User talk:Dysmorodrepanis~enwiki/Ipomoea pes-caprae part 2

Ipomoea pes-caprae part 2

A few case studies:

Hartlaub (1896?)
So here I have Hartlaub's 44-page paper "Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der ausgestorbenen Vögel der Neuzeit, sowie derjenigen, deren Fortbestehen bedroht erscheint" from Abhandlungen der Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereinigung Bremen. Volume, issue and year are not quite clear; the volume is 14 or 16, the issue may be 61, and the year is 1895 or 1896. The title means, in modern terms: "History of the birds extinct since 1500, and those who are Critically Endangered".

It is of course highly interesting. It is also available on the Internet Archive.

But the information in the Hartlaub paper -- certainly highly useful for a lot of articles -- is to be taken with a grain of salt. It is over 110 years old after all, and the California Condor is not Pseudogryphus californianus anymore. Still, there is this (my trans.):

"'Specimens in Leiden, Paris, London, Berlin etc. We have not succeeded to get this imposing bird for the Bremen museum, even though there can be no doubt our American colleagues tried as hard as they could to procure a specimen.'"

First-hand testimony by one of the leading ornithologists of his day, in what probably comes close to a minor peer-reviewed journal (considering that peer review was done in front of an audience of colleagues back then), attesting to the AMNH, NMNH, Field Museum etc staff being unable to procure as much as a single Cali Condor specimen for export, in a day whan the bird was still a pest to be shot on sight. In other words, here we have an attestation to the species' rarity outside what inaccessible regions remained in its range, not first-hand (that would be hunters' testimony) but certainly better than newspaper clipppings and probably better than most tertiary sources.

The article does not as of yet provide information on that time period, but it provides a context where the data from the paper may be added at any time. This source's information would probably go, as one or two additional sentences, in the second or third section of California Condor. I'd rather leave the details to the folks who built that FA; for one thing because it is their "baby" and "to the winner go the spoils", for another I do not use plugins or scripts or customized settings, because I want to see and edit Wikipedia like any newbie would, and the countless long in-text refs make it very cumbersome if you do not use editing add-ons.

In case of other species this is not easy. There is a throwaway remark providing rather concise information on the ecological interaction of the Swamp Harrier ("Circus gouldii"), Australasian Pipit ("Anthus novae Zelandiae") and the Brown Rat ("Mus decumanus" <- LOL! I head that syn before, actually, but still: I lol'd). R. norvegicus could incorporate this right now. C. approximans might utilize the information right now, but it needs copyedit. A. novaeseelandiae in no way can in its present state use the information; there needs to be a detailed "status" (sub)section, then Hartlaub is very useful.

In the case of the pipit, there is no place to which I could annotate with ref tag (as footnote). And I do not want to waste my time with half-baked additions like "Its NZ population declined after introduction of NW rats, but the Swamp Harrier kept the population of rats in check and the pipit population recovered." just for the sake you having your ref tag and being happy. Everybody's edits are cranky and awkward when one is new to Wikipedia, it's like newbies' improper use of boldtext. But for me, it would be careless shoddy editing. Was Hartlaub right? I do not know. Right about the harriers eating rats, probably. Right about the pipits thus recovering? Of the full-scale deforestation and spread of pastureland in late 19th century NZ, any pipit would likely benefit, while not even the most eminent 1890s scientists thought in terms like "ecological niche" already. So what if their increase was due to changing land use, and what if not rats but cats were mainly responsible for its decline? Since Hartlaub did not conduct a scientific study of the the situation but merely reported more or less scientific observations of others, his testimony needs to be checked against modern sources, to see whether they agree with his interpretation of the observations. Until then, the existence of the Hartlaub paper ought to be noted down somewhere. It cannot be cited or referenced on its own without risking WP:OR until it is clear that its claims still hold water. Compare to the Cali Condor article, where the sources cited are in fact in line with Hartlaub's testimony, and thus the paper is good to use right away.

As to adding on Talk -- why have to take a detour via Talk when you're going to edit the article anyway with (probably) a main source at hand? Comments in general are meant to be found by people who are about to do a major edit to computer code. In the scope of Wikipedia: things like raising an article one or more notches on the quality scale. For anything below C-class, there is usually nothing on the Talk page, so at least I do not usually look there (it also distracts from the actual work). In other cases, anything GA and above, Talk is usually too active already to keep ref lists from being overlooked.

I could add it as "Further reading". But in one year's time, we will have stubs piling up that look like this, except they do not have such a pretty picture.

Like I said, the argument against is understandable on a theoretical level; annotating future references as comments is of course not SOP. But "nobody else does it" is not a valid argument if the MoS is not violated, which only demands that comments be brief and concise. I think I can safely say there are at best 5 other human Wikipedians who have seen as many Wikipedia articles from the point of a scholarly source to be added as I have, and I have seen the method I use is the one that failed least often. It does not work as well as I would like, but any major change that has been discussed would make it work worse, as I have seen often enough. (As the entire debate shows, the ideas proposed are not really that original. A lot of users have, faced with similar problems, made up a solution on their own, and most are a variant of "add as reffed footnote" or "add in further reading" or "add on Talk".) Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Hypsipetes vs. Auer et al. (2007)
For a different situation, see Hypsipetes. One major recent source on taxonomy exists (two in fact, but the other, as yet uncited, is on type specimens and not important here), and two major recent sources on phylogeny. They need to be arranged in a way that they do not contradict each other, because in that case whatever is claimed in the paragraph which these sources reference breaks down -- even though any single one of the sources, by itself, might not suggest so. In this case, there are enough ways in which the sources fit together, but to notice the problem in the first place, the sources need to be added in one package, not one by one.

This is a task which is problematic enough for a major professional organization like BirdLife International, as evidenced by the fact that they still include the type species of an older genus within a younger genus, nonwithstanding that this error has been discovered 9 years ago. Though that Hypsipetes must be sunk in Ixos and not the other way around should be obvious to anyone who browses the entries in Nomenclator Zoologicus. On Wikipedia we have quite a few people who know how to use Nomenclator Zoologicus; these are able to add the sources. Anyone else however would at best fail, and at worst stumble and mess it up: each of the phylo sources looks as if it resolved the placement of Setornis with regards to Iole and Alophoixus, but in fact they bluntly contradict each other, and thus for the time being Wikipedia must remain equivocal. Being equivocal is of course not possible if one phylo source is added before the other.

The Hypsipetes (or rather Ixos) case was trivial and could be done in one sweep, because phylo sources are easy to find (and those in question were already in Wikipedia), while the (new) taxo source was only about the "Hypsipetes group" and because taxonomic data can be added to the barest stub. It is different for ecological field data, such as the breeding habits of 18 different species in the Argentinan yungas. About half of which had probably never been recorded before and is probably still absent from any field guide or handbook. And where the fact that the source is properly used in some articles already does not in the least indicate that it is just as useful useful for others,if not some sort of annotation is left at the latter.

Even so, I had to read the 3 bulbul papers and ponder about the information for half an evening. There is really no point in throwing such material at a casual as long as it is not well integrated in the article, and things like "Most of the present confusion would appear to be the ambiguity caused by the presence of three potential homonyms" toned down a bit to something that (with the help of wikilinks) as regards what it means for practical purposes can be understood by the average highschool graduate. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Assorted Sylvioidea
A further advantage of mass adding minor sources, in whatever way: taxonomy and other cleanup of stubs can be done on the way. One word to those who know is enough: Laughingthrush. I suspect I updated half of the species stubs to current taxonomic status, simply in the course of adding ref comments from 2 or 3 species lists published in Forktail ecological articles. Also (not-anymore-)"Sylviidae" stubs are improving nicely. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Cercyonis Scudder, 1875
There is also another situation: sources for articles which presently only exist as redlinks. Genera and species mostly. That, in fact, was how I first came up with the idea to add source hints as comments. There is no Talk page or "Further reading" in articles that do not yet exist.

Ref footnotes are used by WP:FISH for newly-decribed species' redlinks, and it works well. I'd rather use a shortened footnote and a proper citation of the reference in a dedicated section, because the code is cleaner and easier to handle, but that is a matter of personal preference. I think they have actually used some of my comments, but usually they read the description before I do and the sources are already there.

But what if the source is not about a newly-described taxon, but a study of eyespots of a particular butterfly species which has no article yet but appears as a redlink on its genus page or worse? Footnoting such sources is bizarre, because they require previous knowledge about the butterfly's basic data to make sense at all - essentially, they require that at least a species stub be present already, making the entire footnoting issue moot. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

The Curse of Zonotrichia querula
I tried out the "Further reading" approach at Saffron-billed Sparrow, to see how it looks. Crappy not godawful, with one ref. If we do this widely, I think we will end up with a many 100s to a few 1000s of articles on birds alone where the "Further reading" list grows to be 5-10 times as long as the actual "article" before it. Because there are dozens of papers which contain piecemeal information, and if openly collected any frickin ornithologist or bird lover in the world that comes across the article will add publications they think to be important (opening a whole new bag of mischief). And this will only stop when an editor comes along who has I do not think we have the resources to handle this. And if mass "Further Reading"ing started to get destructive, it cannot be stopped easily. Because to have enough people note that it is a problem, it has to have reached critical mass already and become a self-sustaining Wiki meme. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * the volume of the Handbook of Birds of the World (not out yet for the Saffron-billed Sparrow) or one of the 1-3 major field guides or family books that discuss the species
 * time enough to go from Stub to B-class (or better, depending on the amount of "Further readings" accumulated already) in one single bout of editing.

Conclusion
I think that there should be an expedient short-hand way to use in particular by those who actually read WP:RS as mainstay part of their Wikipedia work (and thus grok the lingo), in addition to the usual longer-winded and more code-intense ways of suggesting new WP:SOURCES. And I think that any way used should fail at least as seldom as adding TitleVolumeIssue in a comment tag at the start of the References section, or whereever is closest to that.

(Comment tags do not mess up == section headings == . Ref tags do; I remember, however, that this was different in older MediaWiki versions. Ref tags interacting with section headings is totally broken now. This just as an observation many might not be aware of.) Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Attempt at a solution
The following modus operandi might work and make the best of all the different approaches:


 * 1) If the source contains information that may be upsetting to the article lacking it, put on Talk and perhaps leave an "update", "disputed" or other appropriate tag on the article page.
 * 2) Otherwise, if the article lacking a particular source is well-worked on (say "last 50 edits" in last 2 months or less) and maintained by an active Project, add "Further reading" section. If "Further reading" is already present, use it only if it is not used to collect general or specialist works which discuss the article's topc, but add nothing new within the article's scope that is not already better sourced from somewhere else (as physics and related articles may do, and probably others also). To distinguish these uses of FR sections, add the  tag at the beginning of any FR section to be used as a holding-pen for new sources.
 * 3) Otherwise, if the new source pertains to a redlinked entity and is a description of the redlinked entity, add source as ref-tag. (Such sources should be used to create the page at the redlink ASAP. They tend to clutter code to the extreme, particulary if full ref details are given as footnote.)
 * 4) If none of 1-3 apply, use a comment tag to add short source annotation
 * 5) In the case of 4, if a number of sources has accumulated ("about a dozen" or so) and if the article has an active Talk page, move comment to Talk, add backlink to Talk as new comment. Check that backlink periodically; if Talk page gets archived, recover unused sources from there and start anew.

Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 19:17, 11 June 2009 (UTC)