Talk:Chionoecetes bairdi

{fact}

I do recognize that this article is already tagged and needs citations. But there is some material in here which I can personally vouch for and therefore I do not intend to touch it. This statement that I am adding {fact} to is, to the best of my knowledge, utter nonsense, and I intend to delete it, specifically, if no support is provided. So I do not consider the usage to be redundant. Unschool 09:10, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

And now I see that you've actually proven my point, Stemonitis. You removed my {fact} request from the article, then added a fine source yourself, and removed the {unreferenced} tag. Fine work, except that your source, excellent though it is, in no way addressed my concern.Unschool 09:15, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

image removal

Yesteday I added several images of the two Tanner crabs I was lucky enough to have been given while they were still alive. I felt that these images added something to the article in that they showed several different views of the crabs as opposed to the very staged shot of an obviously dead crab that is in the infobox, and they showed the process of cleaning the crab and what the finished product of cooked crab legs looked like. All the images were removed with the rather cryptic summary of Remove gallery per WP:IG. I say cryptic since that really is not an explanation as that page makes it fairly clear that image galleries are not forbidden and may be desirable if they add something not explained in the text. I have reverted that removal and await a more specific reason for the removal of the images. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:07, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Image galleries are allowed where that is the best (or only) way to illustrate something. "The images in the gallery collectively must have encyclopedic value and add to the reader's understanding of the subject." (WP:IG). In this case, I feel that the images have been added for their own sake, rather than to illustrate something mentioned in the article. Indeed, they can hardly illustrate anything mentioned in the article, because it's embarrassingly short. I can see that you've tried to make the images encyclopaedic by adding useful captions, which I applaud, but all the statements therein are unsourced, and therefore inadmissible as original research. If that information were sourced, it would belong in the text, anyway, which could then be illustrated by appropriate images. This would be a great opportunity to expand the article beyond its current pitiful state, if you felt like taking it on. Nonetheless, for now, the images don't belong here, and I've removed them. I look forward to a time when they can be restored, inline, to illustrate a truly informative article. --Stemonitis (talk) 07:06, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

See, the thing is that somebody gave me two live crabs, not a book about Tanner crabs. I think it's a bit ridiculous to claim any of it was "inadmissible" as though there was some hard and fast rule that had been broken. For example, the close up picture, which was captioned as the "face" and claws of a Tanner. How is that OR? I don't even know what it means when you say the images were added "for their own sake." I took them specifically to use on Wikipedia exactly because the article is so brief. Ever heard of the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words? That's where I was coming from here. You seem to be saying that your interpretation of IG says that none of these images can be included in the article until it has been expanded. I don't believe that was the intent expressed at the IG page, it is more meant to keep articles from becoming nothing but an image gallery. Image galleries are meant to "add to the reader's understanding of the subject" and i don't see how these informative images failed to do that. If you have a problem with the captions, they can be changed, although the only unsourced statements were that people don't usually eat the disgusting slime inside the Tanner's "head" and that crab should be chilled if not being eaten immediately after being cooked.(which is standard advice for any kind of cooked meat or fish) I find it hard to believe that anyone would actually challenge the validity of those statements, unsourced or not. Beeblebrox (talk) 07:21, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

For an example of how images should be used for an article on crabs, have a look at the good article Cancer pagurus. There are dozens of photos of C. pagurus available on the Wikimedia Commons, but very few of them are used in the article. Instead, images were chosen which illustrate particular aspects of the text. (A picture may paint a thousand words, but this is a prose encyclopaedia, so the text has to come first; images may add to the prose, but may never replace it.) A close-up photo of the head accompanies text describing the mouthparts and antennae; a view of a female's ventral side accompanies a description of sexual dimorphism (I would have liked a photo of a male for comparison, like the pictures of Pachygrapsus marmoratus in the article crab, but no images were available). Every picture in that article expands on something mentioned in the text, and helps clarify it for the reader. All the text we've got to work with for Chionoecetes bairdi is that it is very similar to C. opilio, and that it was subject to overfishing, neither of which facts is particularly amenable to illustration. If we had a long section on culinary uses, as we certainly should have if this article reaches the sort of size it should be, then your pictures would be excellent illustrations. Until then, they're not illustrating the article, just illustrating the crab. That's why I suggested expanding the article, something it's in desperate need of. --Stemonitis (talk) 09:21, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

So, just so we're clear, you are saying that the images I took can't be included until somebody expands the article with text? You've been watching this article and editing it since 2007 [1] but you are either unwilling or unable to expand it yourself, but I, who just looked at this article for the first time two days ago, should go ahead and do it? Interesting. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:56, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

•  Done I've just completed a sevenfold expansion of the textual content of the article and have added back in two of the images in relevant sections. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:04, 10 October 2010 (UTC)