User talk:DavidLevinson/Vitamins

Friendly note on the vitamin articles: A central premise of wikipedia naming conventions is to name pages based on what the majority of English speakers will most easily recognize with the reasonable minimum of ambiguity (see the first paragraph of the conventions page). Another important convention is to use English words for things when English equivalents exist. Unfortunately, scientific terms are at best jargon and at worst anglicized Latin and Greek -- either way they should be avoided when common alternates exist that essentially mean the same thing (if not exactly the same thing -- differences in usage can be explained in the article -- see jellyfish for an example). I'm a biologist and even I avoid these overly technical terms whenever valid common terms exist -- we are trying to educate people here on the arts, science and history not dumbfound them with unfamiliar terms. Overuse of technical terms discourages linking becasue redirects are not obvious. The technical terms can be introduced in the first line of the articles and then used throughout if wanted. I'll go ahead and change these over to conform to our naming conventions in a while. --maveric149, Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Yes, but when the common english term is ambiguous (or incorrect), the scientific term is used ... that is why scientific terms were developed. And that is why redirects (and disambiguation) were invented -- to move the users to proper, unambiguous titles. E.g. if you read the vitamin article, half the time the 'scientific' name is used, half the time the common name, and usage is mixed. Shouldn't we stick to the clearer more formal terminology, and redirect to that instead of away from it?

-- dml

One more point (somewhat peripheral, but not entirely). Type Vitamin A into the Find window. You get an error. Not overly useful in itself. "Sorry, your boolean search query contains the following errors:

"vitamin" [!! SYNTAX ERROR: the word 'a' is too short, the index requires at least 4 characters]

" so if they are going to be at the vitamin page anyway, does it really matter?

-- dml

That error is a technical issue that needs to be worked out by the wikiware people.

Who but a small minority of people are going to know to look for Retinol anyway? This is a technical term that is not nearly as widely known as Vitamin A (the two are nearly synonymous). Your average person on the street doesn't have a clue what the technical term for the most common form of Vitamin A is while a majority is going to at least recognize "Vitamin A" as 1) a vitamin, 2) something that is good for you. Many of these same people will even know it is good for maintaining vision (among other things). Yes, it is true that there are other compounds other than retinol that fall under the umbrella of "Vitamin A". But retinol is the most important of these and for all practical purposes you cannot distinguish the two in common usage, nor can you really have a discussion about just retinol or just vitamin A or just any of the other Vitamin A compounds. Lets make a comprehensive article about the vitamin first, then we can think about a more technical discussion about retinol alone.

Shall we also have heart attack be a redirect to myocardial infarction? Any doctor will tell you that the term "heart attack" is technically ambiguous and therefore isn't really a correct term (when in fact the difference isn't that important -- this difference in usage would be an interesting thing to note in the hear attack article BTW). But can we reasonably expect the average visitor to our site will know, or even care, what the hell a myocardial infarction is? If I were a random guy without a degree in biology and I saw that technical term as the title of a page, I wouldn't even bother reading the first line. "Sounds too technical" I would say to myself and then I would move on to the next site that is just a click away. The average netcitizen has a very low attention span. We are fighting for hits here -- each and every visitor is a potential contributor and without contributors we have no project.

Biologists and doctors have their own special cliquish language, believe me I know, -- why force it on everybody else when valid and common names exist for the same thing? I try to follow the advice of our former editor-in-chief Larry Sanger when naming articles; 'Just think about the "surprise factor" when naming articles.' People are going to almost always link to the term they know and expect and if that term is redirected to a technical term, the first feeling that person or a visitor will feel upon seeing the technical term is surprise. This is something we should avoid -- we want to inform people, not surprise them. When trying to teach somebody something, one should always try to start with something they already know and then build upon that. People already know many of the common names of things and we have the opportunity here to gently teach them other things -- such as the technical name of a term they already know.

Redirects are great but they are not obvious to either contributors or visitors (especially new ones) -- meaning that contributors will get the impression that they need to know the technical names of things in order to link to them and will therefore waste time and consideration constantly checking links because there is no obvious way to know of the existence of redirects (if they decide to contribute to our site at all). Nor is there an obvious way of knowing how technical the term they are linking is named (ever here of 3,7-dimethyl-9-(2,6,6-trimethylcyclohex-1-en-l-yl)nona-2,4,6,8-tetraen-1-ol?).

One of the founding principles of our naming conventions is to think to ourselves when naming pages, about giving them names which are distinctive and what we feel will be a good candidate for direct linking by a contributor on the other side of the planet that we won't ever meet or know. All the other conventions spring from this simple idea. Please read our naming conventions (especially the first paragraph that talks about reasonable ambiguity and choosing titles that can be expected to be recognized by the greatest number of English speakers). BTW, the National Institutes of Health uses vitamin A as the preferred term to use when talking about retinol, and so does Britannica and every other encyclopedia I'm aware of that is oriented for general use -- like wikipedia. Please read our naming conventions page for more info. BTW, 3,7-dimethyl-9-(2,6,6-trimethylcyclohex-1-en-l-yl)nona-2,4,6,8-tetraen-1-ol is the full chemical name of retinol. Shale we move retinol there? What can be more technically correct or unambiguous than the accepted IUPAC name? --User:maveric149

Google searches reveal the following hits:
 * vitamin a 3120000 retinol 89100
 * vitamin b1 119000 thiamin 102000
 * vitamin b2 112000 riboflavin 165000
 * vitamin b3 75900 niacin 220000
 * vitamin d 843000 calciferol 5140
 * vitamin e 1500000 tocopherol 75100

So, shall we have vitamin A, B1, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin d and vitamin e.

Aesthetically this inconsistency in citations and form looks ugly to me, but as we say in Minnesota, whatever.

-- dml

Consistency is not nearly as important as usability -- otherwise we would have to use binomial nomenclature for every one of biology articles about plants and animals (a very sizable portion of all named lifeforms do not have any common name). Who is going to know what the scientific names of common lifeforms except some specialists? Knowing the binomial names of commonly named and known lifeforms isn't even something that is stressed in the standard modern bio-science curriculum anymore -- we have more important things to learn than that. Given that, I will have to research the above list in order to determine what should be named what. We shouldn't try to impose artificial ways of organizing things just to "be consistent" -- each article is an island upon itself here in the 'pedia when it comes to naming (naming conventions should be followed where appropriate, of course -- these conventions aim to name articles in a natural, easy to directly link to in the wiki way). I will still contemplate your search results as part of the consideration in naming. Google is very useful but not always the last word. If you don't mind I will copy this discussion and place it in the talk for the naming conventions page. I wouldn't mind at all if you then deleted this discussion from this page. --maveric149