A simple way forward on common names of species edit
The "lower-case or capitalize common names of species (maybe only birds)" dispute that has been ongoing is rather pointless. Not because it doesn't matter (it does matter for WP:LOCALCONSENSUS reasons, for WP:NABOBS reasons, and others), but because the solution is obvious and is even already being used, it just hasn't been applied to bird articles much or at all.
- Complex example
To invent a complex example to illustrate all the principles, this article's title would be Northeastern boobook, referred to in running prose as northeastern boobook, the same way we'd do snow leopard, and it illustrates a case where the IOC name is not the WP:COMMONNAME for Wikipedia article titling purposes, having different capitalization, hyphenation and a varying name component:
| Northeastern boobook IOC: North-eastern Morepork | |
|---|---|
| |
| Northeastern boobook in Warkworth, New Zealand | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | |
| Phylum: | |
| Class: | |
| Order: | |
| Family: | |
| Genus: | |
| Species: | N. examplea
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| Binomial name | |
| Ninox examplea (Gmelin, 1788) | |
| Synonyms | |
| |
The northeastern boobook (Ninox examplea),[1] also called the Wellington ground owl,[2] Tasmanian walking morepork,[3] and formally named the North-eastern Morepork by the IOC),[4] is a small owl found throughout New Zealand, Tasmania and across most of mainland Australia. This bird is the loudest owl in Australia and is the continent's most widely distributed owl that cannot fly.
In the German spoken by the population of Austrian immigrants in the area, it is named Vandernvögel. The bird, in common with other closely related species, has almost 20 alternative common names, most of which, e.g. boobook, morepork, mopoke, and ruru, are onomatopoeic, as they emulate the bird's distinctive two-pitched call.
Two subspecies, the fast-running boobook and the Tasmanian crawling morepork, both became extinct during the 21th century.
end of example
 | Do not fixate on any detail in this example! No one cares whether IOC would really hyphenate exactly that way, prefer Boobook over Morepork, or whatever. That's not the point.This sample data is just here to illustrate handling of name variances of several sorts! And it's not just about birds; that's the example here because it's the recent dispute topic. And is doesn't imply that some kind of "official" name parameter should appear under the article title in every taxobox. |
- Simpler case, where the WP:COMMONNAME is not the IOC formal vernacular name
In simpler cases without so many names to cover, but a difference between the IOC name and the WP:COMMONNAME, this will suffice:
The northeastern boobook (Ninox examplea),[1] formally named the North-Eastern Morepork by the IOC),[2] is a small owl...
- Simplest case
In cases without any conflict with the IOC name this would be simpler yet:
The northeastern boobook (Ninox examplea),[1]is a small owl...
[... skipping to References section ...]
- "IOC World Bird List". International Ornithological Congress. 2014. "Northeastern Boobook" entry.. IOC formally capitalises the name as Northeastern Boobook.
This should actually be done even after the infobox change (see below) because per WP:INFOBOX, information is not supposed to be in an infobox but not the main article body. While this principle is very frequently violated for no reason, we don't need to make that situation worse.
- New parameter to be added to
{{Taxobox}}
| formal_vernacular = North-eastern Morepork | formal_vernacular_authority = [[International Ornithological Congress|IOC]]
This code has already been implemented, in the sandbox version of the taxobox used in the longer example above.
It adds a line near the top of the infobox, under the common name given at the top. This line provides the formalized, published vernacular name when such a thing exists. For birds, it would accoding to the consensus at WP:BIRDS last I looked, be the (capitalized) IOC name. For birds, this should use an embedded template to actually link to the entry at the IOC World Bird List where it appears, e.g. {{World Bird List|owls|Northeastern Boobook}}, since most bird articles on WP fail to cite their sources for the names they use anyway (even very well-developed ones, an unacceptable situation even aside from this lengthy style debate. Any other biological field in which a standard should be cited can do something similar if necessary (remember this is about Wikipedia, not birds.
See talk page for rationale, details, and discussion.