User talk:Stemonitis/Archive03

DO NOT EDIT OR POST REPLIES TO THIS PAGE. THIS PAGE IS AN ARCHIVE.

This archive page covers approximately the dates between Feb 07 2006 and May 22 2006.

Post replies to the main talk page, copying or summarising the section you are replying to if necessary.

Decapoda and other critters

Hi, You seem to know quite a lot concerning up-to-date taxonomy of Crustaceans (I'm still at the Martin & Davis-stage). We need people like you at Wikispecies. Would you consider revising Decapod taxonomy over there? I'm mainly involved in Peracarida (pictures on commons), both there and on the Dutch Wikipedia (e.g. Cumacea on nl). We already almost had a clash on Anomura/Anomala, but I'm very interested in current stuff (and pdf's ;-)) Lycaon 09:40, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Martin & Davis is an excellent work, but there are a couple of areas where it's a bit out of date. My particular emphasis is on the Decapoda, and there have been a number of papers in the last few years trying to sort the relationships therein (some of which I contributed to). The latest word as far as I know is the paper by Porter et al. (2005: "Model-based multi-locus estimation of decapod phylogeny and divergence times", Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 37: 355–369), which partly overturns Dixon et al. (2003: "A new hypothesis of decapod phylogeny", Crustaceana 76: 935–975), which was based exclusively on morphology. Before that, Scholtz & Richter (1995: "Phylogenetic systematics of the reptantian Decapoda (Crustacea, Malacostraca)", Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 113: 289–328) is the only other cladistic study of the whole order. So while there's still some dissent, some things, like the polyphyly of the Palinura, are fairly certain! The reason I've listed the titles here is that I can provide you (or anyone else) with PDFs of any of them. Just send me an email and I'll forward them to you. I'll have a look at Wikispecies in the next few days, and see what I can do. --Stemonitis 12:13, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

An Tiaracht

Many thanks for doing the info box for Tearaght Island. I had planned to do it, but it was just getting too late at night - and then this morning I find it done! Wow! Snalwibma 09:48, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Strange how these coincidences occur, isn't it? I'd seen Tearaght Island appear weeks ago with no infobox, but hadn't decided to do anything about it, and then today, everyone wants to update it. Maybe next time I'll wait a few hours more… --Stemonitis 10:07, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Rhineland-Palatinate

Hi Stemonitis, good you warned me, because I'm going to create a lot of stubs! Markussep 16:31, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Bundesländer stubs

No problem - it was mostly guilt because I was still using the old "Germany-geo-stub" until I spotted yesterday that you were changing them over.

Going off on a different tangent, have you noticed at the newly-established German Portal that they're trying to make it standard practice to translate "Kreis" by "County" rather than "District", mostly because that's how it's done in America? Never mind the meanings of the words or the several thousand other articles on Wikipedia. (Personally, I REALLY don't like "Heilbronn County"). But you must have seen this in your stubbing travels. A Portal might be a nice idea, but this doesn't bode well... All best, Staffelde 17:11, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Journal refs and quotes

Hi Stemonitis - you might want to look in here Wikipedia talk:Cite sources/example style#Proposal to change format for Wikipedia journal citation - MPF 19:12, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I'd been trying to find where the discussion was taking place. --Stemonitis 10:19, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

re Stubs

Read your comment, fair enough, they are short articles. However I felt that with the added classification and the photographs, three in one case, the articles said most everything that was to be said about the topics. Admittedly a real expert could come along and add screeds but he/she could do that anyway. Also I have a growing feeling that the stub notice is used a bit too widely and freely. Such is the nature of Wikipedia and such is the nature of its contributors stub notices are hardly necessary and, perhaps, should be used sparingly. Anyway what is a 'Marilyn' as in your intro, any connection to a Munro? cheers. ping 07:29, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

A fair point. I suppose we should expect that many articles are going to be short in a project like this. Regarding Marilyns, yes, they are a pun on Munros, but supposedly more interesting. They are certainly more geographically varied. --Stemonitis 08:22, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Torula

Hi, I've created Torula (about the species used to flavor foods, usually called "torula yeast" in lists of ingredients). Could you check to make sure it's accurate? It's hard to tell much from a Google search, whether it's a fungus or a yeast, what its real Latin name is... It's kind of mysterious. Badagnani 00:15, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Good work. I'm not a fungal expert, but it seems alright to me. Yeasts are, incidentally, fungi. The nomenclature is also a bit confusing, since the same organism can have several apparently conflicting scientific names! (See teleomorph, anamorph and holomorph.) --Stemonitis 08:50, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Mervyn Matthew stub

Thanks for categorising it! Glen Stollery ^{(My contribs) (talk)} 20:00, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

No problem. Feel free to join in, by the way: WP:WSS. --Stemonitis 10:38, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Scotland-railstation-stub

Thanks for the stub sort! I created quite a few of those station articles, so it's partly my fault that you have such a long job, sorry about that. I thought the category was getting a bit large, but I was too lazy to propose a split -- Gurch 10:45, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Isle of Man - Sheadings and Parishes

All towns, villages and districts now allocated. A commenced parish section has been started for all parishes.

Where necessary, the format is ' Arbory (parish) | Arbory ' and will appear as Arbory as the stub will be entitled ...(parish). This occurs when names such as Patrick, German etc appear otherwise in the encyclopedia and to avoid pointless roaming through unrelated references.

Kindly do not "correct" cross references which already appear blue as these already have articles written about them. Thanks. Gari

I don't believe I did alter any links on that page; all I did was remove some pointlessly repeated information [1]. But thanks for the advice, anyway. --Stemonitis 08:08, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

The Vancouver Sun

Please fix the indexing by including the appropriate sort key when you make moves such as that at The Vancouver Sun. Are there a bunch more like it out there? Gene Nygaard 11:44, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Apologies — I hadn't thought about the category indexing. And no, that's the only one of that ilk that I've done recently. --Stemonitis 11:48, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Saarland/Schleswig-Holstein

Hi, for now I'm done with Saarland, I'm working on Lower Saxony now. I guess there's no need for a Saarland stub category then, for the moment. Markussep 20:11, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

I just started working on Schleswig-Holstein, I guess that will result in more than enough stubs for a separate category. Should we announce that somewhere? I was already so bold to create it. Markussep 20:14, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I've put a notice in at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Discoveries, and I can't believe anyone will complain about its creation. Good work. --Stemonitis 07:09, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Marine Life

I made Marine Life to categorize what the Marine Life portal/wikiproject hopes to complete. That way it will have a comprehensive list of everything that should be done. Not only that but it can form a basis for general searching within a broad topic. Two categories that do this are, Category:Wildlife of Africa and Category:Islam. Dark jedi requiem 23:53, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

I suppose we disagree. If there was a broad topic I enjoy, say 'African Wildlife' I could browse the hypothetical 'Category: African Animalia'. That way I could find Amur Leopard, Tree Kingfisher, and Tsetse fly. Although this is in no way the easiest way to find a particular species it is a good way as a general search for a broad category. It's not designed to work like finding say, the Barbary Lion in 'Category: Lions', as the category only has 12 pages listed, but rather is made for much more generalized open-ended browsing. The hypothetical 'Category: African Animalia' would be great for both looking through pages for a topic and also to see how complete Wikipedia is for the group. I do not disagree that categories for marine fish, marine crustaceans, marine mammals are helpful (or possibly needed) because if someone didn't want to look through pages for "everything that lives in the sea" they could try browsing increasingly specific categories (marine invertabrates>marine crustations>marine crabs>Raninoidea>Symethidae). However, not everyone will need such specific terms. One who is looking for a grouping of articles with more than just Symethidae, will look at Raninoidea. One who wants more than Raninoidea in a category will look in marine crabs. One who wants more than marine crabs will look in marine invertabrates. One who wants more than marine invertabrates will look into marine life. Dark jedi requiem 07:59, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

So, just to clarify, do you really expect all the marine organisms on Wikipedia to be classified under Category:Marine life (presumably in subcategories)? All the marine crustaceans (but not all of Category:Crustaceans, because many are freshwater or terrestrial), all the marine molluscs (likewise), all the marine fish, and everything else should be marked somehow as "marine life"? Are there also plans to establish Category:Terrestrial organisms? It would probably make more sense to work upwards from well-defined communities, like hydrothermal vents and coral reefs than to start at the top (land, sea, soil) and work down. Who cares that both Northern krill and the Australian sprat both live in the sea when they live thousands of miles apart and have nothing to do with each other? --Stemonitis 08:20, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Again it works the same way as looking indiscriminatly for something in the ocean. The same exact way as looking indiscriminatly for something that lives in a/around sea vents. Even though the broader they get, the bigger the category gets they can be useful. People use Category: Muslims even though the list is large. Granted, more specific lists, for instance Category: Muslim political writers and Category: Muslim scholars would be more helpful for someone looking for more specific results but the broad Category: Muslims is still there. There is also Category: Islam which has both Emirate of Sicily (which only mentions 'Islam' in one sentence: "Christians freely converted to Islam.") and Jahl (Arabic word for ignorance which some feel has Muslim connotation). Both are very different, but fit in the same category. Just like Marine Life. Dark jedi requiem 16:15, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I would love to see a Marine Life wikiproject, but unfortunatly I don't see it ever getting off the ground. As to your first question though 'who looks for random articles about marine life or Islam?' I would. If I was told in a film class to research a series from the usa I would go to Category:TV shows in the United States, or maybe Category:African-American actors (566 links) even though it has a large amount of articles. There are several ones with large amount of links, for instance:

• Category: American film actors (2593 links)
• Category:Album covers (25054 links)
• American film actors (2593 links)

But there are groups even more useless than my 'Category:everything that lives in the sea'. For instance: Category:Animals who will Eat Your Face Off (actully exists). Dark jedi requiem 00:23, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Melicertus

Sorry about that category, I was doing major cleanup of Category:Australian animals, and accidentally did that. Thanks for picking it up, I am glad there are people who notice my mistakes so quickly :). --liquidGhoul 09:43, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

List of people by name: Gj-Gl

You summarized

(Rv. Why list him twice? He's already under his real name.)

At the cost of a sense that i'm being played for a sucker by a disingenuous troll, because it's not a just world. His cause failed, and as a result virtually no English-speaking people know or care what his real name was. The purpose of LoPbN is not to document people's real names, which is part of the job of bio articles, but to help people, including casually ignorant or bigotedly ignorant ones, get to the bios they are looking for. You will be blocked as a nationalist PoV vandal the next time you remove the dupe entry under his English name.
--Jerzy•t 20:26, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Arthropod

Just wanted to apologize for reverting defence. Didn't realize it was a proper spelling in British English. Cerealkiller13 07:23, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

No problem. I guessed that was probably what had happened. --Stemonitis 07:16, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Parktown Prawn

File:ParktownPrawn Large.jpg

Parktownprawn

Green Beetle

Glad you liked my Parktown Prawn image. Can you help me identify the following green beetle? It was dead when I found it but has a jousting horn in the front making me think it is related to rhino beetles.

Eltharian 18 April 2006

I don't know much about beetles, I'm afraid, but I've re-posted your query at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life, in case anyone there can answer. I imagine information about location (even which continent), habitat and so on would probably be useful - perhaps you can add that there. --Stemonitis 06:59, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

your input

hi Stemonitis, how are you? You seem to be knowledgeable in this area and was wondering if you could take a look at the discussion that is taking place here, Talk:Meißen porcelain, thank you. with kind regards Gryffindor 09:56, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

I've put my oar in to that discussion, although I think this time there is a case for the ss spelling. Sorry not to be able to side with you on this one. If anyone tries to move Meißen to Meissen, though, then they'll have another thing coming. --Stemonitis 15:19, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

A request

Dear Stemonitis, Hi, I'm AshLin, self-appointed steward :) (one of three, actually) of the Indian butterflies Wikibase. I noted your formatting changes to Scarce Swallowtail and I have disagreement with your changes in respect of converting the names to all small case.

It's like this, we have a usage in our 1000 species wikibase of using initial capitals for common names. For example, we write Common Evening Brown and not common evening brown.It helps bring out the species clearly in the text and is a technical writing aid to make the text more readable. We feel small case is counter-intuitive to easy assimilation.

If you feel very strongly over the issue log me on my talk page. If I recieve no communication from you within next three days, I assume that you are willing to concede our small point whether we are right or wrong and then I shall undo those small changes of initial capitals back to what they were.

I felt it was important to explain our point of view and solicit your cooperation before hand. We would also appreciate if you feel that you are correct and we are wrong, let our Indian butterflies wikibase be like that only and permit us to continue to follow the guidelines we have established and are used to working with.

Aside from that do visit our pages. We appreciate constructive critical comments. An entry point is List of Butterflies of India (Papilionidae). We are hard at work adding data and there are many more stubs than we would like but give us three months time and then revist us. :). With warm regards, AshLin 19:09, 19 April 2006 (UTC) I forgot to login :(.

Thanks for the clarification

Thank you for your response which was educative. I was unaware of the larger panorama on this issue. I appreciate your mature response and hope you do continue to associate with Indian butterflies. Your points regarding redirecting of pages/our own naming mess - absolutely true. We've been so busy adding material, the administrative aspect has got neglected. Thanks for pointing it out.

The Scarce Swallowtail being more correctly part of the British/European butterflies, I've been a bit wary about any major changes to it.

Do visit our latest entries :-

• Commander.
• Plain Tiger.
• Red Pierrot.

Regards, AshLin 07:49, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Wales

Do the edits to Wales by User:213.40.131.66 seem oddly automated (rather than just reverting back to his previous edit, the changes are sequentially re-added). He is getting close to 3RR. --Straif 16:40, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't much matter how this user makes their edits, I don't think. Even if not exactly vandalism, they are still pushing a non-consensus POV, and should be at least discussed before acceptance. If the user won't discuss their persistent reversions (as seems to be the case), then one would have to call in an admin to slap his/her wrists. I'm at the limit of my three reverts, so I'm unwilling to do any more. Furthermore, I'm going home now for my tea. Good luck. --Stemonitis 16:46, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Beaten to it! Good work, Arwel Parry! --Stemonitis 16:47, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

'Dab'ble some more, please!

Dear Stem, Thanks for the valuable dab. It educated me and will help my young visiters to 'shed' their ignorance and learn more. Do you think it would be appropriate to categorize such interesting and relevant articles in a generic category such as 'Natural History of Butterflies' where we can also categorise mimicry, ant-association, larval development etc? Regards, AshLin 15:00, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Hmm.. I'm not sure I understand your proposal. Ecdysis is a process found in all arthropods, nematodes, tardigrades and possibly others, not just in butterflies. Similarly, mimicry, in all its various forms (Batesian mimicry, Müllerian mimicry, etc.) is widespread throughout the animal kingdom (and beyond?). If there were specialist articles on "ecdysis in butterflies", "mimicry in butterflies" and so on, then they might go into Category:Butterflies, or, better, Category:Lepidopterology (just like Category:Insects contains the taxa, with physiology etc. being under Category:Entomology). I doubt, however, that butterfly ecdysis is all that different from ecdysis in other animals. There may be scope for an article on mimicry in butterflies, I suppose, but in general, it's as well to wait until the parent article (e.g. mimicry) becomes so large that it needs to be split up, rather than making many small, over-specific articles. --Stemonitis 07:36, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Marilyn (hill)

Thanks for the clarification about Marilyns. I think it is important to be specific about the limited geographic scope, so I'll instead put in a sentence about the term being restricted by definition to the British Isles. -- Spireguy 13:52, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Arthropod leg

Nice job. Squamate 21:58, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Web Wheeler

Hi, Stemonitis. I am new to wikipedia and do wish to contribute to this project in a meaningful way.

I added two links to information pages on my website regarding crayfish, however, you edited them out.

I hope that you will not take what I am about to write as a complaint about your actions, rather, I just would like to understand why you chose to remove my links.

I added a link under the "Crayfish" heading because I have pictures and other information on my website that is not covered here, nor on any of the other existing links.

I added a species citation under the heading "Cherax" for a crayfish known as Cherax sp. Irian Jaya/Hoa Creek as well as a link to an informational care sheet for this crayfish.

I have no issue with you removing my additions, but I would like to know why you removed them. Best regards, Webwheeler 18:47, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Please don't be put off by my reverting your edits. Adding links to external sites is widespread in Wikipedia, and often go unchecked. I have seen many articles fill up with many links to external sites, many of which individually add nothing to the article. The best solution (although it's more work) is to add any information held on the external sites to the relevant article. The articles in question are chiefly about the wild crayfish, and so instructions for care are only of marginal relevance. Similarly, the existence of a species/variety "Irian Jaya" in the aquarium trade is not really important for the genus Cherax as a whole. I hope this clarifies things. --Stemonitis 09:45, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Welsh Marilyns

I notice you've reverted the bold figures for 1000+ foot prominences. I've absolutely no problem with this. However, I think we should be consistent between the English and Welsh pages, and the English page has had bold figures ever since it was converted to table form. My personal opinion is that some visual differentiation is good, though I'm not convinced 1000'/300m is the right cut-off (unlike, say 2000'/600m, it's not a threshhold in common use elsewhere). I'm also not convinced that putting the figures in a bold font is quite right either. ras52 13:52, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I dislike any idea of a cut-off; inevitably the list has to end somewhere, but we needn't add any further arbitrary thresholds. Leaving the bold formatting out enables the reader to find his/her own cut-off, should he/she so desire, but doesn't impose one on those readers who prefer to appreciate the smooth curve that the relative heights colelctively form. So anyway, I've taken the (inconsistently-applied) boldface off the list of English Marilyns as well and now the two pages are comparably formatted. --Stemonitis 14:03, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

OK. Fine by me. ras52 16:26, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Aquarium (pet) Crayfish

Thank you, Stemonitis, for your rationale as to why you removed my additions to the "Crayfish" and "Cherax" wikipages.

With consideration to your wish to limit the above pages to discussions of a scientific nature, I am creating some wikipages that will have a more hobbyist flavour to them, i.e. pages that will pertain to crayfish that are commonly kept as aquarium pets, and which will contain more care and breeding information than what you would be likely to go into.

Best regards, Webwheeler 14:01, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

That would be fine. I'm sure there's enough information to create a pretty large article about keeping crayfish as pets (which might be better than splitting out each species / variety). I'm not entirely sure what the best title for such an article might be, though: "Crayfish as pets" is better than "Pet crayfish", for instance (in my opinion). There could then be links from crayfish itself and any species that is widely kept in aquaria to that article. The de:Marmorkrebs story could probably be fitted in, too. --Stemonitis 07:14, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Citations

Hi Stemonitis, I noticed you changed the citation location in Right Whale. It's pretty well accepted around here that citations follow punctuation,^[1] like this.^[2] That's the format used in most scientific papers and according to the Chicago Manual of Style. It's also part of Wikipedia's footnote manual of style, WP:FOOT. In light of this I hope it's ok if I change it back. --Spangineer^[es] (háblame) 16:59, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, if it's an accepted standard. I would suggest that it's only one of several possible standards, but I won't go against consensus, even if it would make more sense to have the citations within the sentence that cites them. --Stemonitis 05:13, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Merostomata

Hello, Stemonitis: regarding the use of Merostomata against Xiphosura + Eurypterida. I was being over-cautious, because I'm relatively new at Wikipedia and I didn't want to delete a whole article and start from scratch. There is no doubt that the current paradigm of systematics is the cladistics. According to it, no parapyletic groups are accepted. Merostomata was widely proved to be paraphyletic, but as I said elsewhere, there is a lot of inertia which makes it appear in text books and encyclopedias. Likewise, it is a historical name that deserves its place as an entry, even if just for clarification. Maybe best thing would be just keep Merostomata entry very summary and refer the reader to Xiphosura (most cases) or Eurypterida. Anyway I'll try to keep an eye on well written articles to see what can be done regarding those neglected ones. Already seen I can count on your help. Cheers! Vae victis 14:47, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I'll not have regular access for a while now (it's collecting season for us alpine botanists), but if you've got an overview of the group, then I'm sure you'll come to the right decision. --Stemonitis 18:06, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi! I think all this Xiphosura-Merostomata question needs careful re-evaluation. I understand the reasons for making the whole Xiphosura entry only a redirect to Limulidae. But on the other hand we cannot just ignore a whole class which is important for phylogeny of Chelicerata just because most of members are extinct. When I have time I will make some experiences making a coherent set of Xiphosura-Merostomata pages. The name Merostomata cannot be accepted as it is non-monophyletic. We need some discussion here. Cheers! Vae victis 11:10, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Sierra de Guadarrama

Hey! You know sometimes I hate that edit summaries are so limited in space (although I understand the reasoning). I would have liked to be less terse and thank you more fully for the changes. Plateaus is indeed correct. Plateaux (and adding x to eau as a plural in general) is the British/commonwealth convention. See, e.g., [2] or more specifically (pdf document) [3]. I like your change better anyway (mesetas), though I piped the link from the disambiguation page to the correct definition appearing on that page. As for the topographic prominence issue, you are absolutely correct. What you found was my sloppy translation (though I try very hard to do so with fidelity). The correct translation is that "the principal peaks of the range have an average topographical prominence of 1,000 meters." I'm going to add that fixed translation back in (without the emphasis). Shows you how one word left out or mistranslated can devastatingly affect the meaning. --Fuhghettaboutit 22:35, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Wow. American spelling really is, um..., different, isn't it? As regards the relative height sentence, it's still somewhat vague: how are the "principal peaks" defined? what are their relative heights? I think it may be better to have a table of selected peaks (without necessarily saying how they've been selected, so that it can be added to), including relative heights, and leave it at that. Average relative height of selected peaks is an almost meaningless measure. --Stemonitis 07:49, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Rocco DeLuca

I saw your entry for Rocco DeLuca and the Burden, saw the documentary and interview with Sutherland here in England so created Rocco DeLuca and the Burden. I am a HUGE fan! If you're a fan, help me man! Thanks from England!