User talk:Wsiegmund/Sitka Spruce

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This archive page covers a discussion of Sitka Spruce range and upper/lower case common names that occurred in September, 2005.

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Sitka Spruce
I added an image and some text to this excellent article that seems to be primarily your work. Last weekend, I photographed the Lake Quinault and the Preston Macy trees on a trip to Olympic National Park and did short hikes through the splendid spruce-redcedar forests near Lake Quinault and the Hoh River Visitors Center. Walter Siegmund 17:28, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Hi Walter - thanks for the note, nice pic! I'll move it higher up and my plantation tree lower down to be beside the cultivation section. Caps (Sitka Spruce, not sitka spruce) is intentional (for uniformity of treatment) so I'll be putting them back too :-) and also trim the headers down to three (that way those silly contents boxes don't appear!) - MPF 20:38, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Range - it gets south of Arcata; although the main range stops around there, there's an isolated outpost in the Fort Bragg area (Griffin & Critchfield, Distribution of forest trees in California) - MPF 20:50, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Range: Van Pelt claims that Cape Medicino is the southern limit; he apparently was unaware of the Fort Bragg colony.
 * Citation. I think Journal reference novolume from Wikipedia:Template messages/Sources of articles/Generic citations may be a better template than Book reference, but revert if you don't agree. If you keep it, please correct the page numbers.
 * Capitalization: Thanks for bearing with me on this matter. After my edits, I read in the style manual that British and American practices are somewhat different. (I'm assuming that you are British.) Also, spelling differences go beyond colour/color so I need to be aware of that as well.
 * Headers: I am not particularly troubled by the table of contents boxes, but I'm happy to defer to your judgement.
 * Image: Thank you for the kind words about my picture and for giving it more prominence. Walter Siegmund 04:13, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks; the caps difference is not a British vs American difference, it is more what I guess could be called 'field guide style' as most field guides (including many/most American ones e.g. Preston's North American Trees) use caps for species common names. Because field guides are the first contact many people have with plant/animal names, it means that using caps is very common among plant & animal enthusiasts. It's been extensively discussed on the WP:TOL talk pages, though you'll have to search through about 15 pages of archives to find it all (!). When voted on there's been a consistent but small majority for caps, not enough to make it a hard policy for one or the other, but all the conifers have caps (by contrast e.g. fish are almost completely lower case); I reckon it is best to be consistent within a group. On things like colour/color, I try to remember to use US spelling for US species (tho' sometimes forget!), but equally, Sitka Spruce is as much Canadian as US, so either can be argued for in this case. Of the range, I'm really surprised van Pelt didn't know about the Fort Bragg population, as it is shown on every published range map that I've looked at! The Griffin & Critchfield page numbers (in my 1976 2nd edition) are 23-24, and map 39 on p.75; I don't have the 1972 1st ed., so don't know if they're the same pagination or not. - MPF 11:20, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the history on this matter. I don't want to belabor a point that has been thoroughly discussed, but the standard field guide for this region, Pojar and MacKinnon, uses lower case for trees (except for proper names like Sitka) as does the lesser used Whitney. Van Pelt does the same.
 * Pojar, Jim and MacKinnon, Andy (2004) Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast: Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and Alaska, Lone Pine Publishing. ISBN 1551050404
 * Whitney, Stephen R. (1983) A field guide to the Cascades & Olympics, Mountaineers. ISBN 0898860776
 * Walter Siegmund 08:09, 22 September 2005