Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants/Assessment

List classes
What is the relationship between List, FL, and SL (and for that matter, what does "SL" stand for?). Kingdon 01:54, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
 * That assessment system was developed through discussion with myself and a few other editors who wanted to distinguish between complete lists (List-class), featured lists (FL-class), and lists that are incomplete (Stub Lists--SL). Hope that makes sense. I'll explain on the assessment page. --Rkitko (talk) 02:32, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for adding the explanations. Kingdon 13:43, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Items to include
Hi all. I was just sorting through the new articles and was wondering if we could refine what we should include in our project. Should we be including the many articles on botanical gardens? Or how about articles on proteins that are mostly botany-related (e.g. Photosynthetic reaction center protein family). Any thoughts would be helpful. Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 03:09, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
 * In the latter area, Auxin and Plant hormone, for example, got a lot of attention from WP:PLANTS people, so I guess that is an argument for including them. I guess some biochemical topics would fit in WikiProject Plant Evo Devo but I guess that is narrower than biochemistry, or proteins, in general.
 * As for the botanic gardens, at least the one I looked at first, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, didn't really seem to have much botanical content. United States National Arboretum a bit more although it is a stub.  So I guess I'm a bit skeptical about taking this on. We wouldn't list any article which says "Next to the house is an old oak tree", and although I do remember a past discussion (probably in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Plants) about "what is a botanical garden?" even making that distinction doesn't really imply they go in the same wikiproject.  The botanic gardens may belong in WikiProject Horticulture and Gardening. Kingdon (talk) 13:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the input! I asked over at the hort and garden project if they'd like me to assess the gardens for them. No response yet, but it seems like it's within their scope. We do have some of the more important gardens like Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in our project scope since they also do important systematic work or are historically significant. Come to think of it, Chelsea Physic Garden should probably have a WP:PLANTS tag on its talk page, too. Evo Devo was/is really the effort of one editor and should be a taskforce of WP:PLANTS until it gains sufficient support for a WikiProject. I'm going to tag those photosynthetic protein-related articles with WP:PLANTS for now. It has an overlap with WP:MCB and can be seen as in the scope of either. If someone provides rationale as to why it's not in our scope in the future, it'll be easy enough to remove them. :-) Rkitko (talk) 20:58, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I've ended up discussing this over on my talk page, and I suggested bringing this over here, this is the relevant bit from my last post:
 * ...a botanic garden can be funded by a university say, so they tend to be a distinct breed apart from "normal" gardens and parks. I'd profoundly disagree with your weasel-worded (and non-WP:CSB?) statement that "most" botanic gardens are purely for show - off the top of my head I can't think of any in the UK that aren't connected with a university or Kew, and that haven't been used for "serious" botany at some stage. And WP:PLANTS merely requires "botany" rather than "taxonomy", remember. I suspect the same applies to most of Europe - they were mostly set up in the early days when there was still a lot of "easy" taxonomy to be done - and even in the New World (I'm thinking Australia in particular) they may have been set up initially as a source of germplasm from Europe,  but then made important contributions to understanding the native fauna.  In fact, in the UK it goes the other way - there's quite a lot of "botany" happening outside the formal settings of the few botanic gardens, many of the National Collections of garden genera are in private gardens for instance, and there's a couple of examples of some private collections attaining such importance that they end up in some kind of "Big Botany" structure. To take a different example - not every university in the Universities Project can be a Harvard, some are almost exclusively teaching organisations, but just being called a "university" stands for something, it distinguishes them from 10,000's of other educational establishments. Since botanic gardens represent less than 0.1% of all public "gardens", I'd say that tag is a meaningful indication that some kind of botany has gone/goes on there, and that the onus should be to prove that it doesn't, rather than the other way round.FlagSteward (talk) 15:35, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Apologies for non-CSB/weasel comments. They were not intended as such. My point is that many of the articles I've seen written about botanical gardens focus on the design, layout, architecture (if any), and sometimes which plants they specialize in or display. Very little is said about what kind of botanical work is done there. It just seems to me that they, unlike the botany morphology, nomenclature, or botanist articles, are not within the scope. I could be entirely wrong, though, so I'd be happy to see what others have to think. Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 00:46, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

I think our scope is better described by the word botany than the word plants. We include articles of relevance to botany that are not actually plants; e.g. articles on botanists, herbaria, nomenclature, even some non-plantae plant pathogens. On the other hand, we tend to exclude plant-related topics not generally considered the domain of botanists; e.g. floristry, agriculture, and, as Rkitko says above, some botanical gardens. Hesperian 01:12, 15 May 2008 (UTC)


 * That's my impression as well. Some of the larger gardens, that include a research component and a major herbarium, are worth including as part of WP:PLANTS, but most gardens seem more to belong to WikiProject Horticulture and Gardening. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:14, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Well that's my point - in the UK, having "botanic gardens" in the name pretty much implies a link to an academic institution, and probably a long history in taxonomy (there may be the odd exception but they are exceptions). Hence in the UK, "if it has botanic gardens in the name, it belongs in WP:PLANTS" is a useful rule-of-thumb. But I get a sense (although people aren't saying it explicitly) that in other countries, probably in the New World, the term gets used more widely to include some pleasure gardens. That's your local bias, which is fine.  How about amending the scope to "botanic gardens with links to an academic insitution"? That seems a fairly concise and precise heuristic.
 * Rkitko seems to be making a powerful argument in favour of a broad inclusion of botanic gardens in WP:PLANTS though. If most such articles are still at the rudimentary "look at the pretty flowers" stage, then surely what they need is exposure to the intellectual rigour of WP:PLANTS to fill out their contributions to taxonomy and other plant sciences? FlagSteward (talk) 10:20, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

assessment request
I'd like to nomonate Miracle fruit for reassessment, but as I can't find a page or section for nominating articles, I'm doing it here. It's rated as a stub, but it's clearly bigger than that. It should be Start class or perhaps C-class, if you're using that. Also, it has no importance rating. I think it should be rated as medium importance - it has a(minor) commercial usage, and there are several websites devoted to it (eg themiraclefruitsite.com, miraclefruit.co.uk, miracleberry.co.uk etc.) Totnesmartin (talk) 11:15, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and reassessed it from stub to C-class/Mid-importance. You don't need to nominate articles for reassessment unless you're really unsure. As long as you follow our assessment guidelines, you should be fine if you ever need to reassess one of WP:PLANTS articles again. Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 12:01, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I will in future. I'm more used to wikiprojects having assessment request sections, so thanks for allowing me to use my own judgement. Totnesmartin (talk) 13:05, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi, I'm not too familiar with WP Plants standards, so I'll request an assessment. Taraxacum officinale was recently expanded. It's probably C, but could be B too. Punkmorten (talk) 20:00, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Seems like B unless there is some major area missing (herbivores perhaps?). Kingdon (talk) 17:54, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Please assess Kiwifruit, it is a high importance piece with a lot of viewership, it should be at least B may need a little help to become A, if you can indicate things to fix to make it A it would be good as well.144.188.128.3 (talk) 00:48, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Request assessment of Coffea charrieriana
Hello, I have been working on the stub article Coffea charrieriana and I would appreciate an assessment of the article. Thank you. Chuuti (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 23:51, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Request assessment of Zanthoxylum americanum
I started Zanthoxylum americanum and assessed it up to start-class. I think with additions since then, it deserves higher than that, but I won't assess it further myself. I'd also appreciate feedback on the article talkpage of what would be needed to take it up to GA-class. Lady of  Shalott  16:54, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Category template mod
Hi, I've added an alphanumeric selector box to assist browsing in the vast Category:Low-importance_plant_articles and maybe will also add in one or more of the other categories. This really needs editing in at the locked Template:Cat_importance level, so it works on all vast categories, but let's see if any hitches here before asking an admin. Best,  Trev M ~  05:01, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Assessment check
I've greatly expanded Asparagales, based on the Spanish article, as had been suggested, and rated my efforts at B. Perhaps someone could check! Peter coxhead (talk) 00:16, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Phyllochron
Just created an article for phyllochron. I'm new to wikiproject plants — can I get some help with assessment and ratings? Thanks!! --Pusillanimous (talk&bull;contribs) 07:41, 5 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Seems like a Start class, Low importance article to me, so I've attached these ratings. I'm not entirely sure about notability; is this term used widely? The references are mostly by McMaster et al.; the term isn't in any of the plant glossaries I own, including the most recent 2010 Kew glossary. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:48, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the ratings, Peter. The references are mostly to McMaster papers as two of them are effectively literature reviews with very large reference sections and I didn't have time to go through the entirety of the cites. A google books search provides references in academic journals and books as recent as 2010 and there was a | symposium (and 7-odd papers!) produced in 1993 on the usefulness of the concept so I figured it's still relevant and notable. I agree with the low importance rating (because of its speciality) but re:start class I'm not sure how much more the article can be expanded other than increasing the depth of references in the variability section, so in my (very much new-to-wikipedia) opinion, that seems a little low. Thanks again for the help! :) --Pusillanimous (talk&bull;contribs) 09:08, 5 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Are there any other articles you can link from? My experience is that the article will soon get an Orphan notice if there aren't more. This helps to clarify notability. Re Start class: the requirement for C class given here includes "The article is substantial". If there really isn't more to say, then it seems to me that this is more like a section in another article (Leaf perhaps) than an article in its own right. A redirect from "Phyllochron" can point to a section in an article rather than another article. To get an idea of the general quality of C-rated articles, look at a sample in this list. I would say that some are actually now B class, but it does suggest that C class articles are meant to be considerably more substantial. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:50, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Chamomile
If someone could assess the chamomile article for quality/importance, that would be great. Just added the template for that. Thank you! TylerDurden8823 (talk) 21:26, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Where do plant families, economically important species, etc. go?
I would like some input about assessments, like adding some good examples. I think that higher level taxa, above order in APG III, are usually rated high (asterids, eudicots). But when it comes to families, genera and species, we seem to be all over the place. Recently the Araceae, Fagaceae, Euphorbiaceae, and Cyperaceae were assessed as "high," and the Pinaceae was assessed as "low" importance. Can we include some examples? This comes from recent edits by a user who is putting a lot of effort into assessing plant articles. I would assess more, if I had more useful guidelines. "International notability within their field" would apply to most large plant families, the orchids, pines, daisies, oaks. But should high be reserved for orders? But sometimes the order may not be as important as the family. Should all plant families be top or high, certainly by this description, the pine family is way up there.

Can we get an idea where plant orders and families should be, in general, on the importance scale, and include taxa examples, more than economically important plants? And maybe some insight into what economically important plants should be where? --(AfadsBad (talk) 15:13, 5 September 2013 (UTC))
 * I have to say that I've never understood this scale. One unresolved issue is "notability to whom?". For example, Amborella is notable/important to botanists, because of its position at the base of the angiosperm clade. But it isn't notable to the general reader, in the way that say Banana is. It could be argued that WP:PLANTS assessments should be in terms of botanical importance, not agricultural, horticultural or food importance – let other projects assess articles in those terms. Currently we have an odd mixture, it seems to me. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:36, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That would make it easier for plant article editors to do the assessments; however, I think that most botanists can understand the overall economic importance of plants, as agriculture is often the root of funding for plant scientists, so, to continue this run-on sentence, I am not certain how to remove economic importance. --(AfadsBad (talk) 15:44, 5 September 2013 (UTC))

I've been working on assessment for the past couple of months and have been leaving families alone for the most part until yesterday. I finally finished a first pass through all of the unassessed quality/importance articles and am down to the ones I skipped earlier due to difficulty in assessing importance. Quality assessment is a somewhat subjective, importance more so. Anyway, I screwed up Pinaceae; I intended to have it high, but that was my last edit before bed, and I guess I should have knocked off one edit earlier.

A couple principles I've been operating under. I don't think importance should necessarily be inherited up the taxonomic hierarchy. An important species doesn't make it's genus important. I think notability applies to the general reader, but do give some extra consideration to topics more notable to botanists (I've also skipped assessing importance for a lot of articles on morphological concepts so far). Amborella may just be another rainforest shrub to the typical reader, but it's notability to botanists merits at least a Mid importance (maybe even High). I do think importance mostly comes from the relevance of the plant to humans; which doesn't mean that humans necessarily have to use the species (although in most cases they will). A particularly showy wildflower that's discussed in a large number of sources might merit Mid importance.

I'm inclined to rate orders fairly low; they're not very important even for botanists, let alone the layperson. Orders haven't been very stable historically, and they don't show up in most floras or botanical publications that aren't specifically focused on ordinal level systematics. Families on the other hand are critical for botanists, and many of them are fairly recognizable to the lay person. I think the largest and most widely distributed families should be High importance, many other families should be Mid, and only the smallest families with very restricted distributions should be Low.

One thing I've struggled with under the current wording is the distinction between regional/global importance. I'm not sure that all regionally important plants should be treated equally (in terms of the actual importance assessed). This is the English Wikipedia, and people are more likely to seek information on a regionally important plant from the UK (or even India), than one from Peru (where potential readers are more likely to go to the Spanish Wikipedia). This gets back to the issue with family importance; globally, Dipterocarpaceae is probably more important than Campanulaceae, but our reader base is more likely to encounter members of the latter family (maybe that's a bad choice of examples, now that I see Dipterocarpaceae is getting more page views than Campanulaceae). Plantdrew (talk) 18:12, 5 September 2013 (UTC)


 * For rating families in take a look at this. It's all over our *aceae articles ranked by "score". I certainly don't want to suggest that a particular score should be used as a cutoff for Mid/High importance (I've seen some articles with inexplicably low scores, and the importance assessment figures into the score itself, so article with a High importance assessment earn higher scores). Nevertheless, the rank by score does roughly correspond to my sense of what families are important; the most speciose and economically significant families have high scores. Important tropical families maybe score lower than they should. But overall, the top ~50 or so look like a good set of candidates for High importance, 50-250ish are Mids getting into Lows, and most of the families on the 2nd and 3rd pages of results seem pretty reasonably to be Low importance. I'm not inclined to make a whole lot of further changes to the importance assessments for various families, but would like to provide values for the unassessed families. Plantdrew (talk) 01:11, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Um... I struggle to see any clear principles behind the ratings which I could follow in assessing one of those currently unassessed. Surely the question to be asked is not "how important are the genera or species within this family?" (since there may be only one genus or species which is really important) but "how important, how interesting to a general reader, is ?" So I guessed, for example, that Hypoxidaceae, rated "Mid" for some reason, would be viewed much less often than Sarraceniaceae, rated "Low", which is the case. Why? Because there are enthusiasts who cultivate insectivorous plants, so will want to read about the family, whereas Rhodohypoxis is really the only genus in Hypoxidaceae likely to be encountered, and then only by fairly specialist gardeners.
 * Here's another example. Urticaceae was rated "unknown" (which I'll fix next). Because I did some work on nettles and created Stinging plant, I happen to know that there are a lot of articles where "nettle" is wikilinked to "Urticaceae", not because this is necessarily the best link, but because it's not clear what is because "nettle" is used so vaguely in the article. So I'm not surprised that the page view stats show that this article is viewed roughly 50 times a day on average, which is somewhat high for a family article. (Gesneriaceae, rated "High", is viewed only about 40 times a day. By contrast Arecaceae, also rated "High", has about 900 views a day – I suspect because readers start with "palm" and end up there.) So I'm going to rate Urticaceae as "Mid".
 * Could we agree on some defaults? E.g. unless there are good reasons to the contrary, genus and species articles rate "Low", family articles "Mid", order articles "Low"? At least this would give a starting point. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:20, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I would generally like to default to mid for plant families. I disagree that it should be solely what the reader considers important, some of it should be about the level of interest in academia, botany, agriculture also.
 * But, in general, I think that species and genera should default to low, with individual exceptions; families default to mid would be appropriate. I would also default orders to mid, for the reasons Plantdew stated above, that orders are generally less important and more fluid in Angiosperm botany than families. I think there would be a number of exceptions to the mid-default for families, but only going higher is better than low-mid-high; and certain families would be high, palms, asters, poaceae. I do not think any orders would move to high, though. I think mid is fine for plant orders, for prior reasons stated. Moving species and genera to mid or high would be a matter of individual judgement, and this would occur often for familiar species. I would default the major unranked APG III clades as high. We have the top, already.
 * If we agree on this, are there other types of articles we can assign initial defaults to, physiology, energy metabolism, secondary metabolites, diseases, botanists? --AfadsBad (talk) 14:37, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Peter, we're basically in agreement. The existing assessments are a mish-mash, and were added without any sense of a big picture, so many of them are kind of strange. I don't think Gesneriaceae should be High, Sarraceniaceae should be Mid, and Sarraceniaceae is definitely more important then Hypoxidaceae. Readers may come from academia, botany, and agriculture backgrounds; I don't mean only the general layperson when I say "reader" (for many of the plant articles, the most likely reader will have some specialist background).
 * Mid seems to be a pretty safe default importance for angiosperm families, but if you look at the family articles in the link I posted above, we've got a lot of moss/liverwort families, extinct prehistoric families, historically recognized families (and I just replaced the Plants banner with Algae on a large number of algal families). I'd argue that all of those should be Low, and there are quite a lot of them. But for APGIII recognized families that have more than a couple dozen species, and which aren't narrow endemics, Mid is a good default.
 * Species and genera as default Low unless there's some human interest (which needn't be general, specialist interest should count). I'm OK with orders as Mid, but lean towards Low myself. And anything on a minor rank (subfamily, section, etc.) I've been assessing Low (with some exceptions). Regarding the other classes of article Afadsbad mentions, there aren't very many articles with Plants Project banners on physiology, energy metabolism, secondary metabolites, or diseases. I'd leave secondary metabolites to WikiProject Chemistry for the most part. There don't seem to be a lot of articles on physiology/energy metabolism on Wikipedia. There probably are some disease article that need a Plants banner. We do have a lot of bannered botanist articles. Default Low, but I've struggled with what it would take for a botanist to be Mid. Plantdrew (talk) 16:52, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree about mid as a default for Angiosperm families, APG III families specifically and that, probably for moss/liverwort families, extinct and historical families it should not be. Minor rank defaults to low are fine, probably excepting some grass subfamilies and Fabaceae tribes(?), maybe a very limited number of other ones.
 * Mosses, I would give moss a top and Bryopsida a mid, and other orders and families a low, liverworts a top, and all families and orders a low (actually, mosses and liverworts work mostly with classes, I think). Most prehistoric plants can be a low, with certain more familiar individuals a mid; Peter and you and I are in disagreement about the Rhynie Chert, but I believe you all conceded high; there are some groups that would merit a mid or high, but most can be defaulted to low, imo.
 * We all agree on low for species and genera default values.
 * I disagree with your removing plant banners from green algae (sensu amplo) and red algae articles. Technically they are plants, particularly soem clades of green algae. I think that these appear to be the only algae articles that have plant banners, and, imo, they should remain, but generally be marked low, even at the highest levels for plant importance, except for Charyophyta.
 * There seem to be plenty of plant physiology (leaf, see cat), energy metabolism (cat Photosynthesis), diseases (plant pathogens, viruses categories), and secondary metabolite articles (latex). Botanist mid? or higher? Darwin, Linnaeus --AfadsBad (talk) 17:19, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll have to check out the various categories you mention. I've been focused more on assessing articles that already have a Plants banner, but I've gone through a few categories and found plant related articles that lack banners. I'm sure there are more articles in some of these categories that aren't yet bannered. I did leave the plants banner on various Charophyta related articles with a circumscription that includes land plants. Other algae may be plants in a technical sense, but with a Project more specifically focused on Algae (and a clear offshoot of the Plants project), it didn't seem to me that they needed to have banners for both projects (it looked like an oversight from when the projects split; most algal genus/species articles have just the algae banner, but the families and order hadn't had the algae banner added). Plantdrew (talk) 20:46, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I assume that many of these do have plant banners, as I found them through the categories, but it would also be useful to add the banner if they don't. If you did check for Charyophyta with land plants circumscription, I suppose we can leave it at that, although I would be more inclined to keep all green and red.
 * Shall we move forward and add plant families, orders, genus, species, and subclades to the information for assessments while working on how to do the various other categories of plant articles? I also think your author assessment of low is a good default; there will be some obvious mids, and a very few highs, Asa Gray a mid, maybe a high, probably not, possibly L. and Darwin as highs or the only tops, if any. --(AfadsBad (talk) 21:12, 6 September 2013 (UTC))

I did a first pass through the unassessed families. See [] for the remaining unassessed articles; it may take a few hours to refresh; there should be less than 111 articles if it has refreshed. Remaining articles are non-APGIII families, or small families with a limited distribution. I'm inclined to go with Low importance for most of the remainders. It turns out I assessed a few non-APGIII families as Mid. I had no idea they were defunct until I glanced at APG III system. The following non-APGIII families seem fairly important to me in a historical context and might be best as Mid importance: Aceraceae Flacourtiaceae Bombacaceae Sterculiaceae Tiliaceae Chenopodiaceae Illiciaceae Valerianaceae Dipsacaceae Myrsinaceae Theophrastaceae Sparganiaceae Nyssaceae Turneraceae. The first six (to Chenopodiaceae) were defunct in earlier APG systems. There may be some other important pre-APGI/APGII families I've overlooked. And after Chenopodiaceae I'm really just going by family names I recognize that are treated as defunct in APG III system; there might be a few more important pre-APGIII families that I'm not familiar with. And maybe some of what I listed isn't that important; but I do think Chenopodiaceae for one is more than a Low.

I'm going to start going through Orders and assessing with a default importance of Mid (maybe some Low, no High). I do think orders are, for the most part, less important than families, but with a limited number of importance categories available, I think they are better as low-Mids than high-Lows. Plantdrew (talk)

I've assessed the orders, and all but 6 of the families (remainder are mostly monotypic/monogeneric and I intend to work on merging with the only genus/species). I've started going through unassessed articles on individual botanists, looking for those that seem to me to be fairly obviously "Low" importance. Keep an eye on Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Plant articles by quality log and feel free to change my importance assessment if you disagree. Plantdrew (talk) 04:18, 7 October 2013 (UTC)


 * For botanists, I'm still bothered that there don't seem to be any criteria, even rough ones. As an example, I would assess Clive A. Stace as a contemporary botanist of high importance in Britain, because his New Flora of the British Isles has consistently set the nomenclature and classification used for vascular plants, in national and local recording schemes and in local floras. But internationally he's not of importance. So what criteria should be used to rate the article? Peter coxhead (talk) 09:06, 7 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Does the importance lie with Stace, or with New Flora of the British Isles? 50-100 years from when an even Newer Flora comes out, will that diminish Stace's importance (yes, that's getting into WP:CRYSTALBALL territory)? I'm inclined to reserve Mid or better importance for botanists that have made a major physiological discovery, or who've participated in a significant expedition that led to the description of a large number of species, or who have developed a widely used system of classification. Maybe being the main force behind a major national flora also belongs as Mid. I don't think a successful academic career alone merits anything other than Low (a successful career is needed to get into Wikipedia in the first place). Decribe a few species, publish a couple revisions, serve as head of a professional society, maybe get appointed to lead a major research institution; not necessarily enough for Mid.


 * Keep in mind that most botanist articles have already been assessed for importance (not by me) without any well-defined criteria. We've got 1553 entries in Category:Botanists with author abbreviations. 169 are unassessed importance. 3 are Top, 10 are High, 245 are Mid, 1118 are Low. I'm sure there are some Mids that would be better as Lows and vice versa. See this search for how things stack up at present. Plantdrew (talk) 19:52, 7 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I would make almost all low, keep the three top, add Darwin, put Stace and Jepson mid, the system taxonomists as the only highs. --(AfadsBad (talk) 20:05, 7 October 2013 (UTC))
 * We seem to have some rough criteria: creators of major taxonomic systems/innovations are likely to be "High"; the great majority of botanists "Low". It perhaps doesn't matter who goes in the "Mid" category. I do think, however, that current importance should be considered – how important is this person to readers now? how likely are they to want to know about the person now? Long term importance is a different matter, and hard to assess. (How many of the names at List of systems of plant taxonomy are going to be of any relevance in 10 years time, let alone 50–100?) Peter coxhead (talk) 21:39, 7 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Even the most relevant, I would still be inclined to put as mid, Soltis, for example, in spite of leading much of APG. Maybe Asa Gray could stay a high. Who today would you put high rather than mid, say, based on today's importance? But I think those are currently workable guidelines, and I hope Plantdrew's question means he's going to assess the botanists now. --(AfadsBad (talk) 21:48, 7 October 2013 (UTC))
 * I'm planning to go through the remaining unassessed botanists soon. I'm fine bumping Stace up to Mid (Jepson is Mid already). We don't have articles on the Soltises (though .nl Wikipedia does), but we do have Peter F. Stevens as Mid. I'm surprised Darwin hasn't already been tagged for Plants. I could see an argument that Darwin or Mendel aren't Top; their contributions go far beyond Plants, and their expansion of specifically botanical knowledge isn't what they are known for (what if Mendel had worked with fruit flies?). On that note, George Washington Carver seems to be the 3rd most viewed botanist (or is he an agronomist?) article, and I'd like to bump him up from Mid to High. Looking at botanist articles by Score, I see others I'd like to bump up to High.  Joseph Dalton Hooker, Robert Brown (botanist), Joseph Banks, Luther Burbank, among others. But it's hard to articulate  objective criteria for the importance rank; the Score statistic seems to do a good job of uncovering some relatively important topics, but shouldn't be relied on. Plantdrew (talk) 02:45, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Carver is important for so much more than plants, but he was a botanist and agronomist, but technically, yes, a botanist, and high would be appropriate, Brown, Hooke, Banks, maybe Burbank, Juss. Senior. I would not downgrade Darwin's contributions to plants. --(AfadsBad (talk) 02:54, 8 October 2013 (UTC))

I've done an importance assessment for all the botanist articles I could find that were already tagged for the Plants Project. I've been working through various categories to find them, so I'm sure there are a few uncategorized articles I've missed. I am noticing that are a lot of categorized articles that don't have the Plants banner. Category: Botanists with author abbreviations alone has 2746 entries, but only 1571 of these have a Plants banner (and there are certainly more un-Plant-tagged articles on botanists that aren't in the author abbreviation category). It makes me wonder how many articles on plant taxa haven't been tagged. Unfortunately, the categories for taxa are pretty finely split. Getting another bot to run through various categories tagging untagged articles might be good. For now, although I'm a little discouraged, I'm going to go back to working on getting everything currently tagged assessed for quality (the Unassessed-Importance Stub article backlog begs for some automated tools). Plantdrew (talk) 02:14, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
 * After dinking around with CatScan for a bit, it looks as though all of the plant articles in taxonomic categories have been tagged by the project, whereas we have somewhat over 1,000 un-Plant-tagged articles on botanists in that category. Some of those in the category are strictly mycologists and phycologists, however. Perhaps the templates for WikiProject Algae and WikiProject Fungi should be modified to add a parameter for biographies in those fields? Choess (talk) 02:50, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
 * CatScan is a new tool to me. I'm curious how you managed to use it to check taxonomic categories. I've come across untagged taxa in the last couple days, and I don't see how to make CatScan check presence of talk page templates (the Project banner) against presence of article-space categories. Adding a biography parameter for WikiProjects Algae and Fungi seems like a good idea (though from what I've seen, the backlog in untagged botanist articles isn't overwhelmed with mycologists and phycologists). Plantdrew (talk) 02:48, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Chloroplast
Can someone please reassess the article Chloroplast? It was originally a C, but over the course of about a year I've since octupled the content and I think it deserves a regrading.—Love, Kelvinsong talk 22:22, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Have you considered nominating it for Good Article status? It certainly seems better than the typical C rated plant article. I'm not very comfortable assessing articles as A. Since there are so few plant articles rated A, it's hard for me to get a sense of when that rating is appropriate. If you don't want to bother with a GA nomination, I'll take a more detailed look at it for B quality (from a preliminary look, it probably meets and/or surpasses B quality criteria). Plantdrew (talk) 04:11, 7 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I might nominate it for GA, though I thought GAC articles have to be free of article cleanup tags, and Chloroplast has tons of those (seven expand tags, one split tag, and a cn). Though most of them are expand section tags that only science nuts would care about. Thanks!—Love, Kelvinsong talk 02:26, 8 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I'll read through it soon. I think the lead could use some expansion; a sentence or two summarizing each of the six main article sections (evolution, DNA, structure). And it might flow better with the second sentence ("As well as conducting photosynthesis...") moved to the end of the first paragraph (I'd do it myself, but am not sure which content the citation ending the lead paragraph is meant to cover). Plantdrew (talk) 03:09, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Importance Assessments
I'm thinking we should be less conservative in importance assessments (i.e. less inclined to put article at Low importance). I noticed that the global assessment Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment has a ratio of about 3.5 between the different importance categories (3.5 times more High than Top, 3.5 times more High than Mid...). Plants has a ratio around 7 between the categories, though I suspect most of the unassessed importance stubs and most future articles will end up at Low. Importance assessments are pretty um...unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and I certainly am not planning on devoting any significant effort to changing them. But it might be worth considering bumping articles up in importance if changing the class assessment (or editing the talk page for other reasons). I'm inclined to default to Mid for any cultivated species or species with any significant human use. Plantdrew (talk) 22:24, 21 November 2013 (UTC)


 * On the other hand, articles about groups of organisms with very large numbers of species are bound to have a high number of Low importance assessments, given that every species is considered sufficiently notable. Look at Insects, where under 2% of the articles assessed as Top–Low are higher than Low, compared to our 17%. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:46, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree that organismal projects will end up with a high amount of Lows. If the 18,974 Stubs not yet rated for Importance end up as Low (and I expect that almost all of the will), we've got about 10% higher than low. And there's a bias in article creation; we're more likely to already have an article on an "important" plant than an unimportant one. As time goes on, there'll be more and more low importance articles created. Plantdrew (talk) 18:25, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Rose cultivars - assessment?
Hello, I am trying to work a bit on the rose cultivars and did some 'assessments' for articles included in the book "Roses" in the last few days, but while I did read the guidelines, I'd really like somebody to check them/help me to learn when a rose cultivar has enough information to be moved from stub to start or class C. Oh - probably not really important, but my interest in roses comes more or less solely from taken responsibility for the category Rosa on commons - I don't know anything about growing the plants. It could be that that part is cut short in my article improvements... Best wishes, --Anna reg (talk) 14:13, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
 * It's very subjective, but here's how I see it. The phrases in the assessment guidelines for Start-class that I focus on are "most notably, lacks adequate reliable sources" and "provides some meaningful content, but most readers will need more" (which I read as meaning at least some readers will not need more). For C-class the contrasting phrases are, "article should have some references to reliable sources" and "useful to a casual reader". The most common reason why I'd keep something as Start rather than C is a lack of inline citations. Rose cultivars are pretty esoteric, so a few paragraphs can meet the C-class critera of "useful to a casual reader". Rosa 'Sunsprite', Rosa 'Abraham Darby' and Rosa 'Chrysler Imperial' are Start class, but I'd consider them as potentially low C-class if the referencing was better. These articles cover the basic information a casual reader would be interested in (cultivar origins, basic description of the plant and its flowers, basic horticultural info (e.g. disease resistance, cold hardiness)). Rosa 'Double Delight' is stub class, but at least briefly addresses origin and describes the plant, and also includes a photo. Double Delight probably isn't quite start class, but as minimal as it is, it's getting pretty close; again, cultivars are pretty esoteric and it shouldn't take much to satisfy some (if not most) readers. I do think a photo is probably the single most informative thing to include (far more useful to readers than a text description). I'm far more likely to consider something very minimal (like Double Delight) as Start if a photo is included. Absent a photo, I'd like to see at least a couple paragraphs for Start. Plantdrew (talk) 19:15, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that does help a lot. Just one more question: the most reliable source I'm using is the Encyclopedia of Roses from the Royal Horticultural Society - but the German translation. Is it a good idea to cite a German translation of an English book in the English Wikipedia? Somehow that sounds very strange to me... Anna reg (talk) 21:58, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Updating assessment table
The assessment table hasn't been automatically updating (as it used to do) for several months now. I just found out how to run a manual update. There's certainly no need to run it daily, but every couple of weeks would be good. Leaving the link here for future reference for myself and others. Click here and select Plant. Plantdrew (talk) 22:06, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Monotropoideae
Just to let the Project members know, I'm working on a substantial expansion of this article, with the aim of expanding it to Good Article and ultimately even Feature Article status. I've expanded it enough in the last week that I've nominated the article for a "Did you know...?" entry. A link to the nomination and also discussion of expansion of that article can be found at Talk:Monotropoideae.

Also - I think the article could use a new assessment, but I don't feel comfortable as the so-far primary author of the article on grading it. I did move it up from Stub- to Start-Class, but I believe it could be a B- or C-class article at this point.

Cheers! Peter G Werner (talk) 23:44, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Ipomoea oenotherae
Hi there!

I'm a fairly new editor, and I decided to adopt the stub Ipomoea oenotherae a little while ago. I machine translated the page from German, and then worked on improving it, adding a photo, checking references, etc. I received some significant help in cleaning up the machine translation from Bermicourt, and I know that Plantdrew cleaned the article up a little, but I need your help: I am a molecular biology student, and my knowledge of botany is incredibly limited. I'm not sure whether the technical botanical terms are accurate, or whether they are just Google Translate's best attempt at doing its thing. Would any of you be able to give it a quick look? It would be greatly appreciated. :) Cheers, Rambunctious Racoon (talk) 09:08, 24 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Just to add to that. I cleaned up the non-technical German translation and also changed some of Google Translate's attempts to translate botanical terms using the assistance of www.dict.cc as well as a number of English-language online botanical sources on this plant. However as RR implies, it needs a botanist's eye! --Bermicourt (talk) 10:43, 24 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Ok, I've had a quick look, and it seems basically ok. Note that in the English Wikipedia, the sections of a plant article and their order should follow WP:PLANTS/Template. We wouldn't normally subdivide a Description section as short as this one, but it's acceptable. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:17, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Appalachian Province and Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain Province importance
Hi, I noticed that the Appalachian Province and Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain Province articles were marked low-importance, but the North American Prairies Province was marked as mid-importance. Is there a difference between these provinces? Maybe the prairie should be marked as low-importance? -Furicorn (talk) 22:19, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Stub vs. Start criteria
The first goal of WP Plants is to "Describe all ranks and notable clades - particularly orders, families, genera, species …". The same could be said for other organisms and this is going to be a massive task. Without wanting to 'dumb-down' WP standards, I feel that it would be useful to establish some clearer minimum criteria to achieve Start class articles, since Stub-class pages " have risks of being dropped from being an article altogether." An approach taken in other WPs, notably Sv and NL, has been to generate a large number of pages robotically, often having taken data from the Catalogue of Life. Whereas this had obvious limitations, at least they have helped to make inroads into the 'massive task' and I have found them to be useful starting points for generating new En pages in less than an hour. I agree with user:Plantdrew that finding and placing good illustrations is highly desirable, but this can often be the most time-consuming part of the task!

The current criteria for Stub-class articles include: "A very basic description of the topic. However, all very-bad-quality articles will fall into this category …" and they "Provide very little meaningful content; may be little more than a dictionary definition …". Incidentally, the example given: Stellaria graminea seems to me to be much more useful than this: and should be upgraded as a 'typical Start-class'. WP now provides a number of powerful tools including the Automatic taxobox and taxonbar: these alone often provide substantial meaningful content for people like me, especially with the links to international databases, when trying to 'track down' plants that we see in southern Vietnam. In order to achieve 'Starter articles in a person hour' I suggest a list of minimum start-class criteria, for example: With achievable targets such as these, editors could then swiftly move-on to the next taxon … might we not then be able (say) to at least make some reference to >99% of the World's species, with pages on all the higher taxonomic ranks, within the next 20 years? Roy Bateman (talk) 06:14, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Complete taxobox (preferably automatic), including Authority and (where relevant) synonyms
 * Picture(s)
 * Introductory description, to include (at least briefly):
 * Taxonomic placement and description with at least one (or 2?) references.
 * An indication of the known geographical range of the organism.
 * Wherever possible, vernacular name(s), ideally verified with a reference or equivalent WP page in other language(s).
 * If it is a genus page, at least a provisional list of species. Unless there are less than 3-4 subdivisions, I prefer to put the list in a section of text rather than the taxobox itself.
 * Footers: reference section, taxonbar, commons/species links if available, categories.
 * yes, Stellaria graminea is now not a stub. That's always the problem with providing examples of assessment categories.
 * An article meeting your description of "Start" is what I would unhesitatingly class as "C". For many less well known species, this information may be all that is available in reliable sources. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:19, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Many thanks Peter, I find that very reassuring. Almost inevitably, examples placed here will be upgraded: perhaps we need Hypotheticus stubicum (and H. starticum) :-) as examples of minimum requirements. Roy Bateman (talk) 15:11, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Stub class
Every Wikiproject has different criteria for assessment of article quality. If one looks at how the scientific and botanical community approaches descriptions, having a photograph or scientific illustration is quite desirable, adding considerably to the content. It is my feeling that an article that has a photo or illustration is not a good example of a Stub-class article. I am not saying that I want to make that part of the assessment criteria (by stating that a photo automatically makes an article Start-class), but it is not good guidance to choose a stub that has a photo as the example when there are so many stubs that don't have photos. I personally am thinking about going through and adding photos to articles since I found a tool that does the matching from Commons. Abductive (reasoning) 18:33, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Ooh, what is the tool that helps match photos from Commons? Sounds really useful. —Hyperik ⌜talk⌟ 18:59, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
 * This is the tool. It is a bit crude, but I just used it to add two images, including one to Enterovirus 68, an article I created and that has 3000+ pageviews a month. Not one of the 124 editors of this page ever found this image. Abductive  (reasoning) 20:40, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Having two examples for a stub, one that does not have a photo and one that does, seems like a good compromise to me. Looks like there are around 29K plant stubs not tagged as needing photos (or needing reassessment). —Hyperik ⌜talk⌟ 18:59, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
 * That is no compromise at all. What is your attachment to this idea that because something has been misguiding editors for years, it should be kept? Abductive  (reasoning) 05:26, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how to answer that question. I don't see (June 2007) as a misguiding stub example, or I wouldn't be attached to the idea. —Hyperik ⌜talk⌟ 06:01, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * If you can't see the difference between it and then why not allow me, somebody who cares and has a reason, to do what is right? Otherwise it's a case of WP:DONTGETIT.  Abductive  (reasoning) 06:13, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * are you looking at the that  linked to above? Because I can't see any significant differences either.
 * More generally, I agree with Hyperik that an example of a stub with and without an image is a good idea; merely adding an image doesn't convert a stub to something else. (I'd also say that it's necessary to take care over adding images of plants from Commons – the proportion of misidentifications is quite high.) Peter coxhead (talk) 07:02, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Merely? Try looking at it from the point of view of the user of this encyclopedia. The assessment scale talks about "useful to readers". What you guys are saying is that a photo or illustration makes no difference to the readers, which is absolute hogwash. People like pictures. People use pictures to help them understand the topic. People use pictures to identify plants. I'm sorry you are so wedded to a bad example just because it has stunk up this page for x years. God forfend anybody try to improve the Wikiproject, but no fear, the project WP:OWNERS are here to make sure to drive people away. Abductive  (reasoning) 07:50, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for updating your link to the old version which doesn't have a photo (, July 2007). I was pretty confused before heading to bed last night playing "spot the difference" between the two Stellaria articles. The live version of Stellaria humifusa looks like an equally good stub to link to as an example from my perspective.
 * "What you guys are saying is that a photo or illustration makes no difference to the reader" No, what I am saying is that despite having a photo, a one-line species page still isn't a start-class encyclopedia article. It doesn't make sense to have two example stubs that show essentially the same type of content, we would want to have some variation in the examples. Also, I only started editing taxon pages a couple months ago, so let's refrain from the unhelpful accusations please. We're all here to improve the encyclopedia. —Hyperik ⌜talk⌟ 15:08, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Okay, I get what you are saying. Abductive  (reasoning) 03:54, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Taxon-specific quality guidelines
As I mentioned at WP:TOL and WP:ARTHROPODS, I think it would be helpful to have some slightly more specific guidelines for quality assessment of taxon pages since there is a basic template that can be applied to all of them. See the draft begun at WP:WikiProject Plants/Assessment and please modify as makes sense. Thanks! —Hyperik ⌜talk⌟ 15:24, 19 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Per the discussion above, I would agree that adding a photo should not be an automatic bump to Start-class from Stub-class. IMO, the C-class criteria are set a bit too high: what they currently require sounds more like a B-class article. I would have to think a bit about what makes an article C-class but not B-class. Choess (talk) 02:36, 27 December 2018 (UTC)