Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora)

Clean up common names section

Stale

 – Mooted by admin-closed RfC at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Bird common name capitalisation, which removed the bird-related material in question.

I removed irrelevant material about birds here[1], but this was reverted[2] with with an edit summary that doesn't seem to make sense in this context: "that matter is constantly raised in relation to plant names, outside wikipedia as well". Whether there's a dispute about bird naming is not "constantly raised in relation to plant name", since it's not relevant at all here. Whether off-Wikipedia sources agree on style, with regard to birds or plants, doesn't determine what MOS does. MOS is already clear at MOS:LIFE that common names of species are not capitalized. @Sminthopsis84: If you have an issue with that, you need to take is up at WT:MOS, since MOS supersedes its subguideline pages. In the interim, this wildly inappropriate pushing of bird-related strife about capitalization has absolutely no business being in a guideline about plants.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  21:35, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

I think there is instruction creep when you add information not directly relevant to the guidelines. However, I think that if you search the archives you might find that it was put there as a result of the irrelevant arguments constantly being brought up for using common names instead of scientific names, even though it doesn't have any bearing on that, either. I would rather it not be there. --(AfadsBad (talk) 21:59, 4 April 2014 (UTC))

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense here at all. The common vs. scientific names part is a different section, the quoted material is mostly off-topic here, and even most of those examples are about animals. It's grossly inappropriate WP:SOAPBOX POV-pushing about bird capitalization, which has nothing at all to do with flora.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  05:18, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

The issue is not really about birds in particular. It's about following official lists of "common"/vernacular names, which may or may not be more "commonly used" than scientific name. WP:COMMONNAME is going for "commonly used" names, but is widely read by the Wikipedia community to mean that vernacular names should always be preferred over scientific names. By WP:NCFAUNA, if the Springfield Paleontological Society decrees that "King Tyrant Lizard" is the "common" name for Tyrannosaurus rex, that dinosaur should be titled by a vernacular name. Official lists of vernacular names often have idiosyncratic conventions for capitalization and hyphenation (that contradict WP:MOS). I absolutely support abandoning the weird conventions used by official lists of "common" names, but would argue that many fish and reptiles (and some bird and mammals) would be better titled by the scientific name if the stylistic conventions of official lists aren't being followed.

As far as plants go, the official list of vernacular names for British plants makes abundant use of capitals, which is way the birds capitalization has been included here.. The de facto official list of vernacular names for United States plants (as well as the list for British plants, and the de facto standards for bird and mammal names) use hyphens in a way contrary to WP:MOS. Plants are mostly at scientific name, so the "official" vernacular names aren't much of an issue for title here. For animals though, getting away from weird conventions of the official lists (which I support doing) makes titling animal articles more frequently by scientific name much more logical (which I also support doing, although this is apparently to controversial for Wikipedia to consider). Plantdrew (talk) 05:49, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

This isn't really even a relevant debate here. Plant species articles are at scientific names, not common names. We all already think that common names, lower case and upper case, should be redirects to the scientific names. There is virtually nothing relevant for NCFLORA to say here about common names and capitalization. Whether to capitalize or not is a WP:MOS matter, not a WP:AT/WP:RS matter, anyway, if you want to have a side discussion about article content (which is off-topic in a naming guideline). This has been gone over at both WT:MOS and WT:AT about 1,000 times. Whether or not any particular outside list of animal names is a WP:RS for purposes of determining what the names are under WP:COMMONNAME has nothing to do with what Wikipedia should do with them stylistically. Some editors refuse to accept this, but WP:CONSENSUS does not require unanimity. There's been a consensus at MOS to not capitalize (yes, including in article titles the common names of species of organism, and that consensus is so stable not one word of it has changed in almost 2 years. The section here is quoting MOS directly and extensively to support an incorrect idea, namely that there are all sorts of exceptions to MOS:LIFE, of which bird are just one example. That's absolutely, positively not at all what MOS is saying (it's not even saying there is that exception; rather, it's warning that there's an unresolved WP:LOCALCONSENSUS dispute that leads to editwarring and is best avoided until a broader consensus resolves the matter). And it has nothing at all to do with article titles of flora. Whether "getting away from" vernacular names for fauna articles is or isn't a good idea, and would or would not be controversial, is a matter for discussion at WT:NCFAUNA, not here. (Your argument about T. rex isn't actually correct – we would never put a dinosaur species article at a vernacular name, and certainly not on the basis of one institution's advancement of it as a common name vs. it aactually being the WP:COMMONNAME –, but that's another matter for WT:NCFAUNA.)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  23:34, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Proposed re-wording

@SMcCandlish: There's no intention here to "push" bird naming conventions. The facts appear to be these:

1. There are a substantial number of biology-related articles, not just birds but also lepidoptera, where capitalized English names are used as a matter of policy by the WikiProject. Whether this should continue or not is a matter of controversy, currently being debated in an RfC. Members of WP:PLANTS have their own views, but the project as a whole does not. What is relevant to this guidance is that the practice of capitalizing actually exists, rightly or wrongly, and so guidance is needed which takes reality into account.
2. As there has been no consensus within WP:PLANTS over capitalizing the English names of plants, the actual result is that some plant articles do capitalize (including GA and FA articles), particularly where there are national ties to countries which have "official" capitalized plant names (see e.g. Category:Banksia taxa by common name). But equally some plant articles – perhaps the majority – don't capitalize. The important advice, given that there is no consensus among plant editors to go around changing capitalization styles, is "Use a consistent style for common names within an article." The consistent style should be applied to all organisms in that article, i.e. if the English names of plants are in sentence case, then the English names of birds, etc. should be the same, and similarly if title case is used.

I do agree that the current wording isn't quite right, because it doesn't bring out the real issue which is ensuring consistency within an article and not following the style of any linked article, and because it isn't applied directly to plants. Rather than quoting the MOS directly, I would suggest something like this:

The Manual of Style recommends the use of sentence case for the vernacular names of organisms, i.e. that they should be in lower case other than words that would normally be capitalized within a sentence. Thus "common bluebell", "meadow buttercup", "cuckoo-pint", but "Mount Cook lily", "Spanish bluebell" and "Adam and Eve". Some English plant names contain "proper names" but not used in a way which applies to specific individuals. Where sentence case is used, these names should be in lower case. Examples are "jack in the pulpit" and "ragged robin".

As of April 2014, plant articles vary in whether sentence case or title case is used for English names, as do articles in other areas of biology. Use a consistent style within an article. Redirects from vernacular names of plants should be created for alternative capitalizations.

However, any change requires consensus and should not be made by one editor acting alone. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:48, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

That's a misstatement of facts in several places, though I think the proposed wording changes is worth discussion (and correction). The disputation part should be dealt with first, because most people who attempt to approach this vernacular names issue do so from multiple faulty positions.

1. There is no such thing as a "wikiproject policy":
   • Wikipedia:Consensus#Level of consensus (WP:LOCALCONSENSUS): "Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. For instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope." And: "Wikipedia has a higher standard of participation and consensus for changes to policies and guidelines than to other types of pages. This is because they reflect established consensus, and their stability and consistency are important to the community."
   • Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide#Advice pages: "The best [wikiproject-based] advice pages do not conflict with the site-wide pages and avoid unnecessary duplications with site-wide pages. However, in a few cases, projects have wrongly used these pages as a means of asserting ownership over articles within their scope, such as insisting that all articles that interest the project must [comply with the advice page], and that editors of the article get no say in this because of a 'consensus' within the project. An advice page written by several members of a project is no more binding on editors than an advice page written by any single individual editor. Any advice page that has not been formally approved by the community through the WP:PROPOSAL process has the actual status of an optional {{essay}}.
2. The fact that some pracice exists off Wikipedia does not mean that Wikipedia has to account for it internally.
3. The fact that some editors engage in a practice on Wikipedia that conflicts with guidelines or policies does not mean that those have to be rewritten to endorse that practice. We might as well just delete all guidlines and policies if that were the case, since they would be meaningless.
4. The fact that "there has been no consensus within WP:PLANTS over capitalizing the English names of plants" is precisely why this pro-capitalization activism has to stop. You and I have been over this at least 4 times that I remember. MOS:LIFE has already established a site-wide consensus, in one of the longest-running, most widely-advertised debates in its history (one that some bird-focused editors even dominated, canvassed and tried to disrupt[3]), and it nevertheless settled on not capitalizing the common names of species. No wikiproject has to "ratify" this, it just is, and consensus has not changed on it. It does not matter whether a wikiproject, which is just a page at which individual editors agree to coordinate collaboration on a topic, not an autonomous authority, comes to some independent agreement with it. The fact that various plant articles were capitalized way back when does not magically mean MOS:LIFE has new "exceptions", it means that no one's gotten around to moving them since consensus on lower case was reached at MOS in 2008 and reaffirmed in 2012. If moving them would be a big fight, it also indicates that some people don't understand WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. You seem to be unaware that wikiprojects did precisely the same thing at all the cetacean articles, all the primate articles, all the rodent articles, all the ovis articles, and many others, and yet they've all been methodically put back at lower case per MOS:LIFE without any strife at all. This Chicken Little pretense, that heads are going to explode if moth or fern names aren't capitalized any longer, is untenable, and everyone knows this.
5. This is patently a WP:OWNership argument: "there is no consensus among plant editors to go around changing capitalization styles". It does not matter, because there is a consensus to use lower case at MOS:LIFE. Members of a project that doesn't even have a local consensus for upper case are not some mystical force that can block the application of site-wide consensus in favor of lower case. You've been making this weird argument for four years now and really need to drop it.
6. "Ensuring consistency within an article" is MOS's job, and it has a standard for that (do not capitalize species common names, but allows that if for some wild reason this is ignored, then do be consistent about it). AT/NC pages have nothing to say about that topic; they are about titles, and on style matters they necessarily defer to MOS.

As for your proposal, it is heading in the right direction, in spirit, but mostly fails to stay focused on naming conventions and keeps trying to rewrite the content guidelines of MOS. The first paragraph is arguably better written than MOS itself on the matter when it comes to capitalizing; putting it in terms of "proper names" has always been dicey, because there's a camp that insists (incorrectly) that common names of species are themselves proper names. But anyway, the text has several serious problems in both segments:

1. It misstates MOS's position as being in support of sentence case (this would result in usage like Common bluebell in the middle of a sentence); sentence case only applies to article titles, and is handled by the software automatically.
2. But wait; plant species (and genus, and subspecies, etc.) articles are at scientific names, not common names! There is nothing for NCFLORA to actually do here other than to talk about how to title redirect pages, and we already know the answer is to redir from every reasonable version of a name!
3. Not surprisingly, the examples you give are in-text usage, not article titles. This is MOS's job, and has absolutely no business being in a naming convention page. You and others here keep saying no one is pushing bird capitalization on other topics, and that this being just a naming guideline it is not trying to contradict MOS on article content. Yet what you've proposed is doing both.
4. The "jack in the pulpit" cases could more succinctly be addressed with "Some plant names contain personal names not used in a way which refers to specific individuals (e.g. jack in the pulpit and ragged robin); these names are normally in lower case, thus Ragged robin" (and note use of redir title as example), but this is also really an article content issue, not a naming conventions issue. It needs to be addressed at the MOS:CAPS page, and I'll raise it for inclusion there myself. Done as of 05:27, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
5. In the second segment, the entire purpose appears to be to advance a capitalization justification agenda, and it applies only to article content! This is off-limits for naming conventions, even aside from its direct conflict with MOS.
6. And the wording gets worse: "plant articles vary in whether sentence case or title case is used for English names" would have to be "plant article titles vary...", but well, they don't because they're not at common names. For redirects, we'd actually want both capitalized and non-capitalized to work. And most people don't what title case and sentence case mean.
7. The "are used for" verb tense implies a MOS exception that does not exist. This wording would be a very wikipolitically problematic, despite looking minor; but again this entire section is trying to be an anti-MOS and has nothing to do with naming conventions, so it has to go.
8. The "as do articles in other areas of biology" bit serves no purpose at NCFLORA, and is just fight-baiting. It's also hardly true any longer. I've have personally de-capitalized most of the articles in entire families (maybe even an order or two), and this cleanup work is ongoing by others are well. There is no forest of "exceptions". There are birds with a constantly controversial alleged local consensus to ignore MOS (in actual fact, only some birds editors agree with it), and there are some plant and insect articles, without any such consensus as you noted yourself. It's just more anti-MOS posturing, since it has nothing to do with article naming conventions of flora!
9. "Use a consistent style within an article." This is off-topic for a naming convention, and is already covered at MOS, pretty much everywhere.

Making changes does not require consensus; consensus is required for them to stick. See WP:BOLD, WP:BRD.

I'll take a stab at redrafting to resolve these problems.

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  23:34, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Alternative proposal

The concerns raised above would probably be mollified with something like this:

The Manual of Style recommends the use of lower case for the vernacular names of organisms, other than for words that would normally be capitalized within a sentence. Plant species articles are usually at the scientific name. Redirects, which are automatically sentence-cased with an initial capital letter, should be created from common names to the scientific name, e.g. Common bluebell, Cuckoo-pint, but Mount Cook lily, Adam and Eve (plant). Redirects from vernacular names of plants should be created for alternative capitalizations – Common Bluebell, Mount Cook Lily– because capitalization is common in many field guides and preferred in some academic disciplines.

That's all that's needed, and it's really all that reasonably can be said here, without this leading to an eventual RFC or RFARB to stop NCFAUNA from being advanced as a competing, anti-MOS article prose style guide. Peter, you wrote "There's no intention here to 'push' bird naming conventions". Okay, so let's stop pushing them here. (PS: Set index articles and disambiguation pages as alternatives to redirects are already covered further up the page, so we needn't reiterate anything about them here.) — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  23:34, 5 April 2014 (UTC)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  23:34, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

I've struck through wording that, as pointed out below, isn't really necessary.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  05:35, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

The reason is speculation, and should be omitted.

I utterly despise your attempt to make this page an extension of battles elsewhere. I'll take it off my watch list and ignore it. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:58, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I certainly didn't WP:POVFORK these NC pages and MOS subpages from MOS:LIFE. I'm not "making" this page anything; it's not possible to raise the problem of guidelines diverging from each other without being specific as to which guidelines they are and where they're conflicting. I decline to feel like a bad guy for proposing that they be normalized back to MOS again (at which I have not advocated any relevant change). Nor am I going to feel like a bad guy for pointing out that misuse of a naming conventions page to advance article content guidelines isn't proper. To the extent that this is even about capitalization rather than wikiproject politics, there was a two-month long discussion in 2012, in which you were a major participant as were WP:BIRDS members who cared, and many, many other parties; the consensus that emerged from that to recommend lower case while noting the existence of a single WP:LOCALCONSENSUS dispute, in April 2012, is the broadest and most stable ever reached on Wikipedia about this stuff (the wording at MOS:LIFE hasn't changed at all since then).

I'm not sure what you mean about "speculation"; there is nothing speculative about the fact that field guides frequently capitalize and that some academic publications also do, and that this makes redirs from alternative capitalizations useful to readers. It is certainly optional wording, though. But its also not unusual for these guidelines to briefly explain their rationales for rules. I don't care either way. I've taken your personal-level objection to your talk page, and that discussion seems reasonable.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  05:35, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

It's been over a week. Does anyone even watchlist this page, or care about plant article title capitalization (for the few plant articles not at the scientific names)?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:07, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Nobody cares about article title capitalization. None of the remaining articles with capitalized vernacular name titles are good candidates to remain at the vernacular name. Some people do care about using specialist styles to present vernacular names in article text (and that's not just caps, but hyphens as in "Douglas-fir"). There's consensus that plant vernacular names should be sourced. There doesn't seem to be consensus whether specialist sources should be strictly followed in use of caps and hyphens. Does the plants debate over presentation of vernacular names in article text belong in a policy on titles? No. Does it belong at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Plants#Common_names? For now, that's probably the best place for the text you wanted to remove. Straight up removal didn't go over very well. Moving it to a more appropriate place will likely ignite another lengthy discussion. If you're still wanting to get the controversial text out of the article title guideline, try moving it, not right out deleting it. Plantdrew (talk) 03:25, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Much if not all of this is moot now, but this deserves a belated answer. MOS would never be okay with something as weird as "Douglas-fir"; there are virtually no sources for that, and all of them are specialist sources that conflict with other specialist sources. This is a classic example of what WP:SSF was written to cover, and why the essay's become oft-cited even in my absence. Every other day some specialist somewhere promulgates some linguistically freakish notion as a secret code, an insider shorthand of some sort, between specialists. Normally no one cares, because it's just between them. It becomes a problem when some of those specialists decide to try to push it on millions of encyclopedia users, however. There is consensus whether specialist sources should be strictly followed in use of caps and hyphens, and the answer is an overwhelming "no". MOS has entire subpages about both, and how to do them here. There is no magical exception for plants just because some wikiproject wants to ignore MOS instead of trying to convince the rest of the encyclopedia's editors to change MOS to account for their quirk. The "debate over" presentation of vernacular names in article text belongs at WT:MOS and was just administratively closed there in favor of lower case. Any actual article-editing advice to contradict that site-wide consensus, which has actually been around since 2008, and very clear since 2012, does not belong here, or at WP:PLANTS#Common names, or anywhere else, since it's a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS policy problem. The "text I wanted to remove" was (now-incorrect) direct quotation of MOS on a dispute about capitalization of bird names, so it had nothing at all to do with either this page or the plants wikiproject. We don't need to "move" any such material to some place to ignite yet another lengthy discussion. The discussion's been had, many times, and it always ends the same. No one is in a position to refrain from removing irrelevant material simply because the removal may not go over well with people who have latched onto the material inappropriately and were misconstruing it. One or two people reflexively objecting to the removal without actually analyzing it isn't even evidence that it didn't go over well, only of reflexive reactions.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:52, 4 May 2014 (UTC)