Talk:Carex

Genus: Carex
Family: Cyperaceae

Media related to Carex at Wikimedia Commons

Now, can someone from the Plant project please paste something as useful as this here? Rate yourself on credibility first.-- Carol 09:23, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[Image gallery removed --Melburnian (talk) 21:31, 31 December 2007 (UTC)][reply]

Consensus needed to resolve content issues[edit]

I'm requesting editor's consensus to settle an editing disagreement on two content issues. Issue number 1 is the question of whether the addition of or deletion of red linked plant names in this article is more desirable. Please see Wikipedia:Red link for further information about red links and see Rhodostemonodaphne, Convolvulaceae and Orobanchaceae to see plant related articles which demonstrate what an article with red linking looks like. Issue number 2 is the question of whether the addition of or deletion of plant common names, referenced from the articles wikilinked by their scientific names is more desirable. I was unable to find guidelines on issue 2 in WikiProject Plants, however three examples of articles which include common names are Astralagus, Caryophyllaceae and Minuartia.

For both issues I'm going to vote that the addition rather than deletion is desirable. Trilobitealive (talk) 02:37, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Importantly, the lists at Rhodostemonodaphne, Convolvulaceae and Orobanchaceae are comprehensive lists of the constituent taxa. That cannot occur here, because there are too many (I suspect that no comprehensive list exists, either). Those lists are, like this one, also catastrophically under-sourced, but at least for the families, that's probably an editorial oversight, because comprehensive lists are around, and are presumably the sources that were used. As I have explained elsewhere, common names are also only really useful if they, too, are comprehensive, which requires the list to be. Otherwise, a reader searching for a given common name could easily be misled by the omission of a second species with the same common name. Astragalus is a very poor example, and is not the sort of article we should be modelling this one on. Astragalus is one of the very few genera of flowering plants to include more species than Carex, and the list is extremely biased towards certain parts of the world (chiefly North America). Instead, we should try to emulate the best plant articles, the Featured Articles and Good Articles. The first two of those that I looked at were Buxbaumia (comprehensive list of 12 species, no common names) and Aiphanes (link to separate list article, which also includes no common names). I'll look around for a reasonably comprehensive source, and see if I can knock up a list of Carex species, at which point we can remove the troublesome list from this article altogether. --Stemonitis (talk) 08:42, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough for now, though it would be nice to hear from someone other than the two parties in disagreement, i.e. neither you nor me. BTW it appears that List of Carex species which you created to house the list is in violation of both the Copyright notice and the no derivative terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License notice linked on the Plant List site. Perhaps you'd be so kind as to clarify whether that point is valid on Talk:List of Carex species. See Terms and Conditions and CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives terms Trilobitealive (talk) 23:34, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am glad you have come to accept that this is the correct way forward, and I'm sure you now recognise how incomplete and skewed the previous attempt at a list was. Incidentally, the bot that flagged the possible copyright violation was in error, as they often are when dealing with taxonomic lists. A scientific name is not subject to copyright. The list reports information in the only logical format, and cites the source of the information explicitly, so there is no copyright issue. (The terms of their licence are actually irrelevant, because we're not republishing anything under that licence.) --Stemonitis (talk) 05:54, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Number of species[edit]

I just changed the number of species in the lead sentence from 1500 to 2000, which seems fairly commonly cited. I have also seen 3000 claimed, e.g. in [books.google.com/books?id=8qEYmYlCJdcC&pg=PA35 The Successful Gardener Guide], but I think these may be confusing the sedge family with the genus, and would want a really reliable citation. Agyle (talk) 10:53, 25 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]