User talk:WolfmanSF/Archive8

Your revert
The script owner/maintainer tells me: yes, it sometimes does that because it can't tell the difference between x and y (can't recall what they were – too tech for me); and why don't you use the appropriate template to avoid this, he says. My best. Tony (talk)  11:39, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
 * In, specifically, the removal of parentheses around the "1" in the caption was wrong, the addition of the hyphen after "non" in the synonym list was wrong, lower-casing "Mayor" in the author list was wrong, and the removal of the doi links from the ref. list was very wrong. Now, it is true that the article was crafted in an idiosyncratic fashion (by the principal author, who has many other featured articles under his belt) and these sorts of errors might not crop up very often. However, given that this is a featured article, those mistakes are a fairly big deal. So, I suggest you use that script with extreme caution. WolfmanSF (talk) 17:12, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, yes, those are issues. But ... featured article? Don't make me laugh. As soon as I see that shit-coloured star I'm reminded of how corrupt and inadequate the FA process is. Wouldn't trust that status in a fit. Tony (talk)  02:11, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Oh dear, somebody has a bad attitude. I always use the templates. But Wikipedia has a principle that editors can start articles with non-standard citation/reference styles, which then are supposed to be maintained. That's what we have to deal with. WolfmanSF (talk) 03:34, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Oh I sure do have a bad attitude about FAC. I'm well-qualified to judge, too. So I wonder why you're bowing and scraping at the foot of FAC—self-degradation, in my view. The capping of "Mayor" is not consistent with MOSCAPS. Otherwise, fine. Tony (talk)  11:43, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
 * In the ref. in question, "Mayor" is a surname. No doubt we are all aware, to varying degrees, that our system has shortcomings. WolfmanSF (talk) 19:41, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
 * My apologies about "Mayor", then. "Shortcomings" is an understatement in the case of FAC. Tony (talk)  01:29, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Veronica perfoliata
Hello WolfmanSF,

I appreciate your edits to Veronica perfoliata. Changing the wording to the "Taxonomy" section the way you have, avoids the constant repetition of the species name. I wonder, though, whether you might agree that it now doesn't read like Brown was the first to describe it? "Robert Brown first formally described..." does not read the same as "....was first formally described by Robert Brown", to me, anyway. Gardner first formally described Melaleuca suberosa in 1931 but it was first formally described by Schauer in 1844. I'm keen to read your response because I have started several thousand "Taxonomy" sections of plant articles with a species name. (Incidentally, I also appreciate your several edits to Eucalyptus which is a mess and would be a bigger mess without your changes.) Gderrin (talk) 02:13, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Given the number of articles you have created (thanks, by the way, for your massive contribution), I can understand the appeal of an efficient, assembly-line technique for generating them, but literary qualities may suffer when this approach leads to repetitive paragraph openings, something I try at times to address. I think there are a number of possible ways to handle the potential ambiguity you refer to without going back to a binomen-first sentence, such as "Robert Brown first formally described the species in 1810 as ...". Does that strike you as a good solution? WolfmanSF (talk) 03:58, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply and your compliment. (I do not use an "assembly-line technique" as would be apparent from reading the articles I've written. Additionally the sentence starting "Veronica perfoliata was first formally described...." was not written by me.) "Robert Brown first formally described the species in 1810 as ..." does not indicate that he was first person to formally describe the species. As I tried to indicate in my question, Gardner first formally described M. suberosa in 1931, but he was not the first. A far better wording (since you object to starting the sentence with a binomial) would be "The first person to formally describe [the species] was.....". I would be happy to start the sentence in the articles I write or expand, in other ways, but not the ways you have suggested so far. Gderrin (talk) 04:43, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I would interpret "Robert Brown first formally described the species in 1810 as ..." as indicating two firsts, but evidently not all would. Strategic addition of a comma, as in "Robert Brown first formally described the species in 1810, as ..." would remove any doubt that it refers to two firsts (at least from my perspective). However, there must be many other equally good solutions, and I don't think it matters which is used. To be clear, it is only the sequential repetition of binomial-first paragraphs (more than 1 in a sequence of 3 after the opening) I object to. WolfmanSF (talk) 05:06, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Westerlies / tidal locking
Thanks for working constructively and for a good explanation of your reasoning in your recent edits! I wholeheartedly approve of your decision to replace "non-rotating" with "tidally locked to the Sun". That wording exactly captures the hypothetical situation the remainder of the sentence describes, while the previous phrasing did not. As you noted, non-rotating was not strictly synonymous with tidally locked (because it's less correct - locked planets do rotate, only once per orbit). And "planet" was indeed superfluous, especially with the newest phrasing. Honestly, I should've come to the same conclusions when I was adjusting that sentence. Tofof (talk) 22:42, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

IUCN template
Hi. I notice you lobbied for a simplified way of citing the redlist, something I just copy/paste from their page currently. What I want is an auto filled template, which seems to be a rudimentary task and I can't imagine what the difficulty is. Did you get any further than when you enquired in 2015? cygnis insignis 09:21, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I actually did create a Microsoft Word macro that would automatically form the template citation from the web citation listing, but never got around to posting it because it didn't work in conjunction with all browsers and needed a bit more development and testing. The IUCN citation listing has changed since and the macro needs updating, which I will see about getting to when I have time. WolfmanSF (talk) 18:54, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I have had a couple more thoughts, and may see a workaround. Should I let you know if there is some progress with that? cygnis insignis 19:13, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Sure. WolfmanSF (talk) 20:05, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

FA Review for Ceres
I have nominated Ceres (dwarf planet) for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. 20:18, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

Mastodon
Hello, can you expand the information about the encounter of two mastodon skull fragments in South America? thank you in advance. --181.165.218.33 (talk) 17:21, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
 * The term "mastodon" is not always used consistently in nonscientific writing. It usually refers to proboscid species in the genus Mammut of the family Mammutidae. However, the scientific names of several gomphotheres (family Gomphotheriidae) sound similar (e.g., Stegomastodon and Notiomastodon). Given that Mammut is not established as living in South America, while the presence of gomphotheres in South America is well known, I think we need to suspect that a nonscientic reference to a "mastodon" in South America may refer to a gomphothere. Thus, I think we should wait for a scientific publication before discussing a possible Mammut discovery in South America. WolfmanSF (talk) 23:48, 28 July 2019 (UTC)

Endemism
Hello WolfmanSF,

Just to save us both a lot of work..... I noticed that you are changing "endemism in" to "endemic to". I have used both phrases, more recently "in" on hundred of pages (of Eucalyptus spp. for example). Do you have a good reason for changing? The fate of the world depends on it! (Agree with the other changes you've made lately, like the position of the word "family". Thanks for them.) Gderrin (talk) 03:21, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * One of the better usage sources is Oxford's Dictionary. Under the adjective definition "(of a plant or animal) native and restricted to a certain place", they give 21 usage examples (if you click on the "More example sentences" button), including 13 examples of "endemic to" and zero examples of "endemic in". However, under "(of a disease or condition) regularly found among particular people or in a certain area", they also give 21 usage examples, including one example of "endemic to" and 10 examples of "endemic in". So, I conclude that when discussing a plant or animal species, it should be "endemic to", whereas when discussing a disease or condition, "endemic in" is appropriate. I hope I have discharged my heavy responsibility adequately. WolfmanSF (talk) 04:26, 30 July 2019 (UTC)


 * World saved! Thanks. Gderrin (talk) 04:32, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

African elephant
Re: "... edit caption, and remove two media files; I think editors should show restraint in adding their own images to an article"

Dear WolfmanSF

I can see that you are much more experienced in all things Wikipedia. However, this was really good faith editing, not self promotion. I have gone through the trouble of cutting the video down to a short piece, to only show the family hierarchy complete with sound, then convert it online into ogg, then upload and tag it on commons. Not everyone can travel to Africa to see elephant behavior in the wild. And the sound does not carry well with still photography.

Best, Axel Tschentscher (talk) 22:33, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Here is my suggestion: go through the other available videos, and if you honestly think after that yours is the most suitable, I won't interfere further. What drew my attention was that four of your media files were added in a short interval. Of those, the one of the trunk hairs seems most unique and useful. I think it tends to be harder for most of us to be objective about our own work. In the case of your brief video, to my thinking it doesn't tell an obvious story in terms of why one elephant chose another individual to shove. WolfmanSF (talk) 00:46, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I went through all of those videos, found two actually relating to information and put one up as a replacement for the Japan zoo video. Also: removed one of my pictures. --Axel Tschentscher (talk) 01:40, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

hi sir, nice collection ,this is a medico from south india — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2409:4070:2018:CD22:234:46B6:9DF6:212E (talk) 04:43, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, WolfmanSF (talk) 05:46, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguation
Hi, it's the destination, that is ambiguous. It would be like creating an article (not a disambiguous) for giant earthworms, giant frogs or giant lizards. None of those terms would be taxonomically correct, rather a mixing up information with a colloquial or familiar name. Your thoughts would be welcome on Talk:Giant_tortoise. Regards, Sun Creator(talk) 23:57, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
 * It's about a single distinct subject that in this case comprises 2 extant non-sister taxa rather than one taxon. We are not bound to write biology articles only about unique taxa. Consider army ant, amphibious fish, marine mammal and flightless bird among many other examples. WolfmanSF (talk) 00:16, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your thoughts. The taxonbox in this case has twenty-three different taxon, plus many others mentioned in the article. Regards, Sun Creator(talk) 00:35, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Among extant species, we're basically talking about two clades, Galápagos members of Chelonoidis and the genus Aldabrachelys. WolfmanSF (talk) 04:47, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Society for Marine Mammalogy updates to articles (re: Phocoena sinus edits)
Hello! I am a marine ecologist and a member of the Society for Marine Mammalogy, and I'm working on a team of curators on the Education Committee to update and reformat information on all marine mammal Wikipedia pages so that they have a consistent style and reflect the most current information. This committee is being run by a marine mammalogist at NOAA, and in addition to that, each drafted Wikipedia page is reviewed by an expert on the species. I completed a full literature review on the vaquita, wrote this article fitting a uniform format for all marine mammal pages (although many are still in progress), had the article independently fact-checked by a vaquita researcher, and then uploaded the edits. I apologize for making all of the edits at once, but it is accurate and up-to-date. Additional information cited by peer-reviewed sources is welcomed! The goal is to have all marine mammal pages with updated, properly cited information under the same headings.KimNiels (talk) 05:22, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

List of fishes of Colorado
What an enormous mess. Drmies (talk) 22:52, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Article links
I suspect you're using a deprecated template for them. Sorry to cause that problem. Tony (talk)  08:13, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * The problem is that no template at all was used. That is how User:Ucucha and some others like or used to like to set up their articles. I wouldn't have done that, but it's a featured article and we are generally discouraged from messing with the reference style, once established. WolfmanSF (talk) 08:17, 26 April 2020 (UTC)


 * I'm guessing this is talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plesiorycteropus&diff=prev&oldid=953216551 ? A lot of my articles have been converted to use templates by now and I don't mind all that much, but clearly templateless citations with links are better than the same citations without them. Ucucha (talk) 15:26, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's what it's about. I don't mind maintaining templateless citations, but why would you have a preference for them? The most obvious advantage of templates comes in cases like MSW3 or IUCN, where occasional systematic changes in URLs can be repaired en masse via the templates rather than the much more laborious (and inevitably incomplete) process of fixing them individually. But even in the less problematic cases like cite journal, bots can do useful things like repair bad citations or add PMIDs. Without the templates, there's much less potential for such fixes or enhancements. WolfmanSF (talk) 23:22, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Well well well if it isn't --on the very day I'm working in the shed, checking the rat traps. Long time no see, sir. Fijne Kwoningsdag nog. Drmies (talk) 22:55, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

"Great Pyramid of Ceres" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Great Pyramid of Ceres. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 May 1 until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. 2pou (talk) 20:23, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Your recent edits to Bath School disaster
Thank you for the addition of the information + sources about Kehoe's head injury. Who knows what made him a mass murderer but that serious head injury could certainaly have had something to do with it. However, within your recent series of edits to the article you also changed the  style to the efn nomenclature with no discussion on the talk page. So far as I know ref group = "Note" is not incorrect. I would like to change it back to the previous longstanding form but I thought I should check in with you first...if you have some MOS/etc objections we can move this discussion to the article talk page if you like. Cheers, Shearonink (talk) 03:17, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I have changed the note template to one that allows the notes to show up in the text as "Note1, Note2, etc., just as before. It may not matter for our purposes, but my impression is that Template:Refn is more versatile than just using . WolfmanSF (talk) 06:39, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining
Even though I do know that you need to specify what you do in the edit summary, I sometimes forget to specify it, like what happened in my recent edit at Dreadnoughtus, that's why I only put "made some fixes". If that happens again, feel free to revert it, but now that I'm more aware of specifying my edit summaries even the minor ones, I'll try not to leave them in blank. JurassicClassic767 (talk) 22:11, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Megalodon
The meg article makes no references to Megalodon being the largest shark. The article says meg was one of the largest predators, meg may have been the largest fish*, and meg had the largest known teeth of any shark found. There is no cited reference or mention to the fact Megalodon is the largest shark, and there should be. --Ylleknivek (talk) 20:53, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
 * That is implied by the other superlatives, and it doesn't really need to be added to the lead. WolfmanSF (talk) 21:18, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Spider families
Thanks for all the work you're doing with spider articles. It looks like many of these are moving the word "family" behind the family name (example: your most recent edits of Shuyushka and Anapis), but I'm not completely sure when or how this rule applies. Can you explain the rule(s) behind using the word "family" and using a family's name? I'm one of the group's more frequent editors, and I wrote a lot of the pages you're updating, so I want to make sure that I understand enough to help you out instead of contribute to the problem. Thanks! Sesame honey  tart  13:54, 5 June 2020 (UTC)


 * In a noun combination consisting of a more general and a more specific term, the normative English syntax differs depending on whether the combination is, or is not, a compound noun. In a compound noun, the presence of the more general noun changes the meaning, and the more general term is second, while in a combination that isn't a compound noun, the meaning doesn't change and the category term comes first. As examples, consider that we say "aluminum can" (a compound noun) but "element aluminum" (not a compound noun).

So, the combination of taxonomic rank plus a formal taxon name is not a compound noun, and the normative syntax of this combination is "rank" followed by "formal name" (e.g., "family Cervidae"). On the other hand, the combination of taxonomic rank plus a popular taxon name is a compound noun, and the normative syntax of this combination is "popular name" followed by "rank" (e.g., "deer family"). There is a certain amount of confusion regarding this distinction, and not everyone gets it right. The confusion tends to be greater when the rank is family, because that is also a common nontechnical term, unlike, say, genus.

You can see the statistics for various examples of application of the rule using formal taxon names in these Google Ngrams: kingdom Animalia, Animalia kingdom, phylum Chordata, Chordata phylum, class Mammalia, Mammalia class, order Primates, Primates order, family Mustelidae, Mustelidae family, genus Corvus, Corvus genus, species Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens species. This is the opposite of the normative syntax of the combination of a taxonomic rank plus an informal taxon name, e.g.: kingdom animal, animal kingdom, phylum chordate, chordate phylum, class mammal, mammal class, order primate, primate order, family weasel, weasel family, genus crow, crow genus, species human, human species. Some non-taxonomic examples are: element mercury, mercury element vs. thermometer mercury, mercury thermometer, or planet Mars, Mars planet vs. rover Mars, Mars rover.

In Wikipedia, many species articles were started by a bot called Polbot, which got the syntax of formal family name plus "family" backwards. By now this error has been fixed in most expanded articles, but remains in a fair number of stub articles, I situation I have been addressing.

Please let me know if any of the above explanation is unclear or incomplete. Thanks, WolfmanSF (talk) 19:48, 5 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the explanation! I haven't been making a distinction between "formal" and "common" taxon names. I also copied syntax used in more common animals / expanded articles, and it's likely that I copied some of Polbot's mistakes for the article frameworks I use for spiders. For the last year or two, I've been moving through genera articles by World Spider Catalog ID#. I'm currently at #3391 Munduruku bicoloratum, so that's the last time you should see this error in spider genera (except the ones I haven't gotten to yet). Sesame  honey  tart  16:53, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Biota = Vitae?
Hi, WolfmanSF. You reverted my edit at Taxonomic rank (I had changed "Vitae" to "Vita"). Perhaps you're right, but I'd like to see a reliable source, so I have now added "Citation needed". Your summary guided me to the page List of phrases containing the word vitae, but there were two problems there: no source is cited, and this was not a phrase anyway. So I've removed the relevant line from that page and I've explained on the talk page.

I don't honestly see how "Vitae" could be the equivalent to "Biota", but very likely some biologist has a better brain than I have. Andrew Dalby 09:00, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
 * As the plural of "vita", usage of "vitae" for "biota" makes a certain amount of sense and this usage seems to have a degree of tradition and currency, although it does not appear to be widespread or considered "official". Here are some examples culled from searches: Two-empire system, wikt:Vitae,, 4, 5, 6, 7. WolfmanSF (talk) 19:24, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry about the delay in responding: I didn't get any ping (at least, I don't think so). Thank you for finding those links, but I don't see any of them as reliable sources. It seems best to me to take this back to "Talk:Taxonomic rank", where someone may well be able to show that a real scientific Latinist has used the word "Vitae" as the name of the node at the top of the tree. Is that OK with you?
 * I came here at first mainly because I had a little trouble understanding your edit summary, but of course I saw what you meant in the end. Andrew Dalby 14:21, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
 * That's fine. I don't think there is an official formal taxonomic term for all life, my point was that "Vitae" has some degree of traditional usage, while "Vita" doesn't. WolfmanSF (talk) 18:39, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree that "Vita" doesn't! Andrew Dalby 19:29, 13 July 2020 (UTC)