Talk:Sinanthropus

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 March 2020 and 12 June 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Grang001. Peer reviewers: Ecorona1998, Jargu006.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:35, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I propose that the information in the Sinanthropus disambiguation page be merged into this article, then that this article be renamed to Sinanthropus. The articles listed there are all members of this genus and are also listed here. In addition, this article is so short, the merging will not cause any problems as far as article size is concerned. The See Also section on the disambiguation page (pointing users to Zinjanthropus, a.k.a. Paranthropus) could be served by Template:Distinguish here. This proposal is open for discussion. —LinkTiger (talk) 21:15, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Note that this seems to undo the work that Jerzy did here in a way, but whereas he correctly noted that there was disambiguation improperly located in an article, I see the disambiguation as improper in the first place: all of the articles in the disambiguation page are not ambiguous at all: they are simply species belonging to this one genus (e.g., Canis (disambiguation) does not link to any species). Regardless, I will solicit Jerzy's advice. —LinkTiger (talk) 21:20, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

After consulting Jerzy, I have decided to withdraw my merger request and instead simply move the disambiguation page to Sinanthropus (disambiguation) and this article to Sinanthropus, since the point of this proposal was that this genus is the main topic for the term. The fate of the not-quite-disambiguating disambiguation page can be decided from there. —LinkTiger (talk) 13:25, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

   LT and i seemed to have agreed that discussion of several details was prudent, and i'm surprised that someone decided to dispense with that; more to the point, the result is conspicuously ill-considered.
   I was intentionally overcautious, in creating the only compliant Dab the term has had, in light of 2 previous editors' apparent convictions that content insignificantly distinguished from the current page's prose was unsuitable. The 2005 initial version matching this one's prose verbatim (but not literatim) was tagged after 2 months for merger into Homo erectus by a colleague who returned after a month and a half to propose Peking Man as target instead. A handful of edits and 14 months later, no one had questioned the merge tag, and another editor (an IP who was part way thru a couple of weeks' bout of amassing their oeuvre of nearly 10,000 edits) converted the stub into the suggested Rdr (but apparently found redundant all the meager content of the Sin. stub they overwrote). No one then edited it until my move and edit 20 months later in which the move summary

moved Sinanthropus to Sinanthropus (genus): Move from illegitimate Dab/article hybrid, keeping history of more substantive text for article stub

implies both actions.
   (For those confused by "illegitimate Dab/article hybrid", Dab pages exist solely to aid speedy navigation to articles that "would have liked to have" a title that other articles "would also have liked to have", and it is a very solid guideline that the only way the function can be combined with an article is via a HatNote: it is a wildly exceptional Dab page that has even one full sentence beyond one of the two stereotyped lead styles specified, respectively, for the "primary topic" and "equal Dab'n" cases.)
   As i said to LT, i thot it likely that linking to Lantian Man was overkill, but i doubted that the choice of Peking Man as the target of the redirect version was simply cluelessness on the part of the who editor who proposed it; so i think did the undetermined number of editors who read and implicitly consented to the idea that (at least) some readers want Peking Man when they type in "Sinanthropus", by not editing to contest that in the six years and a month between the "merge to Peking Man" tag and the "merge to Sinanthropus" one last week. It was because of that that i described to LT the probable need for

expansion of the article on the genus, e.g. at least to discuss when the name "Sinanthropus" was applied and by whom, when at least however many species were added to it, and its history from the first proposal that a broader taxon was needed until its replacement was widely regarded as a done deal

And i began some research for that, finding at on-line EB's "Lantian man" the information that LM finds began in 1963 and it was placed in Sinanthropus. That supports a presumption that in at least four and a half decades of the scholarly record, Peking Man was the only species in Sinanthropus. Unless that genus was demoted since 2008, it's at least plausible that the majority of its uses were in the period when Sinanthropus was indistinguishable from Peking Man. Some might argue against there being any primary topic!
   Pending any rebuttal, i'm adding a second HatNote. (And frankly multiple HatNotes -- the only practical alternative, in this case, to equal Dabn -- are IMO a clumsy tool for users, and a credible argument for equal Dabn in borderline cases. Do note that "equal" does not mean that even two (let alone all) senses must be equally significant; the decision rests on a judgment, as "equal" applies whenever there is no sufficiently dominant topic.)
--Jerzy•t 06:32, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

   

Zinj- vs Sin-

   User:LinkTiger is right on the money in summarizing

Zinjanthropus is a completely different type of proto-human. Its only relation is that is sounds similar. Using WP:HAT instead.

"Sin-" is Latin for "China", whereas Zinj- is IIRC part of a place name somewhere along the Great Rift of East Africa. I injected it into my Dab version bcz i recall confusing them the first time i head of whichever of them i heard of second. A See-also entry would be completely unsuitable.
--Jerzy•t 03:30, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Unexplained informationectomy

Another contributor redirected this article to Homo, with the edit summary: "Junior synonyms should not have articles. The genus is a junior synonym of Homo.""'

I couldn't find any other effort to explain this informationectomy. The other contributor called this term a "junior synonym". That is bullshit. Entire books were written about this term. The term may be deprecated, that does not wipe away the extent to which it was covered in reliable sources.

In my opinion this kind of informationectomy is not defensible. We are not censors. We don't decide which kinds of information our readers can and cannot access, when they have been covered in reliable sources.

So I reverted it.

That informationectomy person redirected it again. Again making no real meaningful attempt to explain the reasoning behind their redirections.

I am going to wait a reasonable amount of time, and restore the article, if the informationectomy person doesn't offer a convincing explanation. Geo Swan (talk) 03:44, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

• So, what is in the article? Three measly paragraphs, wherein are cited three papers and two webpages. That's not exactly a whole lot of content.

""Both species have since been reclassified as varieties within the species Homo erectus, and the genus Sinanthropus is disused."

That is literally what "junior synonym" means. As far as I know, it is completely standard practice to merge the content for junior synonyms into the article for senior synonyms. You don't see articles for Manospondylus, or Ugrosaurus, or Scrotum humanum, for good reason. Why not just put this stuff on the Homo erectus page? Hell, under a separate section, if you want. A junior synonym of another taxon does not deserve its own article.

I'm sure @FunkMonk will also have more to say about this. Lythronaxargestes (talk) 08:22, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

• There is no precedence for junior synonyms having separate articles (Sinanthropus is a junior synonym of Homo, containing only one taxon, which is dealt with in Peking Man). If you want to do something which we have so far tried to avoid, then you need a wider discussion on the tree of life project talk page. The onus is on those who want to overturn long standing practices to argue for why they want to do this, before it can even be considered an option. In any case, we have Peking Man, which deals with the supposed subspecies (Homo erectus pekinensis, formerly Sinanthropus pekinensis, the type species of Sinanthropus), so having another article about the exact same subject (an invalid genus which contains nothing more than that aforementioend subspecies) is simply pointless. You call it "informationectomy", I call it removing WP:contentforks. All information about this synonym should be located at Peking Man or Homo erectus. It is the same reason why we don't have separate articles for Tyrannosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex (or its synonyms Dynamosaurus and Manospondylus for that matter); they are practically about the same thing. FunkMonk (talk) 09:05, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
• Err, why was this page revived again? FunkMonk (talk) 07:53, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Remove merge notice?

I propose that we should remove the merge notice on this page because, if we moved the page into Homo erectus, than pages like Pithecanthropus would also need to be moved. If we merged with H. erectus, other defunct taxa across the site would also need to be merged. MrSpikesss (talk) 14:09, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

And that's exactly the point, they should be merged too. FunkMonk (talk) 14:50, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

@FunkMonk: got a similar discussion going at Talk:Monarch flycatcher if you'd like to weigh in. I support this merging this article by the way. YorkshireExpat (talk) 07:58, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

"Pithecanthropus" has really only been used for the Java Man namely from the Trinil and Sangiran sites, so that should redirect there. "Sinanthropus" on the other has historically been used for all Chinese H. erectus. Because so much research has been done on Chinese H. erectus as a whole, and they're distinct in their own ways from other populations, I'd support a separate article   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  16:37, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Then the name of the article shouldn't be the synonym. In any case, I see no justification for this article even being separate, considering how short it is presently. FunkMonk (talk) 17:53, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

I imagine it'd be a lot more substantial if someone were to actually work on it   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  18:38, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Then again, a complete version of this article would strongly lean towards Peking Man...   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  19:58, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

We'd need to have a wider discussion about on the paleo project, because it is pretty widely agreed junior synonyms should not have articles. FunkMonk (talk) 00:58, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

I'd be against merging, and I'd be in favor of removing the merge notice. Joe (talk) 00:55, 5 June 2021 (UTC)