User talk:Stemonitis/Archive01

DO NOT EDIT OR POST REPLIES TO THIS PAGE. THIS PAGE IS AN ARCHIVE.

This archive page covers approximately the dates between Jan 25 2005 and Oct 09 2005.

Post replies to the main talk page, copying or summarising the section you are replying to if necessary.

Welcome

Firstly, Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! Grinner 10:10, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Relative height

You've been adding relative height to the infoboxes on some British hills, just at the same time as I've been trying to standardise them with the following templates: Template:Infobox british hills, Template:Infobox british hills (no image), Template:Infobox british hills double. I'd quite like to include relative hiegh in the infoboxes, but I don't have the data. DO you have RH info for most hills in Britain (Marilyns, Munros Hewitts anyway)? If so I'll add a RH line to the template. It's great to see someone else working on the hills by the way!Grinner 10:10, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

I see you've got hold of relative height data for Scotland, for reference are they from an online source? Grinner 17:26, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Yorkshire Wolds

I see you have added an infobox about Bishop Wilton Wold to this page. Shouldn't it be on a separate Bishop Wilton Wold page? Also, The Yorkshire Wolds are not a Marilyn of England so I suspect the category is in the wrong place too. Paul Tracy 13:24, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

One could argue that the entire hill is the Marilyn, and not just the summit, in which case, the whole Yorkshire Wolds might count as a Marilyn, but I don't think it really matters. I'd be happy for it to be separated, but I didn't have enough material for a page, I thought. If Bishop Wilton Wold were separated off, then naturally the category would stick with it, and not with the Wolds page. --Stemonitis 13:30, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

More on the infoboxes

Bit of a discussion over on Template talk:Infobox british hills (no image), you might care to comment.Grinner 16:18, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I've put in my two-ha'p'orth. Stemonitis 16:53, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Decapoda

There is a an apology for an article entitled Spiny lobster which looks in great need of attention if you run out of hills !
Velela 23:24, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'll get on to that now, then. --Stemonitis 08:23, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hyphenation

What is your evidence that hyphenated forms such as flower-fly are the most prevalent? For instance, when one Googles "flower-fly", the first usage with a hyphen appears rather far down. When I've studied the issue before, it's seemed pretty clear that hyphenation is an archaic British usage at best, not really appropriate for scientific subjects in a 21st-century reference work. Stan 15:30, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Oops, maybe I missed something. Is there a guideline somewhere saying that we should use the most prevalent forms? If so, I haven't come across it yet (not that I've been looking at all). I know of many occasions where the wrong spelling or punctuation is more common than the right one, so I don't necessarily accept that the most prevalent usage is the right one, although I accept that that must be the best decision for Wikipedia to make, in general. My reasons were rather:

a) (the trivial reason) that that's how they're written in my field guide
b) (a better reason) that the book can justify that spelling system. It describes how insect names involving "fly" can be easily divided into true flies and others if all the true flies have "-fly" in their name (e.g. flower-fly) and the others do not - a clear advantage.

(Incidentally, the book I found this scheme in is a brand new edition, so it may be British, but not really archaic.)

I wouldn't change the name in any further way (e.g. I, personally, would prefer to use "hover-fly" instead of "flower-fly"), and I make sure that all the appropriate redirections are in place.

As an invertebrate biologist (that is, a biologist of invertebrates), I am constantly confronted by common names that are applied to a variety of unrelated forms (e.g. "lobster", "crab", and "shrimp" are each used for a whole bunch of different, unrelated crustaceans (and at least one non-crustacean)), so when I found a scheme that could clarify a whole mess with a single small change of punctuation, I jumped at the chance. Thus, overall, we're left with a clear system that emphasises the true relationships between these insects, rather than the trivial fact that they can fly. Precipitate it may have been, but, I believe, sensible.

Stemonitis 15:54, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This is all a much-fought-over area actually; Wikipedia:Naming conventions is the top-level page, while Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) goes into more detail on "common names", as does Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna) for animals specifically. Google is popular as a way to "read" the pulse of the public, so to speak, although since its search algorithm ignores hyphens, it's a little harder to evaluate that kind of usage. At one level, it doesn't matter, because redirects can make sure everybody ends up at the same place. At another level, it does matter, because more and more people are taking WP's content as authoritative, so we want to be sure that even in matters of spelling and orthography we reflect a consensus of both scientific and lay communities as much as possible. I don't have much of a personal preference myself; I'm just reacting to "flower fly/flower-fly" because I poked around the net and my personal library for a half-hour once, and decided that the use of a space was significantly more common than either hyphen or no space. Incidentally, I encourage you to weigh in on the pages above if you disagree with them; none of the conventions are set in stone, and we're always keen to have more experts involved. Stan 23:24, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

House-fly

Hi, I noticed that you recently moved housefly to house-fly. I'm not so sure that this was a good decision; see Talk:House-fly for my reasons. Cheers, AxelBoldt 18:59, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Heterostyly

....is now included in Self-incompatibility_in_plants. Which came first the English primrose article or the image ? Velela 11:14, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

One week later, and I've only just noticed that there's an unanswered question here. How lax of me. To answer it, the article came first, and I realised I could fill the gap of the missing picture relatively easily, and then did so. My picture is timed at 10:44 (local time). Stemonitis 10:50, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Caps for English names

Hi Stemonitis - mainly to maintain at least some sort of consistency within groups (all or almost all the other Rosaceae have full caps for common names; the oaks don't at the moment, though I'm planning to harmonise them with all the rest of the Fagales (which do) sometime soon; beetles also don't at the moment and to put one in caps without working on the rest would be out of place. On the broader principle of caps, there are good reasons of consistency in having all common names capitalised (e.g. most field guides do so, whatever country you're in). It has been discussed several times on WP:TOL talk and has always been somewhat divisive but each time with a small majority in favour of capitalising all common names; all the details are in the WP:TOL talk archives if you want to dig them out. In somewhat similar vein, there is also a small majority in favour of converting all TOL entries to scientific names, but the size of the task dissuades much action from being done (I'm doing a bit here and there where there's difficulty or ambiguity over multiple common names e.g. Primula or the same common name for different things e.g. Delphinium / Consolida); I'm also thinking about moving (eventually!) all the conifers over to scientific names as an experiment to see if it works better full-scale. - MPF 09:04, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

thank you everybody

I would like to express my thanks to everybody helping in the nomination of Antarctic krill. I think 3 1/2 supports and a long long discussion are an unexpected and great outcome for a critter so remote and unknown - you should see how little and poor Antarctic krill is represented in Encarta and Britannica - this is the best reviewed and resourced general article of krill we know of - it is impossible to fullfill all wishes at the same time - this is what we did with our all product peer review stamp to qualify this stage of the article for academic exercises, especially for our dreams of a Virtual university within Wikiversity - good luck to you all Uwe Kils 21:48, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

Welsh-Basque links

Hey, you removed Basque people from the the 'related ethnic groups' section of Welsh people, I believe the source for this claim is http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/1256894.stm -- Joolz 17:29, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but a single study isn't really enough to convince me. One study based on a relatively small number of individuals from a few small areas, using only the Y chromosome (which is very un-representative of the genome as a whole), cannot reveal the true complexity of the relationships among these peoples. If there were really a good ethnic link between Welsh and Basques, then there would also be linguistic evidence, and there is, despite repeated and increasingly unlikely claims to the contrary, no evidence at all of links between Basque and any other language. The article states "[I]t is still unclear whether the link is specific to the Celts and the Basques, or whether they are both simply the closest surviving relatives of the early population of Europe. What is clear is that the Neolithic Celts took women from outside their community. When the scientists looked at female genetic patterns as well, they found evidence of genetic material from northern Europe." All this is a long way from saying that the Welsh and the Basque people are closely ethnically related. In any case, Wikipedia should be consistent, and the page on the Basque people states they are not (known to be) related to any other group. This, I think, is how it should be. --Stemonitis 11:23, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

invitation academic boad

Hallo Stemonitis - you do great work on the ocean critters - may I invite you to join an academic board we are proposing? see some thoughts, and maybe add to the discussion and vote, on http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Virtual_University - are you from Ireland? regards Uwe Kils 17:47, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

Antarctic krill

Hallo Stemonitis! thank you for helping on krill - may I ask you to help contributing on http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Antarctic_krill and maybe voting if you like it - we try to get input from all over the planet, best academics, want to use the article as academic teaching content for the hatching Wikiversity - best greetings ;-) Uwe Kils 19:29, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Haworth

I think Wikipedians would like to see the A. H. Haworth article use his full given names in the title. Or perhaps they are now forgotten?

Since you are into biology, perhaps you know who the Haworth was who gave his name to Haworthia, a genus of Asphodelaceae. Lots of pics of the little critters.

-- RHaworth 08:15, 2005 Jun 24 (UTC)

I'll bet they would, but I couldn't find them, nor the dates of his birth and death, nor even his nationality. This is all information which should be presented, but I can't find any of it (on the web). --Stemonitis 10:52, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Update - Someone has helpfully merged my A. H. Haworth article with a previously-existing Adrian Hardy Haworth, so now we have full name, date and nationality information. It's just a shame that he wasn't mentioned before on Haworth (disambiguation), otherwise I might have found out about him earlier. Never mind. --Stemonitis 14:02, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You may have noticed my changes to the relevant articles already, but I shall reiterate them here; the genus Haworthia is named after Adrian Hardy Haworth.

Interwiki krill

Yeah, I think that particular code I used is buggy. It almost tried to add interwikis to Hongkong in several languages to Harry Potter and I still don't know how it happened. The code needs more user input before changing things. BTW that mistake happened because foreign wikis link incorrectly (it copied all interwikis it could find by following the ones on en: - Mgm|^(talk) June 28, 2005 08:15 (UTC)

Hill infoboxes & flags

Just thought I'd congratulate your efforts in the changes to the infoboxes. Well done! Grinner June 30, 2005 11:07 (UTC)

Why, thank you. Having stumbled across such a helpful template, it seemed a shame not to use it. --Stemonitis 30 June 2005 12:40 (UTC)

Inselkampf

How would I go about Wikifying the page?

j011

The principle is simple; you just put square brackets around words that should link to other pages. So, instead of typing "tactics", you type "[[tactics]]", and that will appear as "tactics". There are various other means of formatting as well, like putting two apostrophes on either side of text to make it italic, three to make it bold, and so on. Please see How to edit a page for details. --Stemonitis 9 July 2005 09:45 (UTC)

Thanks for the info that you sent me, should make a great deal of things clearer. Do you by any chance know much about the Wiki IRC "Bootcamps"? It sounds like a brilliant idea yet I cant quite work out how I would go about getting into one.

I can see know what Wikifying is but are there any specific guidelines as to which words are worthy of being links and when to make cirtain words italic or bold etc.? Thanks --J011 9 July 2005 13:56 (UTC)

I've never heard of the bootcamps, so I can't comment on those. As to when to use different kinds of formatting, you should use a) common sense, and b) the Style Manual. I'm sure there are guidelines somewhere about what to link when, but I can't remember where I've read it, I'm afraid. I do remember that it is recommended that you only link to things once (each) in any given article, or section of an article if the article is long.

Another useful trick is to use pipes ("|") to make a link point to somewhere other than what it says. For example, you could type "[[German language|German]] to produce "German".

I hope all this is helpful to you. --Stemonitis 9 July 2005 14:50 (UTC)

Very helpful, thanks. Geogre gave me help editing the Inselkampf page and through that I learnt a bit about Wikifying. Thanks again for all the help. --J011 9 July 2005 15:34 (UTC)

Woodlouse

Would you mind taking a look at the medicine section that I added to the woodlouse article? (very short but I thought it needed to be mentioned). I can't really find much information, could you maybe add a bit? --J011 9 July 2005 18:55 (UTC)

No problem. I managed to find another purported woodlouse-based remedy as well. Incidentally, I'll be away from my computer for the next few weeks, so don't expect any more replies until August. --Stemonitis 09:12, 10 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Parakeet

Is this "Psittacula eupatria (Alexandrine Parakeet)" or "Psittacula krameri manillensis (indian-ringnecked Parakeet))" ? --Shivu § Mesg 4 Mè § 13:00, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

The hill infoboxes

Anything to add to the discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mountains/General#From_Template_talk:Infobox_british_hills_.28no_image.29 as regrds the infoboxes we use for hill articles? Grinner 09:45, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I note that you have been energetic enough to remove all the commas from the British Hills. The effort is appreciated. But I note that the sorting works both with AND without commas. The only issue is consistency. I also note that you have a more complete list of British hills by height. I was probably the person that put the one in without commas by mistake. My apologies.

ThanX ¢ NevilleDNZ 12:01, 2 September 2005 (UTC) ¢[reply]

It seemed to me (I am possibly mistaken), that the sorting would work either with or without commas, but not both, so I made them consistent the way that seemed best (SI uses no commas, and not even spaces in numbers with fewer than five digits, and that seems like a reasonable system). You needn't apologise; I don't think anyone had realised that such consistency would be needed. Who would have thought that "3,046 ft" would cause any problems?

I have a list of hills in Great Britain south of the Central Belt, in order of relative height, down to a rel. ht. of 152m (here), and a complete list of the mountains in the British Isles with a relative height above 2000', in order of relative height (here), but nothing better, which is why I never put it up as a List of British Hills. A complete list of Marilyns could be a reasonable addition, but no-one's posted it yet, and I haven't got a complete list handy. --Stemonitis 12:35, 2 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that I am apologising to you again. I just invited the participant from a cited discussion to join in. Frankly the recorded vote for Category:Books by title was delete, so I probably did a stupid thing by inviting the wolf into the house.

For the record the British Hills pages are really very great. I only wish I was in the UK and could walk a few such trails.

As a concellation prize, give me a month and I can offer a bot to create these much loved "manual lists by elevation".

Sorry for the trouble caused: ¢ NevilleDNZ 11:29, 6 September 2005 (UTC) ¢[reply]

Here is the text of the msg posted to the others:

Category: British Hills by Height and Category:Mountains by_Elevation (km)

I am posting this to all the particants of the Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Category:Books by title discussion and debate. (Where the categories were voted for deletion).

This earlier discussion has been cited as an example as to why the category Category:Mountains by Elevation (km) (and sub cats) should be deleted.

Could you please take a look at the following CFD and vote. Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2005 September 1#Category:Mountains by Elevation (km) and its subcategories

A complication could be that Category: British Hills by Height seems be to liked by the actual British Hills content contributors. By contrast the category Category:Mountains by_Elevation (km) is not liked by User:RedWolf who seems to be a major Mountain page contributor.

Special note: the Ocean trenches by depth categories were added after the all of the people had voted. But frankly these have no real contributors and would probably get deleted if another vote was taken. You should specifically mention these to ensure there is no confusion in future.

ThanX ¢ NevilleDNZ 11:02, 6 September 2005 (UTC) ¢[reply]

I found a way to index height in the range 0 to 20

So we can now easily do heights beyond Ben Nevis of 1344 meters. Check out:

⒔/1300 Ben Nevis

¢ NevilleDNZ 13:37, 8 September 2005 (UTC) ¢[reply]

I seem to be missing the point - why is this useful? Even if it were useful for the other xxx by height lists, which get about 1999, it requires manual changes to individual pages, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid. Either that, or you encourage everyone to write the heights like "⒔44m", which I don't think will catch on. --Stemonitis 15:13, 8 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt that "⒔44m" would be very popular on a mountain page, but as an index "⒔"on a category page it would have been tolerable. A conversion could have been done in a template, eg like template: {{locale length|5}} & {{locale length|10}}, but the "locale" would be for "catalogue index". It is all academic now anyhow. ¢ NevilleDNZ 01:47, 9 September 2005 (UTC) ¢[reply]

Campanula

Hello Stemonitis! In my opinion, your Image:Campanula beckiana.jpg shows Campanula cespitosa. Your photo shows the typical shape of corollas of C. cespitosa which are narrowing towards mouth. Typical C. beckiana should look like this plant.
I suppose you do your Androsace studies in Vienna? Best wishes from Vienna. --Franz Xaver 12:33, 22 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Quite right; my mistake. I wonder if there's a way of renaming images… --Stemonitis 12:59, 22 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I know, the only way is to upload it with a new name and request deletion for the old image. --Franz Xaver 13:18, 22 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Penaeus

Don't you think you overdid it there? These are proper names, so at least the first characters should be capitalized. Also, why remove the three species from the taxobox? Now anybody who wonders which species still and always are referred to as Penaeus spp. has to painfully extract them from the table. Lupo 09:18, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

I take your point about the taxobox. That was a mistake, and I'll put that right now. But concerning the capitalisation, I cannot disagree more strongly. They are not proper names, they are not regulated and anyone can call any taxon by any name they like. Different people refer to the same animals by different names and to different animals by the same names. There is no reason for any taxon name in English to be capitalised (except where it would be in normal English, e.g. Indian prawn, and except for birds, whose English names are de facto ruled by an American committee). All crustacean articles are currently uncapitalised, so the previous Indian Prawn link redirected to Indian prawn anyway. It seems best to be consistent, and keep them in lower case. There may be a case for capital letters in "Northern", "Eastern", etc., but not in "green tiger prawn". --Stemonitis 09:31, 26 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's been a while since I last looked at the discussions on the topic of naming over at WP:TOL, but I think the agreement was on either "Black tiger prawn" or "Black Tiger Prawn". I also recall some differences between bird naming and the naming of plants. Lupo 14:46, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

I think that's partly because all article titles begin with a capital letter in Wikipedia, so "black tiger prawn" as a title automatically becomes "Black tiger prawn". In English, either a noun phrase is a proper noun, or it isn't, so either all words are capitalised (as in titles of books, films, national parks, etc.), or only those which are otherwise derived from proper nouns (e.g. "Indian prawn" or the fictitious "yellow-bellied Johnson's crab"). To use "Black tiger prawn" in the middle of a sentence is ridiculous. --Stemonitis 07:26, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC, it had nothing to do with the way the Wikipedia software treats capitalization in article titles. See e.g. Humpback Whale (sic!) for what I mean—I'm pretty sure that article follows the WP:TOL guidelines. Lupo 08:48, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

To quote from WP:TOL,

 Many of the WikiProjects listed above have defined standards
 for the capitalization of common names, which should be used
 when discussing the groups they focus on. There is currently
 no common standard, so no particular system should be enforced
 over-all.

, which means that it's OK for the carcinologically-inclined wikipedians, including you and me, to agree to use lower case consistently. When I started making changes, it was only to make it consistent. I wouldn't really care so much if all crusty articles were capitalised, but it would need to be all, and I'm not about to start just to make the crusty names follow a pattern set by mammalogists and bird-watchers. One could even argue that crustacean vernacular names are not as fixed as mammal and bird names (Azure-winged Magpie is only Azure-winged Magpie, but see all the different vernacular names that redirect to Penaeus monodon). Having said that, I see the existence of all the different English names, and the confusion that they cause, to be just another reason to use scientific names wherever possible, hence the new article at Penaeus monodon, not giant tiger prawn. --Stemonitis 10:58, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Pronounciation

I know this is probably impossible, but would it be possible to add a 'Pronunciation' row in the Welsh + Scottish hills infoboxes? I for one have no idea how to pronounce Liathach, Beinn Eighe, Cnicht or a lot of others and I'm sure there are lots of people who don't. This wikipedia is supposed to provide information on hills; shouldn't we tell them how to say them as well? Probably imposs though... --Mark J 17:02, 27 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea. However, I can't read the IPA, and I'm sure a lot of users can't either. Putting the information in the text sounds fine to me, maybe standardise it by putting in brackets directly after the first word (name). --Mark J 15:21, 28 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I'm probably going to get lynched for this, but well, I've gone and done it with Snowdon. Thanks a lot for your template on my talk page which enabled me to do it. --Mark J 18:24, 6 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Achelata vs Palinura

Could you explain the difference in decapode nomenclature? I can only gather that Achelata is a newer proposed name (1995), but Palinura seems to be used by most modern databases. I see that family Polychelidae isn't included. Should wikipedia change to Palinura?

Phaust 02:53, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Achelata is indeed a newer term (introduced by Scholtz & Richter in 1995), and is largely overlapping with the older term Palinura. However, Palinura has been used to mean many things, only one of which is exactly the same as Achelata. Others included Eryonoidea (i.e. modern Polychelidae), some included at least parts of current Anomala, and possibly some glypheoids. So we are left in the situation where the term Palinura is almost meaningless unless one states whose conception of Palinura, and from what year, one is using. Achelata, on the other hand, is entirely unambiguous; it has one meaning and one meaning only. For that reason, it seemed better to use the unambiguous term. Also, all the recent papers on decapod phylogeny have used the term Achelata (Scholtz & Richter, 1995; Dixon et al., 2003; Ahyong & O'Meally, 2004), even if online databases haven't caught up yet. --Stemonitis 08:15, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for clearing that up. A friend and I are planning to write detailed pages on genus Ibacus (Family Scyllaridae), I hope you can look check them over when we're done.

--Phaust 21:31, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Gladly --Stemonitis 14:17, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Northern Irish Marilyns

I don't think we should use the UK mtnbox for the Northern Irish marilyns, becaus it links to the Bristh Grid Ref, not the Irish one. We should probably have a new mtn box for Island of Irlend hills. Unless you object I'll make one and change over the peaks. Grinner 09:22, 3 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a good idea. I had to revert to the antiquated Infobox_Northern_Irish_hills, precisely because of the grid ref problem. Something needs to be created, because all the listings information is equally valid for Irish and Northern Irish hills, for instance. --Stemonitis 09:28, 3 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I will do so immediately! Grinner 09:36, 3 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have made Template:Mtnbox_Ireland, and have listed the old NI boxes on templates for deletion, as they aren't need now. Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#October_3.

Fine. The only advantage to the old infoboxes was the presence of the little flags, which it's sort of sad to lose, but not to worry. --Stemonitis 10:09, 3 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Aye, I can understand that, you put a shedload of effort into changing all the boxes over. Grinner 10:33, 3 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Welsh pronunciation

Apologies, I should have left well alone. But cheers for going through and sorting them out, you're a star! Grinner 16:23, 5 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Haha. No need for apologies; I'd never have got round to converting them all to Mtnboxes on my own. I'll go through all the remaining Welsh peaks that use {{Infobox british hills (no image)}} in the next day or two. I've done a couple already, my particular favourite (from an IPA point of view) being ɐ ɬɛθɾ. --Stemonitis 17:01, 5 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]