Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-12-17/WikiProject report

WikiProject Plants, also known as WP:PLANTS, is a WikiProject dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of plant species and botany. It is an old Project, having been created in August 2004 by TeunSpaans. Although the project nominally has some 70 members, it is primarily maintained by a core of around 20. Several members have an academic background.

For the most part, project members work on their own projects within the scope of WP:PLANTS. Given the sheer number of articles (26,000+ and missing a great many more), and the variety of interests, it is often difficult to coordinate actions in creating Featured or Good articles. One of the project's GAs, plant defense against herbivory, was in fact spearheaded by users who weren't nominally project members. Overall, the focus of the project is currently more on filling lists with blue links than improving existing articles (Although MPF, amongst others, has been working on improving and sourcing tree articles).

2007 also saw the project's first FAs and GAs not to be spearheaded by other projects: Verbascum thapsus and Ailanthus altissima. Articles that became GAs in 2007 include Acer rubrum, Marsileaceae and Marchantiophyta.

Assessment and improvement
Article assessment was introduced fairly late, in March 2007, and progressed relatively slowly. Despite this late start, more than 26,000 plants articles have been identified, and most of that number have been assessed. Ricardo Carneiro Pires has assessed more WP:PLANTS articles than any other user. WP:PLANTS assessment is integrated with the assessment templates of the Banksia and Carnivorous Plants projects to avoid duplication of templates.

EncycloPetey initiated an effort in August to improve all of the project's top- and high- importance above start. Half of the top-importance articles are now rated at B quality. The template botany is also a recent creation that assists users in finding key articles about plants, while highlighting key articles that need improvement the most.

Stub creation continues at a usual pace and is monitored through the AlexNewArtBot-maintained new plant article list. SB Johnny has been creating stub articles to complement the Bloom Clock on Wikiversity that he organizes and maintains. In other areas, WillowW recently created hundreds of algae-related stubs and IceCreamAntisocial has quietly been creating hundreds of plant stubs, many of which are in the often neglected Asteraceae. Neither WillowW or IceCreamAntisocial are self-identified members of WikiProject Plants, however.

Current and perennial issues
In July and August, Polbot created approximately 11,000 plant stubs that were generated from the IUCN Red List data, which created a great deal of cleanup work for the project. This includes correcting typos, sorting stubs, and updating taxonomy of these species.

Just as with other projects dealing with organisms, questions of use of common names versus Latin names crop up regularly. The use of common names has proved a troublesome area for the project, especially for species which have distinct names in different areas of their ranges, or otherwise confusing names, such as Ironwood. This dilemma was at least in part solved by the development of a naming convention that places all articles at their Latin names, except crops (which common name to use within articles remains a bone of contention). The method of dealing with agricultural crops vs. their botanical aspect (e.g. Coffee vs. Coffea; compare saffron) is generally dealt with a case by case basis. Another issue has been capitalization of common names, which still awaits a definitive resolution.

There is a perennial effort to create articles for currently unused plant images. Stan Shebs has compiled a list of his own images in such a situation, which outlines how much work remains to be done in our area of Wikipedia. Despite this, there is also a perennial lack of images for many articles, especially tropical, rare or otherwise out-of-the-way plants.

Related projects
WP:PLANTS is a descendant of WikiProject Tree of Life (WP:TOL), and has four descendant projects:
 * WikiProject Banksia (WP:BANKSIA, working on Banksia-related articles)
 * WikiProject Carnivorous plants (WP:CPLANTS)
 * WikiProject Horticulture and Gardening
 * WikiProject Plant Evo Devo (working on Plant evolutionary developmental biology articles)