd never come across the term tristis in a scientific paper without context. Remember though that scientific papers are just one type of publication; and publications are just one way of communicating. There are situations where specific epithets are used without their genus, where it will be obvious which taxon is being referred to. If I was approached by someone with binoculars on a coastal headland in Britain on an autumn day and was told that s/he had just seen a tristis, I'd know to be looking out for a small brown warbler making a sad-sounding 'peep' noise (rather than a sad-looking snail, say). SP-KP (talk) 11:37, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How do you know that the chap with binoculars is not a field botanist rather than an ornithologist? I use binoculars, for example, to identify ferns growing on the other side of canals.
You left out another 150-200 plant names. Lavateraguy (talk) 11:47, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, what I should have said was "approached by a birdwatcher". My point, though, was - if I didn't know which tristis was being referred to, and was too embarrassed to ask, would this disambiguation page help me to work it out after we'd parted company? To give another example, suppose someone emails me a PDF scan of a page from a book about moths, but it's not the page where the full scientific name is given, so it just refers to "tristis". Would this disambiguation page help me to narrow down the possible candidates? These are the sorts of situation I had in mind when I created the page. SP-KP (talk) 12:04, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In instances like that, it obviously heavily depends on context and, imo, can not be used in any practical encyclopedic manner. Related to Lavateraguy's comment above: if a group of tea specialists are in conversation and one of them uses the word japonica, you can safely conclude he is talking about the Japanese camellia, Camellia japonica.
If it were a group of marine biologists discussing something over lunch, it becomes far more confusing. They could be referring to the breadcrumb sponge, Halichondria japonica, the copepod Labidocera japonica, the north pacific right whale Eubalaena japonica, the small squid Sepiella japonica, the snail Bellamya japonica... etc. You get the drift. Due to full binomial names being cumbersome, a compromise is made by turning the genus name into an initial, but even this does little to help the less specialized the field gets.
In a biological conference or something, if someone says L. japonica he could be referring to five very different things - 3 flies of different genera (Limnophila japonica, Lipoptena japonica, Lonchoptera japonica), a butterfly (Luehdorfia japonica), or the Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica). You might be interested to know that such cases seem to be indeed disambiguated (latter example is here: L. japonica). Not sure how practical that one is, but that might be the sort of thing you are looking for (a collection of such dab pages are then collected into a dab page for the specific epithet here: japonica). The addition of a single letter [of the generic name] can narrow down the search enough as to make it less insane. Even then I don't really know... Creating a dab page for a relatively rare specific name like tristis might seem like a breeze, but imagine it might be biting more than you can chew when it comes to other specific names. But yeah, the japonica dab page seems useful enough, but only because it was split off into several smaller dab pages. There's still that nagging feeling like you missed one.
Also again related to Lavateraguy's comment, out here in the Philippines, we have at least two instances of generic and specific names that have entered into common vocabulary. They are Gmelina and mangium (for Acacia mangium, which... I should probably redirect). Then there's also Citrus of course.--Obsidi♠nSoul 13:17, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
While it's rare for an epithet to enter the vernacular vocabulary, it's not uncommon for a generic name to do so - e.g. geranium (for Pelargonium), nasturtium (for Tropaeolum majus), chrysanthemum, hibiscus, lobelia, alyssum (for Lobularia maritima), brassica (as a generic term for Brassica crop varieties), dahlia, cotoneaster, ... Lavateraguy (talk) 22:12, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Hesperian above. These are all partial title matches, which don't belong on dab pages. Rkitko (talk) 12:01, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ooh. That makes more sense. Does that mean japonica should be deleted though? :P --Obsidi♠nSoul 13:24, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
For japonica, I would think that the word is clearly used as a common name for at least the camellia and Chaenomeles. —innotata 14:07, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not for non-tea drinking countries. :P Though yeah similar thing when talking about "arabica"... which, like vulgaris, is apparently similarly disambiguated LOL. If it is decided that it be kept though, I would just suggest that a disclaimer 'this list may be incomplete bla bla bla' be placed prominently just before listing all the possible binomina with the specific epithet. Still don't like it, though I would make an exception where it has clearly been used enough in lay speech (which is not the case here) --Obsidi♠nSoul 16:30, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not useful If you want to know what birds have the specific epithet tristis, then just search for "tristis bird" either in Google or Wikipedia. Since a dab page of this kind cannot be guaranteed to be complete, it is (mildly) harmful in that it could mislead a searcher into stopping a search when they should have continued. I'm in favour of its being deleted. Also, when there are major articles which badly need editing, why waste editors' time on creating pages and pages of disambiguation of species epithets? Peter coxhead (talk) 14:45, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Several years ago, we noted these epithet disambiguations were being created (yes, they've been around for a few years. Have you used them? I haven't!). The resulting motion was to allow whoever was making them to continue creating them, since they aren't really hurting anything. I'm not certain they have much use, but I personally don't like them. Bob the WikipediaN (talk • contribs) 14:22, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Peter, there are very very few arguments that should never ever be used in a content discussion on Wikipedia, but "when there are major articles which badly need editing, why waste editors' time on creating X" is one of them. Wikipedia relies on volunteer input, and volunteers can take their input away at any time, no questions asked. Volunteers are entirely free to choose what subject matter they work on, and no other editor has the right to demean other editors' contributions by suggesting that they're not tackling high-enough priority tasks. That just risks putting off potentially valuable editors, and making us look like a standoffish bureaucratic elite. Don't do it, please. SP-KP (talk) 18:23, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, so I didn't word my comment as carefully as I should have. The problem is not with creating such articles, it's maintaining them. So by wasting editors' time I mean the following, and only the following. Lists of things that change need to be constantly maintained or they lose their value. Suppose there were a list for every species epithet. Then whenever any editor created a new species article or changed the name of a species to keep up with the latest research, that editor would need to remember to edit the epithet list as well. It's not a question of demeaning an editor's contribution, but if an editor creates an article which then requires other editors to keep updating it, I think this is an issue which I'm entitled to comment on. If the process can be automated in some way (as per the discussion below), that's a different matter. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:05, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Meh, keep I'm not sure this is very useful, but it's vaguely interesting and deleting it would just be a waste of time. If SP-KP is willing to do the work, and it's not actively harming anything, then I say just let it stay. Abyssal (talk) 15:33, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

vulgaris Bob the WikipediaN (talk • contribs) 15:42, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Very interesting. So my idea was far from new after all. Sounds like we need a centralised discussion on this. SP-KP (talk) 18:29, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm with Bob on this one. I can't see any harm in having this sort of article, and it is "vaguely interesting". Now I know sad is the same in Latin and Norwegian! Petter Bøckman (talk) 11:00, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I would say that I am rather luke-warm on this idea. Mild oppose, but I am open to convincing. Wouldn't what you are trying to achieve be done just as well by searching for 'tristis' in Wikipedia anyway? Without this page all of the species you have listed here would be returned by a search? Antarctic-adventurer (talk) 12:38, 6 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List?

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Reading this article (which is a nice compilation, whatever its other merits) it feels like a list. So while I don't think it's really a dab page, would it be worthwhile to turn it into a list? Guettarda (talk) 16:50, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That might work. Abyssal (talk) 17:35, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The very same thought occurred to me, while I was away from my PC doing real life stuff. I need to refresh my memory on guidelines around lists, but I'm pretty sure there are some criteria we'll fall foul of if we try to make this a list. It feels like this is a third category of page. If this were a paper encyclopedia, I guess we'd call it an "index" ? SP-KP (talk) 18:26, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It would probably be considered an indiscriminate collection of information (under What Wikipedia is not), somewhat like "Words that begin with V" or "Baseball players who wear glasses" but for zoologists. --Danger (talk) 18:29, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Some people might make that argument, but given that the specific epithet has a meaning, that would be a weaker argument than "words beginning with V" or "baseball players with glasses". It is discriminate - it has a limited, discrete scope.

As for the "index" idea, see WP:WPINDEXES and WP:WPOOK. Guettarda (talk) 18:37, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you want an "index of taxa" such could be automatically generated from taxoboxes. Lavateraguy (talk) 18:49, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thereby saving editors the initial work of identitying the taxa to include on these pages? If so, that sounds like a great idea. If I've misunderstood and you were actually saying that this makes the idea of these pages redundant, could you post some brief thoughts on how users might do this? SP-KP (talk) 19:05, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not expert on wiki programming, but on first sight it seems that a first stab could be achieved by modifying the taxobox script to incorporate category specifications. But the question as to what purpose an index would serve still needs answering. Lavateraguy (talk) 22:11, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No-one has answered my question which was: what does a page mapping species epithets to genera provide to a user of Wikipedia that searching can't provide more effectively? Indexes are essential in paper sources; if Wikipedia were a paper encyclopedia, then an index of all species epithets would be useful. Indexes are much less useful, if useful at all, in electronically searchable sources. The fact that indexes can be automatically generated surely just shows that the information can be found by searching. (Though it would be nice to be able to limit a search to taxoboxes.) Peter coxhead (talk) 21:17, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We have tools for similar thing on Wikipedia: we can search all pages that start with the same prefix Wikipedia talk:Special:PrefixIndex, for example Special:PrefixIndex/John. But We have no the the same search tool for suffix Special:SuffixIndex/John. / We have a related category Category:All set index articles. We also have guideline for such articles Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Set_index_articles and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (stand-alone lists). We should try to follow these guideline and we should try to follow the spirit of these guidelines. For example I think that the section Wikipedia:Manual of Style (stand-alone lists)#Lists of words is also relevant. / Results of this list can be easily get via searching, for example when you will search "tristis fish" http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=tristis+fish&fulltext=Search you should get all fish with a word "tristis" included. This is true only for those articles, that already exist on wikipedia. I do not consider this list useful as it is. This list could be either automatically generated from already existed data. Or - more likely - we can get results of this list when we will improve searching (or when we will use searching more effectively). For example can we search only in articles that have taxoboxes? (As also suggested Peter coxhead above.) --Snek01 (talk) 23:27, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Such well-intentioned lists, even if they may be pleasing to the eye, are completely useless and impossible to maintain with the right scientific names for all the species. As mentioned above another 150-200 botanical names could be added. I could add 49 names of sea snails (there only two in the list), half of which have already become synonyms. In my opinion, such a list can be speedy deleted under G6 as an unnecessary disambiguation page (see : Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion). JoJan (talk) 15:56, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not useful; delete - As a list, this would be no more viable than as a disambiguation page. There's the real possibility that an organism with the masc./fem. epithet tristis will be reassigned to a genus of neuter gender, resulting in the epithet triste, which wouldn't be listed on the page at all, since it's spelled differently. The same could be said of epithets like rubrus, rubra, rubrum or japonicus, japonica, japonicum. There are so many potential variations on this theme, that even a "complete" list (unlikely to have) would not be helpful. All of these are adjectives and not items that should be listed for disambiguation. It would be like having a list for "Japanese" that listed everything that could be preceded by the adjective "Japanese". --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:17, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Consensus?

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Do we have a consensus here yet on delete or leave or rework? Maybe I am prejudiced but it seems that the WP guidelines would support a delete. Invertzoo (talk) 12:45, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There's probably a majority in favour of delete; not sure that there's a consensus even though I'm in favour of delete. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:21, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think Peter sums it up accurately; a slight majority favour delete, but there's not a consensus. SP-KP (talk) 21:39, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It seems we have a place for going about this formally. I'll do the listing. Danger (talk) 22:15, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tristis (2nd nomination)

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After closure of that discussion as delete, I made a proposal to the closing admin, Jo-Jo Eumerus, at User talk:Jo-Jo Eumerus#Tristis: recreate as a redirect; which was accepted. It was suggested that I ping all contributors to the deletion discussion, in case they might wish to comment; so, pinging @Sandstein, Peter coxhead, Deor, EncycloPetey, Hesperian, Whpq, Lenticel, Carlossuarez46, Obsidian Soul, Guettarda, Metropolitan90, Uanfala, Ultraexactzz, and Plantdrew: I suggest that any debate should take place here, as an essentially new discussion.

The idea of redirecting tristis and the like to List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names has already been floated, but with few participants, at WT:Disambiguation#Specific epithets. Narky Blert (talk) 22:21, 27 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The left-hand column in the list article contains links to Wiktionary. Narky Blert (talk) 10:21, 28 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Just to note that bringing Wiktionary into it doesn't answer my point about referencing, since WP:SELFPUB applies. (WP:CIRC should really list Wiktionary, Wikispecies, etc. as well as other language wikipedias.) Anyone who has followed discussions with Wimpus over etymology will be aware that explaining the meaning of scientific names is not uncontroversial, so it definitely needs sourcing. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:57, 28 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd prefer deletion of epithets, with redirecting to Wiktionary as the next best option. Redirecting to the list of Latin and Greek words is my least preferred option. I worry that not deleting epithets could lead to the creations of thousands of redirects (how "commonly used" are we talking about for the purposes of the list?). There are other potential targets too; sarawakensis should probably target List of Latin place names used as specific names, but currently goes to the "commonly used" list (where it is defined). If not deleted, darwinii should perhaps by a redirect to Charles Darwin (I know there are some redirects for eponymous epithets that already target scientists, but can't find any examples at the moment). Maybe there should be a redirect category template for these; {{R from taxonomic epithet}}? Plantdrew (talk) 17:48, 28 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I was surprised to find that List of taxa named after Charles Darwin doesn't exist. Narky Blert (talk) 21:02, 28 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well if it did, every entry would need to be sourced; there are other people called "Darwin", including Erasmus Darwin. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:03, 28 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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