Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Echo parakeet/archive1

TFA blurb review
Any thoughts or edits? I might be reading it wrong, but the first sentence of the article seems to contradict the rest of the paragraph ... it looks like it's the echo parakeet, not the whole species, that is extant, and I'm guessing the Réunion parakeet, not the echo parakeet, is the subspecies that formerly lived on Réunion. Let me know if the first sentence below works for you. - Dank (push to talk) 21:58, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

The echo parakeet (Psittacula eques) is a species of parrot endemic to the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and formerly Réunion. It is the only living native parrot of these islands; all others have become extinct due to human activity, including the subspecies P. eques eques, the Réunion parakeet. The echo parakeet is 34 – long and weighs 167 –, with a wing-span of 49 –. It is generally green, the female being darker overall. It is largely restricted to the canopy of the Black River Gorges National Park in the south west of Mauritius, feeding mainly on the fruits and leaves of native plants. Due to destruction and alteration of its native habitat, its numbers declined throughout the 20th century, reaching as few as 8–12 in the 1980s, when it was referred to as "the world's rarest parrot". An intensive effort of captive breeding has saved the bird from extinction.
 * They are collectively known as echo parakeet as well (see last paragraph on common names under taxonomy). And since only the echo subspecies exists, that's effectively all we can call the species today. FunkMonk (talk) 22:01, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
 * That's unfortunate. Does my first sentence work for you? - Dank (push to talk) 22:20, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm not too keen on the subject of the article being referred to/linked in a different way, the blurb should reflect the usage in the article, no? FunkMonk (talk) 23:25, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Then we have to do something about the first paragraph. "Two subspecies have been recognised; the extinct Réunion parakeet (for a long time known only from descriptions and illustrations) and the living echo parakeet, sometimes known as the Mauritius parakeet. The relationship between the two populations was historically unclear, but a 2015 DNA study determined them to be subspecies of the same species by comparing the DNA of echo parakeets with a single skin thought to be from a Réunion parakeet." There's no hint in there that "echo parakeet" means "the [whole] same species"; it says just the opposite. - Dank (push to talk) 23:37, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
 * What I mean is, even though biologists make the mental jump between the different meanings of "echo parakeet" effortlessly, we can't assume that readers will automatically get that the same words have different meanings from one sentence to the next. We've had this issue come up several times before, so I feel reasonably confident that we should be careful in the blurb to use "echo parakeet" to mean the same thing every time, whether that's Psittacula eques or Psittacula eques echo. A possible solution is to get rid of ambiguity by never mentioning the other subspecies ... not ideal, but then we'd have room to say more about Psittacula eques echo. - Dank (push to talk) 00:13, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * We do have a similar FA case, the golden swallow, where the nominate subspecies (and the only one which actually looks golden) is extinct. The difference is that, from looking at the article alone, they have only been referred to by the same common name. But that seems unlikely to me, since they were not considered to belong to the same species either originally... FunkMonk (talk) 00:28, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Coming at it from another angle: is there anything you'd like to see in the blurb that isn't there now? If adding things you want to add leaves no room for the Réunion parakeet, then the problem is solved. - Dank (push to talk) 02:13, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * The rest seems fine, but you could maybe circumvent the subspecies issue by doing what I did in the original version of the intro, which can be seen here (it was changed following a FAC comment): In that, the living subspecies is mentioned first, then it is later stated that the Réunion bird is now considered to belong to the same species. I don't think it's a good idea to remove any mention of the subspecies that the species was originally based on. FunkMonk (talk) 14:29, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, your version was much better. I'll get to it later today, thanks. - Dank (push to talk) 15:12, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, perhaps unfortunate that I changed it then, not sure... I'll ping who suggested the change, in case there are further observations on this. FunkMonk (talk) 15:24, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I stand by the comment I made in the FAC. The first line of the lead as it was written (Also known as Mauritius) excluded the Reunion birds from the scope of the article, contra what the article actually covered. Sabine's Sunbird  talk  17:32, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * John and I were just talking this morning about how complicated the world has become ... we don't think people younger than around 50 can appreciate what it was like to grow up at a time when it wasn't expected that you'd know much about, well, anything really, and that was okay. These days, new rules breed like rabbits. I don't really have a solution for that, and I hate to be one of bad guys introducing what may feel like a new rule ... but the current version of the first paragraph of the FA is broken; the term "echo parakeet" flips back and forth between including and excluding the other subspecies, without giving the reader any warning about the ambiguity. I get that biologists make this mental jump easily, but non-biologists don't. It's not my call whether this is okay at FAC, and I can't guarantee that it will get a hostile response at ERRORS, but it certainly might, and I can't recommend it. There are several ways to fix it that should make everyone happy. - Dank (push to talk) 18:01, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Personally, I have no problem if the TFA and lead versions are different. Perhaps simpler wording is more appropriate for the main page that will have a wider audience, and the reader can then get a more fleshed out version if they choose to read the article. I am sympathetic to both versions, but the problem is just that we can't be less ambiguous than the sources, and they are pretty ambiguous... Many recent sources simply treat the two populations together under the "echo parakeet" name (the extinct one usually just gets a brief mention), because the living one is all we can say anything definitive about, and because some still believe the extinct population was not really distinguishable. The easiest solution would be if we could just call the Mauritius subspecies the "Mauritius parakeet" and the overall species "echo parakeet", but that former name isn't all that common. FunkMonk (talk) 18:36, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Sure, there's a lot of support for the view that the Main Page readership is likely to be quite different from the readership for the article, so we have to be more careful to spell things out for non-specialists. Okay, I've rewritten the above so that the echo parakeet is now the term for the species; does that work? - Dank (push to talk) 19:15, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, it looks ok to me that you refer to the overall species as echo parakeet, since many sources do just that. FunkMonk (talk) 19:30, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Looks fine to me too Sabine's Sunbird  talk  04:33, 1 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Looking again,, I think the neck rings should be mentioned, as they are its distinct features. FunkMonk (talk) 12:53, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Mentioning it here is good, but this one was just scheduled yesterday at Today's featured article/June 20, 2019, so make the edit there, please. Current length is 940 characters. - Dank (push to talk) 13:02, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Added something, is it ok? Feel free to modify. FunkMonk (talk) 13:05, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * That's 1107, max is 1025. Way too much. - Dank (push to talk) 13:07, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Seems I got it below 1000 now? FunkMonk (talk) 13:40, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Looks good. - Dank (push to talk) 14:06, 20 May 2019 (UTC)