User talk:SMcCandlish/Taxobox sandbox

Notable features of this solution (some of which should be explicitly written into MOS:LIFE)

• Respects all applicable Wikipedia policies and guidelines instead of conflicting with them.
• Lower case common (vernacular) names of species and of general groupings (e.g. "owl") are used throughout, except sentence case where required (at beginning of sentence, as article title, as infobox title, at start of section heading, etc.)
• Thus, it does not force unfamiliar, ungrammatical-seeming capitalization on all readers and editors.
• An upper case vernacular name is used only when reliably sourced as required to be capitalized by the authority cited, and only once in the article to which the name pertains. (This may well never be for anything but common names of birds as given by IOC, but WP:NOT#CRYSTAL, so who knows?)
• Foreign-language names (in the rare cases it's relevant to include them) are italicized, and following capitalization rules of the languages to which they belong (e.g. German capitalizes nouns). This is like our handling of other foreign-language terms.
• Links to or other mentions of vernacular names of other things, including variants of the article title, are given in lower case (if one happens to also be an IOC name that would be capitalized by that organization, that' something of only passing relevance at the article on that animal; it is not something to browbeat readers with in another article that just mentioned that creature.
• Consistency both within an article and between articles
• Those who advance the novel position that IOC names are "different" from all others somehow and are proper names get to capitalize them, when used in the context of the IOC itself (i.e. the citation to their version of the name), without Wikipedia itself lending any credence to this idea, or the even more linguistically unsound claim that all common names of species are proper names.
• Any problems that might arise at a few articles can be worked around there, and cannot possibly be anywhere near as rancorous as continuing the present conflict.
• Does not elevate one wikiproject above others or above site-wide consensus.
• Does not treat article style or biological naming like a policy or (more importantly) a battleground.

Alleged weaknesses of this solution

• Does not permit capitalization of species common names in running prose (or title case capitalization in article titles), except where they contain proper names, even when the article title happens to coincide with the IOC name. Given that this also eliminates WP:NPOV-, WP:UNDUE- and WP:NOR-related policy problems, and many other issues, it can be argued that this will be a net gain from an overall Wikipedian perspective.
• In some cases, it may lengthen the explanation of names in the article. Given that this also eliminates the false implication that IOC names are universally preferred, it's hard to see this as a weakness either. Our readers deserve to know what the varying names are and where they're coming from.

Future development

Peter coxhead (talk · contribs) and I have been looking into the idea, now that we have WP:Lua to work with, of some templated markup that, though user-specific Javascript and CSS, could capitalize or decapitalized based on user preferences, e.g. something like {{Vernacular|^north-eastern|^morepork}} with a marker like ^ indicating optionally capitalized name elements. Given some time, even WP:BIRDS may get to eat their upper-casing cake while the rest of us can have our regular-English, lower-case cake, too.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:37, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Discussion

Thank you SMcCandlish for this proposition. I wonder whether the name are defined by the International Ornithological Congress or the International Ornithological Committee... I think that this should be clarified before correcting the articles as you nicely suggested, in order to link "IOC" to the most relevant page.

What is more, it seems that the committee was recently renamedInternational Ornithologists' Union (http://www.worldbirdnames.org). Should the "IOC" mention link to "International Ornithological Congress" or "International Ornithologists' Union"?

144.85.187.212 (talk) 19:21, 25 April 2014 (UTC).

That's a matter for the template, really. For purposes of this discussion, it's not who exactly it is, under what legal organization name this year, that matters, but what the spec being cited is; how/where to cite it; and what it's being cited for. The publisher is just a citation template parameter. Cf. the "Do not fixate on any detail in this example!" notice.  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:45, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

• I really like this mockup. I don't mind IOC capitalization being used with an IOC reference, as demonstrated, nor do I have a problem with an IOC designation being given in smaller text in the infobox. And thanks to SMcCandlish for doing this work. I know many of the birders must see most of us anti-capitalization folks as rabble-rousers not interested in doing actual work, so it's good to show that we can put our money (inasmuch as time is money) where are mouths are. Hopefully this could still be put to a bot, but if it has to be done manually, I'd be happy to help implement this. --BDD (talk) 19:29, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
• I'll just add that I would not to see ledes like "The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), formally named the Bald Eagle by the IOC," but I don't think you're actually proposing that. Another thing I hope we could all agree on is that that looks stupid. --BDD (talk) 19:31, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Having it be in the infobox is plenty sufficient in a case like that, I hope! The big, complex example I gave at top is a good case for having it in the lead, though (since it differs in multiple ways from the article title). That said, for all I know people might actually like the bald eagle example you just gave. I doubt it, but I'm less interested in trying to settle lead style here than capitalization style, and how to work around birder demand for IOC names when there's a torrent of consensus against capitalizing bird names all over the place. "One thing at a time" and all! :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:45, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

The one labeled "Simplest case" addresses that, BDD; it would have the IOC capitalization stuff in the IOC citation; still in the article body per WP:INFOBOX but not cluttering the lead with trivia.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:04, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

• If there is a consensus against capitalization on a per article basis (which I continue to prefer, and which I'd like to see decided first) and provided that it is absolutely clear that this approach is not restricted to birds, this may be a way forward. For those who are not aware of it, in the UK there are several lists of English species names which are explicitly capitalized. Thus the BSBI has a list of such names for the plants of the British Isles. The Western Australia government's FloraBase uses capitalized English species names. All such names should be treated equally with bird names (although I suspect that for plants we wouldn't want them in the taxobox). Peter coxhead (talk) 21:05, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Right; I didn't mean to imply you had the same opinion as me about this other stuff, I was just crediting you with the Lua idea. Sorry for the inclarity.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:10, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

PS: I also don't mean to imply that exactly how I've templated this idea should be mandatory; even the idea of having infoboxes being mandatory (much less something that can be mandated in particular ways by wikiprojects) has led to a long-fought consensus that there is certainly no such requirement. I'm just offering a compromise or fall-back position to preserve information like this if consensus is reaffirmed more clearly against upper-casing species common names in running text and in titles. Oh, and even WP:BIRDS came to a consensus back when that IOC names need to be reliably sourced as such; no one ever did anything to implement that, so here ya go.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:13, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

• I don't understand how the future development would be applied. Would we need to manually invoke that {{vernacular ...}} thing at each mention of a species? --Stfg (talk) 22:18, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

I would think so, where ever you wanted that kind of auto-styling to apply. As Peter said (at his page), it would be better if it could be done without parameters, e.g. {{vname|^north_eastern ^morepork}}, but who knows if this is even possible. I was off-wiki for a long time and missed the "Lua revolution" in templates, so I'm playing catch-up to that tech.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:37, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

I was afraid so. Looking at some of the articles that have been mentioned here, they'd end up chock-full of that, and I don't see people being likely to use it, really. --Stfg (talk) 14:22, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Well, [if this could be made to work at all] it would still work in leads. There are two completely different arguments for this capitalization: 1) "Always do it because IOC [or whatever other alleged authority] does it", and 2) "do it for the same reason field guides do it, to make rapid text scanning easier". The latter rationale really only applies to leads and infoboxes, and maybe lists; articles proper are written to be read, not glanced over for five seconds. And you'd be surprised how easily such templating is to deploy when people just do it in the course of editing (see, for example, use of {{cuegloss}} throughout the articles in Category:Cue sports to mark up and link to glossary entries on billiards/pool/snooker jargon terms). That said, perhaps the one good thing about WP:BIRDS pushing for almost all bird article names to be at IOC names despite the WP:COMMONNAME and WP:NPOV problems this raises, is that it would be fairly easy for a bot to take care of it: Get the name of every article from Category:Birds, and code each of those names (following certain parameters) in every article in that category, and optionally even in other articles. That sentence is pseudocode for the bot.  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:58, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Let's not include too much in the lead paragraph. Keep it simple. Almost all (maybe all) WP:TREE articles include a section on taxonomy and a Taxobox. WP:BIRDS recommends that all bird articles include a section, "Taxonomy and systematics (including subspecies, relation to related species, history of naming, alternate names, and evolution)". That's the place to document scientific, regional, local, historic and 'formal vernacular' names along with sources. DocTree (ʞlɐʇ·ʇuoɔ) Join WER 20:05, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Just a point about the concern over the possibility of,

The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), formally named the Bald Eagle by the IOC:

One of the reasons that sounds stupid is that we're saying "The X, formally named the X". Imagine how that would sound in an audio version of the article. A correct wording (not claiming it's the only one) would be:

The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), formally styled the Bald Eagle by the IOC

(perhaps with quotation marks). Besides the question of whether such a trivial difference belongs in the lead at all (I agree it does not), I hope we agree that the logic of the wording is just as bad as the logic of starting with,

The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) is the name of a species of eagle found in North America.

— kwami (talk) 05:20, 1 May 2014 (UTC)