User talk:Hamamelis/2009/Second half of 2009

2009 ARCHIVE : All threads begun after June 2009 (including the last, which spilled over into January 2010) are here preserved in their entirety
 * First half of 2009 (Jan - Jun)
 *  Second half of 2009 (Jul - Dec) <<<--- YouAreHere
 * B A C K  to   T A L K

Tamarix
Hi there, sorry I forgot your question about my photo of a Tamarix. I am afraid that my knowledge of the plant kingdom is very limited to be able to give you a direct answer. However, if there is a possibility that the tamarix trees grown in Greece are mostly of the same species (the ones I have seen are very similar to each other to a layman's eye at least), I assure you that this one was the usual type, planted by local authorities near the beach, to provide shadow to the bathers. It was one of 15-20 trees. The other trees, being a few meters further away from the beach were all looking like the usual type (whatever that is). I hope I have being of help, though I doubt it.--FocalPoint (talk) 16:53, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Cotoneaster
Hi, about your removal of the name Cotoneaster cotoneaster Degen, I'm no expert on the genus, but that name is listed in IPNI (www.ipni.org), and it seems to me that someone might want to know about it. There is also Cotoneaster cotoneaster H.Karst. IPNI says that both are C. integerrima. Perhaps it would be better to leave those names on the main Cotoneaster page and give that information? Nadiatalent (talk) 00:16, 26 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree with your basic inference of not excluding any pertinent information related to topic, though some editors would disagree with me (unfortunately). Its just a matter of how that information is organized. I removed the name because its a tautonym. I'm not an expert in the genus either (not even a botanist, just a lover of botany), but according to the tautonym article, they are conventionally and retroactively 'forbidden' in botany ('though not in zoology). I don't think it would be a good idea to put it back on the already massive list since it is not a seperate species, just another name for the commonly accepted C. integerrimus. The way its usually done (at Wikipedia, anyway) is to put the synonyms in a line in the taxobox of the C. integerrimus article. I made a redirect for Cotoneaster cotoneaster that takes you to Cotoneaster integerrimus. Also, I know your spelling was accurate as per IPNI, but see here in regards to it.


 * By the way, I'll bet the list of Cotoneaster species is bloated with synonyms yet to be identified as such.


 * Please correct me if you see an error anywhere in my rationale. Thanks. Hamamelis (talk) 12:37, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi again, you raise some interesting points, and I'll look at the nomenclature issues when I get time (perhaps this coming weekend or next). The latest ICBN has simplified the orthography parts of the code, and hopefully it is becoming less confusing now. I'll need to puzzle it out and see if IPNI needs correcting or clarifying. I don't want to tangle too much with Cotoneaster, Crataegus is more than enough to wrestle with for the next few months! Nadiatalent (talk) 19:53, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

And Hi again. I'm made some additions to the Cotoneaster integerrimus page that I think will help anyone who finds one of those other names and wants to know something about the plant. See what you think. I'll submit a suggestion for IPNI about C. integerrima when I send in the next batch of such things. It's been good to talk to someone who cares about this material and knows what they are talking about. Nadiatalent (talk) 18:07, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Nice work, I wasn't exactly sure what to put in the synonym line because of gaps in my knowledge. 'nom. inval.' +your additional explanation at the end of the nomenclature section you added should do the trick. It looks good to me! And thank you for the compliment :) Hamamelis (talk) 18:36, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Synonymy edits
Hi, thanks for your comments about the talk pages from pages that are changed to redirects. What I did yesterday was intended as an experiment, and your response is very appropriate, as I hadn't thought about the talk pages. In these cases the talk pages are still available and they include only the following:

. Moving doesn't seem to be appropriate for the synonymy problem generally, as I hope to collapse a few species into species that already have pages. The scope for this is quite limited as there is not yet a complete synonymy available for the genus, but I hope to shrink the species list on the main Crataegus page into something that will be less disappointing to a reader.Nadiatalent (talk) 12:35, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Cotoneaster acuminatus chromosomal number
My thought is that this species has two forms, one a polyploid (tetraploid) and one a diploid (notice the numbers are doubled). This doubling of chromosomes (or tripling) occurs quite frequently in plants. The tetraploid (68) and diploid (34) would now be genetically isolated, but botanists often leave them together in the same species for some reason. Polygonatum biflorum flora of North Americaat 2n=20, 40 is another example here in the eastern US. In that species I know the 2n = 40 variant is larger and has been classified as Polygonatum giganteum. Hope this helps. Earthdirt (talk) 02:33, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Malus prunifolia nomenclature dates, opening a can of worms
Hi, nomenclature is an extremely complicated matter, trying to document every change in Wikipedia would be a major can of worms. I strongly recommend against doing this. Take a look at http://www.plantsystematics.org/reveal/pbio/LnC/dougfir.html as an example of a "morass", and this is far from an uncommon situation! Nadiatalent (talk) 20:09, 14 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank for your kind instruction, and "morass" example. Somewhere in the wonderful (and highly recommended) book The World of Northern Evergreens, by E.C.Pielou (1988, Cornell University Press), she touches on the very history your link pointed to. It is interesting, and rightly a bit confusing, to read more of the story with 'the flesh on the bones'.


 * It is when I make semantic errors like those in your complaint, that I become painfully concious of my lay-person's understanding of the subject. Thank you for editing the page in question (and in general - real botanists are in short supply in WP, so your efforts are appreciated by more people than you probably realize).


 * Thanks, Hamamelis (talk) 07:10, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Hi again,

What I wrote above looks a bit short to me now, sorry, I was in a hurry at the time. Nomenclature is something that takes a lot of time to learn, and very few people would claim to have digested it thoroughly (perhaps 2 or 3 in the world?), but I believe that it is always a good thing for people to try to wrestle with it. All the puzzles need to be individually worked through, so the more people working on it the better. It's rather a nice subject area (mostly), very much concerned with how to go about giving credit to past workers where it is due. Keep up the good work! Nadiatalent (talk) 18:00, 17 October 2009 (UTC)


 * On a similar theme, Hamamelis, I noted you using these categories on a couple new article creations. I haven't gotten around to putting the typical description found at Category:Plants described in 2009 in every category so you may not have known this, but the convention is to use the date of publication of the basionym instead of the current name. I also replied to Nadia at Category talk:Plants by year of formal description with a similar message. These categories are still a work in progress and I have a few holes to fill in: User:Rkitko/sandbox6. Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 00:57, 13 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the clarification, Rkitko. Using the basionym is the only way this really makes sense as a category set. To have it otherwise would surely create a hodge-podgey muddle (which might just be a traditional English dessert, but either way sounds unpalatable). I'll track down the articles I've worked on that didn't follow the convention you described and fix them. ...And I'll keep an eye open for others.


 * Alas, it's probably too late to change the names to "Category:Basionyms from ...", or "Category:Plants with basionyms from ...", or something of this sort, which I think would've been less prone to misinterpretation. But anyway, I like these categories and think they have a lot of utile potential. Thanks, Hamamelis (talk) 16:17, 13 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Much appreciated. Actually, some people have suggested renaming the categories, so I'm always open to new ideas. It's a good thought to try to include "basionym" in the title to avoid confusion, but that would require that plants with no basionym be categorized separately. The main point raised in earlier discussions was the ambiguity of the category titles - does it include all plant taxa or just species? Should we rename them Category:Plant taxa described in 2009? A longer suggestion has been Category:Plant taxa first described in 2009, which would clear up the basionym issue. I could even see a further step, to clarify what kind of description (Category:Plant taxa first formally described in 2009), but I think this may be unnecessary, considering very few people think of plant descriptions prior to Linnaeus. Any opinions? I'd like to be concise, but precise. Appreciate your input! Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 03:01, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I would like Category:Plant taxa first described in 2009, were it up to me. I know its a tad cumbersome (ie, less concise), but all other criteria seem adequetely addressed. Perfect, no. But I think potential difficulties would largely cease being issues, with the occasional literalist picking a nit with some point or other; at the moment I lack the imagination to see what they (nits) could be. Sorry for the delay, Hamamelis (talk) 07:40, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Takhtajan

 * Ifomichev (talk) 08:52, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Em-dashes, en-dashes
Hi – you mentioned in an edit summary (List of Botanists by abbr) that your em and en-dashes don't code correctly. Can't you use the wiki markup versions? (&amp;mdash; &amp;ndash;) Not as neat in the edit box, but they produce the same effect. Regards, Richard New Forest (talk) 18:18, 1 December 2009 (UTC)


 * :)-&amp;mdash;:)&amp;ndash;:) Thanks (:&amp;ndash;(:&amp;mdash;-(:
 * Always good to learn something new and useful. I'll try 'em here &amp;ndash my dinosaur won't even display them as anything but coding &amp;mdash or markups &amp;mdash we'll see. How do they look here?
 * Peace &amp;ndash; :)Hamamelis (talk) 18:47, 1 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Type them as they appear in my text, not as in my markup. That is, type an en-dash in your markup as: "ampersand, n, d, a, s, h, semicolon", not "ampersand, a, m, p, semicolon, n, d, a, s, h, semicolon".  The latter is just how I had to type the code to make the ampersand (&) show in the text instead of producing the dash ("nowiki" doesn't work on this code).  And don't forget the semicolon. I touch-type these dashes so often that I find myself doing it in word-processor text...  Richard New Forest (talk) 21:18, 1 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Repeating message, amended as you've shown:
 * :)-&mdash;:)–:) Thanks (:–(:&mdash;-(:
 * Always good to learn something new and useful. I'll try 'em here – my dinosaur won't even display them as anything but coding &mdash; or markups &mdash; we'll see. How do they look here?
 * Peace – :) Hamamelis (talk) 01:05, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * That looks fine now! Richard New Forest (talk) 13:28, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Manilkara etc.
Hi, I pitched in when you paused for a bit so I thought you'd finished (sorry, we might have collided). For citations IPNI should be fine, even though they say don't cite us, they mean in nomenclatural literature, but online material can't count as nomenclatural literature. Good work on turning these pages into something really useful (E.J.H. Corner's marvellous, isn't he!). Nadiatalent (talk) 13:03, 24 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, and same to you, especially up and down Crataegus. It really looks a lot more complete now. Corner writes quite beautifully, I find, even as he bemoans the "present state" (at that time, 1964) of botany and biology as being too detached and tedious, without enough scholars scrambling about in the jungle. (And he was probably right.) He is also quiet accessible to the non-scientist, so I'm sure he was beloved by his students.


 * As far as using IPNI, I have lately been citing it as a place to look for the publications on species that it indexes, not as a final word on anything. I've been including the publication info in my references, and pointing to the IPNI page where they show it. The intrepid reader can take it up from there, if they are so inclined. Or so I imagine. Hamamelis (talk) 05:52, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi again, I find it very sad that Corner's plea for the trees was based so heavily on the idea that they were evolutionarily ancestral to the grasses etc. on which humans depend, and that idea has had to be tossed out. His plea is even more important today, when we still desperately need botanists, and common-sense, and all those good things ... Perhaps Wikipedia can help by improving the general standard of education.

About your work on Manilkara: you seem to be getting to a point where you need the best revisions of the genus so that synonyms can be listed and redirects can be set up (Sapotaceae are notorious for synonymy). I'm guessing, of course, that you still have energy to continue with this work. If you do, let me know about anything that you need access to by sending a message to the email address on my web page. I might have it, but even here we don't have access to much of the botanical literature; fortunately, a lot of the older work is becoming available in the biodiversity heritage library. Scholar.google reveals a few revisions, and I'd expect that you might have to go back to Cronquist's 1940's work (but I don't know the Sapotaceae well enough to be sure about that). Nadiatalent (talk) 15:41, 2 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Hello Nadia, I'm so sorry I wanted to reply more promptly, I've been knocked down by an upper respiratory infection. I started to feel the first symptoms on the first, and by the second was completely flattened by it. I am avoiding doing much of anything until this goes away, just trying to sleep alot.


 * But, yes of course, I would love to collaborate with you on Manilkara. It sounds like fun! I will be able to write more thoughtfully and longer later, when this sickness passes. I look forward to it. Hamamelis (talk) 00:45, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Sleep sounds like a much more therapeutic option than overexertion on Wikipedia. Whenever you are ready, let me know about any literature that you need. Get well! Nadiatalent (talk) 02:28, 5 January 2010 (UTC)