User:SchreiberBike/sandbox

The well-asked question often answers itself.

 J     DE

D BH D
— A.
April 8, 2017

Authority names

Should there be some direction for how authority names are formatted in short form, for instance I've seen "L. B. Prout" and "Prout L. B." and I've standardized on the former, but just because it is more common, not because I've seen a rule for it.

Similarly, is there guidance for when to just use a surname and when to use one or more initials? For instance there were two people named "Prout" who were authorities on Lepidoptera: "L. B. Prout" and "A. E. Prout". Should we never use "Prout" by itself?

WT:TOL

When should an article be in two project categories?

For instance, should a moth be under both Lepidoptera and insects? or should an ape be under both Primates and mammals?

Inclusion criteria for List of organisms of Place

I monitor a bunch of lists ranging from List of Lepidoptera of Albania to List of reptiles of the Recherche Archipelago. They are mostly quiet, but conflict comes up in five areas:

• Should the list include domestic, introduced or feral species?
• Should the list include extinct species and if so, which ones?
• Should the list include subspecies?
• Should the lists of mammals include humans?
• Should genera be abbreviated?

These ideas would apply to flora, flora, funga, etc.

Usually the consensus has been to include:

• Animals that are part of a self-sustaining wild population even if those animals are introduced, reintroduced or feral.
• Animals which were extinct locally after 1500. This is an easy line to draw, but not always most helpful.
• Subspecies are often included, but usage is very mixed. There are more edit wars on this topic than any other.
• Some lists include humans under Primates because they are present, others exclude them because they are not wild or they don't think they are animals.

I've come up with the sentence below to add to such articles, but I'm open to suggestions.

This list includes all wild Lepidoptera species of Albania which maintain a self-sustaining population and which are extant or became locally extinct after 1500.

Of course the appropriate clade would be substituted for Lepidoptera and whatever place substituted for Albania. This would not include subspecies (it says species), humans or domestic species (it says wild).

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Standard sentence for inclusion of List of organisms of place articles.

Wild - yes

Domestic - no

Introduced or feral

Reintroduced

Self-sustaining wild population

Extinct

After 1500

After contact with

Modern humans

Europeans

In the historical period for that place:

Humans?

No - yes

Native to Africa

If self sustaining (all but Antarctica)

Introduced in the historical period

Species / subspecies / etc.

Spell out genera on second use?

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• User talk:Columbianmammoth

Meaning of fought with

I just ran into the phrase fought with in an article and it wasn't initially clear if they "fought on the same side as" or "fought against". I've found the phrase used both ways.

Examples from the first page of search results for "fought with":

• "a version of the Croix de guerre created on 26 September 1939 to honour people who fought with the Allies against the Axis" (fought on the same side as)
• "these gangs often had bitter disputes and fought with each other" (fought against)
• "the Gorkhas fought with the British East India Company" (I think they fought along side of, but I'm not sure)

Should this be on a list of phrases to avoid? Should I search all these out and fix them? Or is there a better solution?

Style block

We have templates for variety of English and date format. I've imagined having a block at the top of articles which would establish usage of:

• Variety of English (British English, American, or other form)
• Date format (January 1, 2023, or 1 January 2023) and any exceptions in references
• Number style (see MOS:DIGITS)
• Serial comma or not
• Era style (BC/AD or BCE/CE)
• One or two spaces following periods (full stops)
• Capitalization of (B/b)lack and (W/w)hite re MOS:RACECAPS
• Centuries/millennia spelled out or as numbers
• Possessives following "s" MOS:'S
• Quantities of bytes and bits in binary or decimal format
• Probably other things I'm not thinking of

Preceding and trailing ellipses

Should MOS:... say something about preceding and trailing ellipses? I often remove them (as here for example) where they are unnecessary. We know that a quote is only part of a larger work. The reader doesn't need a "..." to tell them there was something before or after the quote.

MOS:... now uses the example "He continued to pursue Smith ("...{{nbsp}}to the ends of the earth", he had sworn) until his own death.". I'd say that ellipsis is unnecessary. What say you?

"No consensus" and T(t)he Gambia

Additional notes from Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#A way of resolving "No consensus" - not used

I also found Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 24#Consistency from 17 years ago which discussed flipping a coin to resolve problems which could not reach a consensus.

I don't know this for a fact, but it seems that in the past those who close RfCs often made difficult choices and resolved problems whereas recently a conclusion of "No consensus" means the closer does not choose to stick their neck out.

Recently someone asked why we use ... as an ellipsis instead of …. It was an arbitrary decision early in the history of Wikipedia. Neither is really better than the other, but a decision had to be made. There are a lot of things like that.

This will come up again. If there's a new RfC, what would be a good way to gain more useful data? Already it's occurred to me to search Google Books deeply in addition to the searches I did above.

Silently correct an error if it's in a title?

Should we add a note to the MoS to reflect the consensus above? We could add the sentence below at the end of that paragraph.

If there is a typo in the title of a source, the source could be hard to find after the typo has been corrected, so when correcting the typo, add a hidden note (<!-- -->) near the error to indicate the original text.