[Taxacom] Wikipedia politics: the future don't look so bright

Sat Nov 23 02:14:17 CST 2013

Your  
     "I simply meant that Wikispecies was designed for
      formal Linnean ranks, and not for unranked clade
      names or informal names for paraphyletic taxa"  
may be just that, "simple", but I see no substantiation of 
its accuracy anywhere. Wikispecies is set up to deal with 
species, and thus must deal with the rank of species,
and therefore also with the rank of genus. It is convenient
to also have the ranks of family and order, but there is no
reason whatsoever that Wikispecies could not get by 
perfectly without these two ranks. The use of any other 
rank is a matter of choice. Wikispecies can deal with 
"unranked clade names or informal names" perfectly well 
and has been doing so for years, just like the real world 
has.

Using ranks in Wikispecies is not obligatory. What is 
obligatory are Wikimedia's Terms of Use
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use
which stress being civil, constructive and paying attention to
the community. This last is not particularly clear-cut as there
is always the risk of gangs who engage in "group think", but
unilaterally making major changes while many other users 
are violently unhappy is a sure sign of something going wrong.

You may not set much store by "groups of botanists [making
decisions on] science or information management", but if you 
apply that to handling the science and information that are
managed by those decisions, this just means that you are off 
on a track by yourself, getting further and further away from 
the real world.

Also, there is no point on using all those adjectives. The
subscribers to this list (in as far as they read this) will make
up their own mind anyway, even without those adjectives.

Paul 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Stephen Thorpe 
  To: Paul van Rijckevorsel ; Taxacom 
  Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 9:55 PM
  Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikipedia politics: the future don't look so bright

  Paul,
  I simply meant that Wikispecies was designed for formal Linnean ranks, and not for unranked clade names or informal names for paraphyletic taxa. My ignorance may well have no bounds, but I wonder if the same can be said for your arrogance? You appear to be dictating what I should do on Wikispecies, while at the same time criticising me for making unilateral changes there! Hmm, a word beginning with 'H' springs to mind! At any rate, the issues involved here are all extremely complex, and rigidly hanging on to particular decisions made by particular groups of botanists really doesn't have much to do with science or information management, the latter of which should be guided by the context of what one's focus and aims in a particular context (Wikispecies in this case).
  Cheers,
  Stephen

  From: Paul van Rijckevorsel <dipteryx at freeler.nl>
  To: Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
  Sent: Friday, 22 November 2013 10:05 PM
  Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikipedia politics: the future don't look so bright

  Formal nomenclature above the rank of family / superfamily
  is very lightly regulated or not regulated at all, depending
  on the Code of nomenclature that applies. The only 'formal' 
  thing about these names is that there are some rules on their 
  formation. Just about everybody who designs a higher 
  classification makes up new names, and a good thing this is, 
  too; this makes it easy to see what classification one is 
  dealing with. For example encountering the name 
  Magnoliopsida is a good indication that one likely is in 
  the Cronquistian universe.

  As to the distinction between bryophytes as opposed to
  Bryophyta, this was formally proposed to the Melbourne
  Congress and an auditorium full of people who had 
  gathered there to make decisions on nomenclature agreed
  with this, so clearly this is not all that esotheric a distinction. 
  What I see as very scary is that someone who is blind to such
  distinctions feels qualified to make unilateral and far-reaching 
  decisions in this area, in the blind.

  As to the design of Wikispecies, surely you know as well 
  as I do that there is no such thing, not really. Unlike
  Wikipedia which has "core content policies", Wikispecies
  has no core values. Somebody in the discussion referred
  to claimed that Wikispecies was created so that the ToL-
  people had a place to go and do the things that were 
  unwanted on Wikipedia, and this is a viewpoint that should
  not automatically be discounted. As it is,Wikispecies holds
  by a single classification (a crooked one, but unified); this
  is expressly forbidden on Wikipedia, and there is no really
  good reason for it to be implemented at Wikispecies. This
  means that Wikispecies is out of step with the rest of the
  Wikimedia empire (it is more like, say, ITIS, or Zipcodezoo)
  and is less informative than it could be.  

  So, no, I don't see you have any grounds for the position 
  you are assuming here, except your personal preferences 
  (and ignorance in this area).

  Paul

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Stephen Thorpe 
    To: Paul van Rijckevorsel ; Taxacom 
    Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 9:07 PM
    Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Wikipedia politics: the future don't look so bright 

    Paul,

    I agree that Wikispecies doesn't have much call to involve itself with higher classification, for exactly the reasons you state. Therefore, Wikispecies sould adopt a pragmatic approach best suited to its main goals, which is precisely what I am trying to do.

    I strongly disagree about informal terms. Abandoning formal nomenclature in favour of unregulated informal terms is the beginning of the end, and it is also something that Wikispecies was not designed to do.

    Am I the only one who thinks it very strange that using "Bryophytes" instead of "Bryophyta" could possibly make any difference to anything?

    IMHO, there is absolutely no harm in retaining paraphyletic taxa on pragmatic grounds (e.g. Reptilia). It may be a good idea to tag the names as paraphyletic (or possibly paraphyletic)..

    Stephen
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