User talk:Eclecticology
Welcome to the 'pedia! Good work on the Library of Congress articles. maveric149
About birds: I just added Falconiformes and Strigiformes (so that bird of prey would have some orders to link to) and found that ITIS is using a completely different set of orders than I'm used to and than Aves uses. (The one I'm used to is in Grzimek.) ITIS puts eagles, flamingos, and storks together. According to a tidbit about their parasites which I read in Grzimek, flamingoes are more like ducks than like storks. So I think ITIS is wrong here. -phma
Concerning naked lists and how they can be made better. See user_talk:Ortolan88 at the bottom. I think for lists of "things" the addition of a one-liner (term used in online tech doc circles) adds a lot of utility. For people, I think the list item should also give dates of birth/death. This results in more information for the reader. If there is an article, they can decide to go there, if there isn't then at least they know something, and in both cases we can see what the person or thing is doing on the list. There's some more discussion of this idea at the bottom of Talk:Listing_of_noted_atheists. Thanks for noticing. Let me know if you pursue this. Ortolan88
- List of Battles identifications, excellent!Ortolan88
Hum, I just refactored the table at Callitrichaceae to majorly decrease its width. One way I did this, was to use link the first common name you listed for each of the species (I'm assuming here you listed most widely used first) underneath the displayed binomial (per naming convention on use of English, common names). Another thing that can be done to further reduce width would be to use the format "C. {species}" as the displayed link and then have the most widely used common name in parenthesis after it.
Question: Why does this page list species at all? Callitrichaceae is a class, no? The only thing that should logically be listed on a class page should be genera (in this case apparently only one). In addition, the detail of all the other common names really is only appropriate for the individual species articles. There isn't a reason why you can't also provide another link to an article that discusses these differences Remember, these tables are for the highlights and really long lists and difficult to explain items should be presented at length in sub-articles. I would like to keep these tables on the range of 200-300 pixels wide (see Sainfoin and Nematoda). Anything wider and the text to the left of the table becomes cramped for those with the MS Windows default resolution of 800 x 600 pixels (the elements tables already are a bit beyond two to three hundred range, which is something I need to work on after this table format stabilizes).
The direct classification links are, as you stated, not absolutely necessary. Although your point about the disambiguators really isn't valid since those links (in all their parenthetical glory) would be copied at the same time the entire table template would be copied (a real template hasn't been made yet -- it would have everything needed by any of these articles -- all one would have to do is delete what is not needed and fill in the blanks). However, I have no strong feelings about their removal though. On the other hand they are harmless as is and many visitors to these pages either wouldn't know that links to these articles are just behind the scientific classification link or they wouldn't care to check. I would therefore vote, however weakly, that they should stay (if it looks weird without them, I may strengthen my vote). --maveric149
Hey Eclecticology -- I hope you don't mind me moving some of the Latin articles to their Anglicized equivalents (and in some cases their common names) -- I mean nothing by it. However, when ITIS lists an English equivalent (or a widely known common name that means essentially the same thing), could we use that and redirect the Latin to it? It just sounds overly pedantic to use the Latin all the time -- I don't know any biologists that talk or even write like that outside the most academic of the scientific literature (and wikipedia ain't that at all). When I do see the Latin, it is almost always in parenthesis after the Anglicized if not common name or within a cladogram/taxonomic tree. I'm not at all saying that you in any way have an academic writing style --- I'm just concerned that creating articles titled with the Latin names encourages that type of writing in others (with everyone else using pipes to hide the Latin). --maveric149
I understand that were thinking of the two city situation but the problems really start to arise with three or more cities. With that in mind, here are answers to your questions.
- In disambiguating Aberdeen, South Dakota and Aberdeen, Scotland is it necessary to show the Scottish County?
- No it isn't for Aberdeen, but it might be for other towns where there is more than one in Scotland plus others in North America, South Africa, etc. Kincardine for instance. Kincardine exists in Aberdeenshire, Fife and Ontario.
- In situation 2 would it be sufficient to put [City A, Scotland] and [City A, England]?
- For two cities, yes. However there is at least one Newport in Wales and at least two in England, so it doesn't always work. Thus it should be allowed but not prescribed.
- In your example would there be any benefit to using the format [Newburgh, Fife, Scotland]?
- This is normally going too far. Fife disambiguates perfectly well. It would only be necessary if there was a [Newburgh, Fife, Australia] and a [Newburgh, Angus, Australia] or similar and that seems unlikely.
This is a bigger problem within the UK than outside because of the history and the density of population. We have a lot of communities who just made up their own names without any central authority regulating things and we have to deal with the results. The point is to be just prescriptive enough to disambiguate without applying a straitjacket, so basically I want to be able to use the least specific of the above three formats that is sufficient to do the job in any particular case.
I don't think that peoples lack of knowledge of county names is a big problem. Firstly it should be mostly Britons who are updating this stuff and they know the counties (or should!) and anyone else can do a bit of Internet research -- the information's all out there; secondly when non-Britons are searching for a particular town, the search engine will return it even without the county name; thirdly linking is no more of a problem than for any other ambiguous subject if there's a disambiguation page. -- Derek Ross
Your ideas about user certificates seems interesting. I will contemplate this. --mav
About User_talk:Yves Marques Teixeira. Thanks! I whish i'll be helpful!
Thanks for the catch on Melvil Dewey. The current text of the article is, shall we say, non-professional; but I forgot to do my usual Google search on the title (doh!) and didn't recognize him as the Dewey (DOH!!). :) -- April
You're right on Julius Caesar. I got confused because it was nominated for the 1953 Oscar, which I was thinking meant it came out in 1952. Eek. Go ahead and fix it, do you have privileges to move it? -- Zoe