User talk:Aranae/Archive6

This is an archive for my user talk page. It contains all discussion from my sixth year as an editor. For current messages, see User talk:Aranae.

Hamster classsification
Hello! I've just been trying to sort out the mess that the classification of hamsters has got into, and, as I noted in my typical peeved article-talk-page style at WP:RODENT, I need some help. First, which classification should I use, and whose common names? Names like Dzhungarian are applied to so many species that I fear we shall be obliged to use Latin names, and give disambig. pages for every common name. As for Cricetulus, which you asked about earlier, I was following the practice at WP:BIRD. You do what you want with the pages in question. If you don't like "see text", I don't mind not adding that to articles. innotata (Talk | Contribs) 16:42, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I had seen your reply at your talk page. Thank you.  I replied to this note at WP:Rodents since it pertains to a wider discussion.  --Aranae (talk) 23:36, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Happy Wikibirthday
And let me take this opportunity to thank you for all your contributions to mammal articles on Wikipedia--all the cleaning up of vandalism, watching for sanity in many discussions, and so much more. It's much appreciated. :-) Ucucha 14:26, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I really appreciate that.  I'm sorry I can't contribute as much as I used to.  I'm also seeing how much of my old work needs improvement.  So much of what I've done came from an era when the standards were lower particularly regarding internal citations.  Aren't you an admin on nl?  Have you given thought to becoming one here?  Let me know and I'd be happy to nominate you.  --Aranae (talk) 14:52, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Every contribution helps, though I definitely hope you'll be able to do more content work in the future.
 * Yes, I'm an admin on nl (and also on Wikispecies), though I'm now mainly active here. Thanks for your offer of a nomination; I may want to stand for adminship here some day, but I prefer to wait at least a few months--I'm not in a hurry, and there are lots of interesting articles to write anyway. Ucucha 16:46, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Please consider this an open invitation - let me know when you change your mind. To me the main tool that would be useful would just be the ability to move over a redirect.  I'm not eager to see you to drop writing articles in exchange for deleting pages and fighting vandals.  --Aranae (talk) 17:09, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is one space where admin tools would be helpful--we do seem to have consensus now for those moves, and requesting a RM for every one of them that can't be moved manually for whatever reason does become tiring. But still, I don't want to overhurry and I'll definitely remember your invitation. Ucucha 17:20, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Castoroides
Concerning your revert of my move; I could not simply move Giant Beaver because there is already content at Castoroides ohioensis. So now I have placed the db-move template on Castoroides ohioensis (as per Requests for moving), and it now appears in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion. Once that's cleared, it should be movable. — Epastore (talk) 16:59, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Perfect. Thank you.  Moving over redirects is the number one tool of admins that I'd like to see accessible to more editors.  If it's going somewhere essentially content-free it shouldn't be as big of a deal as it always is.  --Aranae (talk) 20:14, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Titles
As you may have noticed, there is some new movement in our eternal title capitalization/non-capitalization debate, with a current requested move at Talk:Swamp Rabbit and a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cetaceans (where we're getting at some interesting points regarding details of usage). I also noticed a recent discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora), which claimed that publishers are currently moving towards sentence case for common names; I think we've both written at some time that it's going the other way for mammals. What do you think is the best way to move forward? I'm inclined to just let it go, try to prevent people from being over-eager in claiming they are right, and hope that no one starts mass-moving pages around.

Also, I started a page at User:Ucucha/Titles to provide an overview of the other issue with mammal article titles. What do you think of it? Is the "double fives test" a useful heuristic? Ucucha 16:15, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Part of my tendency to mildly favor capitalization was a practical one on wikipedia, I felt that among the mammal editors who had a strong opinion, the most edits were happening by those favoring capitalization. Much of that, however, was driven by UtherSRG, who's edits have tapered off even more than mine of late.  I'm inclined to just let this play itself out, really see what the new consensus is, and then try and limit future argument until there's reason to believe that consensus may have shifted again or that there's something external that's changed such as editorial policies shifting, etc.  I'm really that neutral on the topic, I just get sick of having the same fight once a month.  And I'm mostly wary of the mass copy and paste moves.
 * I think you've handled the shift to scientific names perfectly. I was on the fence when you started, but you have really convinced me.  You've also really hit a proper balance in determining which taxa warrant movement.  Very well done with the rule of fives.  --Aranae (talk) 19:37, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I think it's a bit of a pity that it's been mainly editors who are not particularly active on mammals who are advocating non-capitalization, and many of them don't know of the background and the arguments in favor of capitalization. But that's how consensus is developing here, and I agree that it's probably best for now to let things run their course, as it seems to be going in a pretty calm and reasoned way.
 * Thanks for the support with regards to the scientific names; it's really nice to hear that. I'll be going on slowly with reviewing other sigmodontines, as I did with the rice rats (I expect all but a few Sigmodon to fail the test). Ucucha 20:00, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Reply
Well, now is the time—thanks even in advance! By the way, did you receive my e-mail? And another totally unrelated note—I noticed that the link to your fifth archive actually leads to nr. 4, so you might want to change it. Ucucha 03:48, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm up over there now. Thanks for the heads up on my archive talk.  Does that mean someone actually reads those archives?  --Aranae (talk) 05:33, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Interdigital webbing
Do you know something about interdigital webbing and syndactyly? Drmies and I are discussing some things on my talk page, and your input might be helpful. Ucucha 21:57, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Capitalization again, and Tachyoryctes
Happy New Year! Now I'm here anyway, you might want to comment at the discussion I'm having with Innotata here. I've allowed myself to be drawn into giving an opinion on whether titles should be capitalized, and would like another check whether it's reasonable what I'm saying. There's also a question related to Tachyoryctes you might have an opinion on. Thanks, Ucucha 08:33, 13 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Can you weigh in soon? I'd like to get this cleared up before I start working on certain groups of rodents. —innotata (Talk • Contribs) 00:58, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

North American mammals
I had difficulty reconciling this edit to the edit summary. I would think that if these monkeys really have established feral populations, they do belong on the list. Ucucha 16:48, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry. I fixed it now.  --Aranae (talk) 16:54, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Plains Pocket Gopher / Taxobox
sorry, I wasn't aware of the map section in the en.WP taxobox - thanks for fixing! Rbrausse (talk) 20:13, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * No apologies needed. Your addition was a great one; I just moved it around a bit.  --Aranae (talk) 16:17, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
 * initially I tried to free pictures of an actual Geomys bursarius - but neither Bob Gress nor Robert Timm were able to publish a picture under CC (all I got was a WP-exclusive permission... *sigh*) - and the map was some kind of last resort action to enhance the articles. and now I'm sure about one thing: I _hate_ it to work with Inkscape and GIMP :) Rbrausse (talk) 22:03, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
 * It turned out quite nice. It's too bad that there's not a good solid freeware equivalent of Adobe Illustrator (only less obnoxious than Illustrator).  --Aranae (talk) 22:15, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Editing
Good to see you editing again. If you have time, there's a protracted discussion at Talk:Sciuridae you may be interested in. Ucucha 21:39, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

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