Talk:Sagebrush lizard

Sagebrush lizard v Southern sagebrush lizard
This article is titled Southern sagebrush lizard, but is really an article about the three distinct varieties of sagebrush lizard (i.e. it also discusses the Northern and Western sagebrush lizard). Should this page therefore be moved to Sagebrush Lizard, or should the irrelevant info be split into different pages. In other words, are the 3 different sagebrush lizards different enough to justify having distinct pages that will also be separate from the main sagebrush lizard page? Anyone have an opinion, before I just have the info moved back to the Sagebrush lizard page??? ~ Ciar ~ (Talk to me!)  23:08, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Okay...I went ahead and did this! ~ Ciar ~ (Talk to me!)  03:13, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Amniota in the taxobox
Amniota is placed in the series taxon in the taxobox.

This is consistent with the Wikipedia article on tetrapoda and amniota. There are issues however:
 * 1) According to Wikipedia, the series taxon is a botanical subdivision of genus. I could not find any reference beyond the Wikipedia articles on tetrapoda and amniota for its use as a zoological taxon. Series_(botany)
 * 2) The Wikipedia taxobox places the series taxon at where the botanical series taxon is placed.  So placing the amniota taxon in the series taxon in the taxobox results in amniota being incorrectly located in the taxobox.
 * 3) Outside of Wikipedia I couldn't find precedent for the zoological taxon rank of series.  Is it possible that the Wikipedia articles on tetrapoda and amniota are just wrong on this point?
 * 4) As of the time that I am writing this the Wikipedia taxobox does not have a division between superclassis and classis. So it does not seem possible to correctly use amniota as a taxon name in a taxobox at the current time. Taxobox_usage

The amniota taxon appears to be a grouping of all the tetrapods excluding the amphibians.

My suggestion with regard to this is that amniota be removed from the sagebrush lizard taxobox, until and if the Wikipedia taxobox is modified to allow the proper use of amniota.Davefoc (talk) 19:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Changes and suggestions
I would suggest adding citations to all of the information presented in the article. I corrected for a few citation and grammatical errors. Edickerson1 (talk) 21:21, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

Apparent hoax
The statement in  04:57, 3 March 2014 edit of Sagebrush lizard that the sagebrush lizard may "play dead" is an apparent hoax. All statements I have been able to find making this claim specifically about the sagebrush lizard use the same wording (e.g. rather than "feigns death") and are subsequent to the aforementioned edit.

There are a relative handful of sites that reference this, but of course, the number will only grow if the hoax is not called out.

List of hoaxed sites:


 * Wildlife Express (April 2017)
 * Valley Sentinel (August 2019)
 * Neeness (2021)
 * Quizlet (2021)
 * Royal Mail Hotel (February 2021)
 * Desert Innovation Research and Technology (June 2021)
 * Kiddle (July 2021)

Fabrickator (talk) 02:10, 30 December 2021 (UTC) added June 2021 entry: Fabrickator (talk) 20:25, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you; dealt with. DS (talk) 05:58, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
 * My confusion was that List of hoaxes on Wikipedia calls for an admin to preserve the article, but that's not needed when the hoax is merely a false statement within the article. Thank you for your assistance. Fabrickator (talk) 07:16, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

(and now, I digress, in Q&A format)

Q: Some comments point out that this had already been tagged with. Why make a big deal about the possibility of this being a hoax?

A: Each of the sources (as identified so far) appears to have picked up on this claim after the tag was added. It seems that is not enough of an alert that the claim may not be true. There are perhaps other tags (?) No, that's only for sourced claims.), but in any case, the current tagging isn't doing the trick.

Q: So what if other sites add the claim?

A: To begin with, that encourages the perpetrators of the hoax. But worse, as the unsubstantiated claim begins to appear on other sites, it gains credibility, and more significantly, it becomes a challenge to establish that these other sites aren't actually valid sources for the erroneous claim.

Q: Why not just insist on promptly removing unsourced claims?

A: Many times, unsourced claims are credible statements. There can be a lot of evidence available to support a claim, but perhaps it's still a challenge to have an appropriate citation. More significantly, we want to support the use of as a way to encourage improvement of an article by identifying presumably credible claims that simply need to be sourced, rather than to use it as an excuse to harm Wikipedia by deleting content which is likely to be accurate.

Q: So again, if unsourced claims can be so bad, but you don't want to delete them because they might not be a hoax, don't you think that you just need to make up your mind!

A: Even the presence of a citation doesn't really prove anything anyway, because the citation may not actually support the claim (and we have sort of a "worst case" situation if the source is not available online or is otherwise not freely accessible). What we need to do is to mitigate the problem. Evaluate the credibility of an unsourced claim. If we decide to use the tag, we should consider a tighter "deadline" for claims that seem less credible. We may actually need to reconsider whether WP:AGF applies In any case, we need to do a better job identifying hoaxes and potential hoaxes.

Q: Getting back to the purported hoax at hand, what's the clue about this particular edit that leads you to consider it to be a hoax?

A: Thanks for asking. The claim made, as origially worded, is that on rare occasions, the sagebrush lizard may play dead. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the sagebrush lizard has never been observed to play dead. How can you disprove this claim? The answer is You can't. Just as with Russell's teapot, this claim is non--disprovable, because (in this case) the longer you observe the lack of playing dead, the more you "prove" just how rare the behavior is, even though the claim implies that the behavior actually does occur. This sort of makes it the perfect claim for a hoax. Fabrickator (talk) 22:03, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

Not a hoax
Goodness,, you've managed to make a mountain out of a molehill here and elsewhere, and seem to have got yourself all riled up about hoaxes. The right thing might have been either to have left it if tit was within ther bounds of possibility, or removed the uncited statement, as was recently done by. But your investigative skills could perhaps do with a little polishing up, and your conspiracy concerns dulling down a notch, as it took me about 15 minute on Google to find a source that ought to keep you happy. In 1973, as part of his 214-page PhD thesis on the Life History and Ecology of S.graciosus, G Burkholder wrote the following in a section on Behaviour called "Tail Thrashing, Tail Vibrating and Escape Behavior":
 * "Sagebrush swifts [=Sagebrush lizards] were never observed in the process of escaping from a predator. However, when the investigator approached lizards they would immediately retreat to the nearest cover. Usually these were captured but in some cases when the lizard retreated into heavy litter they would remain still, even after the entire area was torn up and raked over in pursuit. At times the lizard would not move until touched."

Now, that to me is "playing dead", so I think you can happily reinsert that statement as being a rare, but observed event (albeit using your own words). Not all sources have to be online, and not all uncited content is untrue or a hoax, so taking the time to find and read through the available sources - even by going to a library - often pays dividends and saves other people a lot of time and effort, too. It seems that you both wrote the questions and addressed the answers to yourself, too, which I found quite disconcerting, so I'll just gloss over them, if that's OK. I hope my response closes the issue, so feel free to reinsert the statement with a full inline citation. Nick Moyes (talk) 15:38, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Nick, thank you for finding that. Just as a point of information, is it fair to say that you are unaware of any freely-accessible index that includes this source? Fabrickator (talk) 18:30, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Errm - that's a confusing way to ask. I'm not "unaware", but I am "aware" that the source is findable and freely available on Google Scholar. I'm now on a different device, so I can't supply you with a url right now, but you should be able to retrieve it quite easily. Let me know if you can't. Nick Moyes (talk) 22:45, 3 January 2022 (UTC)