Talk:Platanus × acerifolia

Scan of leaf removed

The scan of the leaf of the London plane was removed by Imc stating "Removed image of leaf, does not seem to be London plane; see notes on talk page for the image." "This leaf is quite atypical of London plane, and looks like P. occidentalis to me. Unless the shape changes in the Florida climate."

I purchased the tree from National Arbor Day and they certainly know their trees. It's not the American sycamore as Imc thought. Noles1984 21:28, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I came here to see what the tree looked like. Despite several pictures on the page, I still have no clue. Some better pictures would be great (thinking wide angle with folliage) 67.189.53.239

Name

Per Wikipedia:Article titles and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English), articles are normally titled using the most common English language name of the subject. WP:Article titles even gives the example "Guinea pig (not Cavia porcellus)." I do not suppose two people in a hundred would recognize Platanus × hispanica. Surely this article should be at London Plane tree or London Plane? Moonraker2 (talk) 00:18, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Please read WP:FLORA. My understanding of WP:AT is that many factors weigh in when considering the title for the article. Chiefly, we look at the most commonly used name in reliable sources. But we also consider precision and consistency. There are apparently several vernacular names for this taxon. This makes the scientific name that more attractive for the title. I have updated the article to reflect the authoritative sources I found that said Platanus × hispanica is not the correct taxon name. Rkitko ^(talk) 14:16, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Firstly, I object to the edit summary "revert undiscussed move again". I raised the matter here well in advance of moving the page and no one responded. However, if you object to "undiscussed moves", then clearly the latest move to Platanus × acerifolia is undiscussed.

I'm not aware of "the most commonly used name in reliable sources" as part of naming policy. For instance, it doesn't seem to be at Wikipedia:Article titles. Can you please say where it comes from? What is said on that page is "This page in a nutshell: Article titles should be recognizable to readers, unambiguous, and consistent with usage in reliable English-language sources", which is quite different. Moonraker2 (talk) 20:59, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

How else would you expect us to assess the most common usage? A poll of four random people on the street? No. We have to go by how the article topic is discussed in reliable sources. And not every page is watchlisted by people interesting in discussing the move. You posted a comment here and did not invite comment from anyone else at any project or noticeboard. If you used the system at WP:RM, it would have shown up on the WP:PLANTS article alerts (Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Article alerts) and then at least plant editors could have commented. And there's a big difference between a controversial move to a vernacular name (that had been reverted before) and a non-controversial move to the accepted scientific name from an outdated scientific name to reflect changes in taxonomy (or in this case, the epithet hispanica hasn't been used in ages because of it's dubious nature). If you want to propose the move, use {{Requested move}} and support it with your argument. Rkitko ^(talk) 23:04, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps some google hits may convince you that a requested move may be unnecessary, though. I find more google books and scholar hits for "Platanus acerifolia" combined with "Platanus x acerifolia" (with an x, not ×) than "London plane tree" or "London plane-tree" or "London planetree". So the scientific name appears to be the most commonly used name in reliable sources. Further, there are multiple vernacular names, which means you'd have to choose one style, whereas the scientific name is unambiguous and much more precise than a vernacular name. Rkitko ^(talk) 23:17, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

That does not reply to my question. I asked what substantiates "the most commonly used name in reliable sources" as part of naming policy. You have repeated the expression without answering. Can you please say where it comes from? Moonraker2 (talk) 08:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

I thought the point of this discussion was to determine the most commonly used name. But if you insist... My quote above is simply a paraphrase of what WP:AT says several times. In fact, you quoted the first instance above ("In a nutshell..."). It's very much the same thing. And again under Recognizability, it says, "One important aspect of this is the use of names most frequently used by English-language reliable sources to refer to the subject." And again under Common names, it says, "Articles are normally titled using the name which is most frequently used to refer to the subject of the article in English-language reliable sources." As I just showed above, the most frequently used name in reliable sources is, in fact, Platanus × acerifolia. Rkitko ^(talk) 13:07, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

A "reliable" source is not the same thing as a scholarly source. How do you determine something's "common name" from scientific journals which have an interest in presenting scientific and unambiguous names? You have to include newspapers, magazines, books and other non-scholarly literature in your research. How many sources that refer to London Plane, identify this as the most common name? I would estimate that most of them do. If you're writing about this tree, you're either writing for an informed audience in which case you use platanus × acerifolia exclusively to avoid ambiguity. Otherwise you may still mention platanus × acerifolia but also relate it to its common name for the benefit of the uninformed audience. So it stands to reason you're always going to find more papers and books that mention platanus × acerifolia in an academic search. It's worth doing a search of non-scholarly resources to see how often "London Plane" is mentioned without Platanus × acerifolia. If this turns out to be more common in (for example) newspaper articles then there might be a case for using "London Plane". Personally, I've never heard of platanus × acerifolia but I lived where London Plane trees are common, for a very long time, and it seems to me that you can't get a much more "common" name for a tree than that ;) — Preceding Goffmog (talk) 14:45, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

It's important to consider the whole of WP:AT, not just the "common name" part. Precision is also important. My experience of using Google to search suggests that only "London Plane tree" produces the correct meaning as the top entries returned; "London Plane" is just too ambiguous. There could, I suppose, be a case for the article being called "London plane tree", but the variants "London planetree" and "London plane-tree" are also quite common. I can't see that any of these would be an improvement. Redirects take care of searches. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:02, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Issue with GRIN reference

The link to the GRIN page now gives Platanus x hispanica as the accepted name and Platanus x acerifolia as a junior synonym. The other reference ([1]) is clarification of the definition of nomen dubium/nudum and really doesn't belong here (perhaps better as a note, or botanical glossary pop-up). Given that this taxon is used as an illustration of a rejected name in some GBIF nomenclatural documents it would be nice if this was better supported by explicit references. P. hispanica is still accepted, for instance, by British botanists, it was not revised by Stace in 2019 (p. 130). Somewhere I've seen this paper as a possible source, but it's paywalled. Semudobia (talk) Semudobia (talk) 21:58, 31 January 2023 (UTC)