Talk:Eunoe campbellica

Description section

Sus barbatus, the level of detail you provide for a species description is way beyond what is appropriate for a Wikipedia article, on two counts. First, it is loaded with technical terms that are completely opaque to the general reader. This is an encyclopedia, not a textbook; our readership is the general reader, not the expert. We provide a topic overview that is as technical as it needs to be, but no more. Hence the "normal" language description sections you will see in every well-developed taxon article. Second, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. We don't aim to collect every single thing that is available about a topic, but rather provide a summary and a reference to more detailed sources. The reader is supposed to get a broad idea in our article and then consult the given sources for the details - we don't mirror it all. - These two considerations preclude the presence of dense sections describing "tentacular cirri without subdistal inflated region" and similar delights :) (Last but not least, this reads as if it was copied wholesale from some publication, which very likely would be a violation of copyright unless correctly licensed. But even if entirely reformulated, it would be too detailed.)

I'm sure my rough condensation into a summary description is inadequate and probably misses all the important features, and you are welcome to provide a better one, but please - we want a short general summary of physical appearance, not a holotype diagnosis. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 15:11, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm just seeing that you have produced the same kind of material for a number of other articles today. The same points apply; this has to be shortened and summarized considerably. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 15:14, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Sus barbatus, I have just gone through these articles and removed the excessive diagnosis sections. I am sorry to rampage through your meticulous material in this way, but this really is taxonomic monograph-level, not encyclopedia-level. In each case it needs to be replaced with a short, easily parsed summary for the general reader. - Now just as a preemptive note, please don't just reflexively revert all of this; we do have to follow the bold - revert - discuss cycle in such a case, and it certainly needs discussion. I'm pretty sure I'm correct in my interpretation of our guidelines and precedents, but it all comes down to community consensus. If you object strongly to this (and I suspect you might), I would suggest we take the discussion over to the Tree of Life WikiProject, where all taxonomy people hang out, and get some wider input? Cheers --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 15:40, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Elmidae, thank you for taking an interest in my work, though not in the way I was hoping. I'm not trying to use Wikipedia as an indiscriminate dump of information. The primary goal of me and my colleagues is to increase the reach and accessibility of taxonomic and descriptive information for a wider audience. We recognise that most people don't know how or don't have the time to trawl through the taxonomic literature. Thus, we have collated diagnostic and taxonomic information into a DELTA database which we can use to output (relatively) natural language descriptions for each taxon. Side note at this point: all of the text is created by us from the information in our taxonomic database and so not "copied wholesale from some publication". We aim to take this information and create new taxon articles also with up to date taxonomies, all linked LSIDs, images with main identifying features and as many references as possible.

Now, the text in the "description" section which you are referring to is perhaps not intended to be read as is, but more as a section that will provide people the necessary information when trying to identify an unknown specimen they have found. To that end, we know that Wikipedia articles are often the top hit on a google search so having that string of descriptive terms in the article helps someone find what they're looking for a lot faster - For example, someone is working with a group to survey fauna in a bay and have taken a benthic sample. They are unfamiliar with the finer details of marine annelid taxonomy, but found some animals that they know are polychaetes with scales and so determine that they are in the scale worm family. They take the samples back to the lab and quickly peek at them under the microscope and see a few note-worthy characters. Now, you could scrounge around for that hard-copy publication from decades ago that may or may not have the key in it and may or may not have up-to-date taxonomy or even the taxon you are actually looking for... or perhaps you might just google "polynoidae with tentacular cirri without subdistal inflated region [or whatever character/s you have actually observed]", and there you go, you have a quick and simple method for identifying your unknown specimen and comparing it with others that also have articles on Wikipedia. Moreover you have actual links that you can click on to take to you all of the information available on the internet for that taxon, and we see big, big advantages of linked data for the future of taxonomy.

Additionally, data aggregators such as EOL and the Atlas of Living Australia pull their "descriptive information" straight from Wikipedia, so again, we are trying to use the platform to increase the reach and accessibility of taxonomic information that otherwise is going to be lost in the dark depths of the taxonomic literature.

I definitely see your point, and we have been working to create other sections that are much less detailed, more readable, more encyclopaedic, such as general taxon recognition, distribution and taxonomic certainty and general phylogeny, to create a more whole encyclopaedia article, with the offending "description" section at the end of the article. If we're talking precedents, I have seen this format and content in quite a few taxon articles on Wikipedia and have drawn inspiration from some of them, for example Olenellus.

I will outrightly reject that this information has no place on Wikipedia, but I do agree that it at least needs to not be the only text included in a taxon article and should be included as a section of a whole encyclopaedic treatment of a taxon.

As far as your deletion rampage goes, I work hard contributing, promoting Wikipedia, and encouraging people to contribute and help share knowledge, and this sort of thing is certainly a far cry from encouraging contribution and increasing access to information. Sus barbatus (talk) 07:52, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

@Sus barbatus: Thanks for your response. Let me take a few points out of sequence:

• I apologize if I am creating the impression that your and your colleagues' work is not valued. Wikipedia has a bit of a reputation for treating the subject experts badly, which does hurt content quality. However, that derives from the necessity of keeping what you might call the "house style", and the agreed-on project foci and limitations, in the face of many contributors who would prefer to just import the conventions of their particular field. A balance has to be found between those.
• I am glad to hear that the text is not a copy of already published (and copyrighted) material. Provided that the factual content can be unambiguously verified from the accompanying reference, this type of de novo generation from a database sounds like an excellent method to provide correct but free Wikipedia text. That removes one issue.
• Most importantly, it sounds as if your group is embarking on an ambitious project that could add a lot of high quality content to the encyclopedia. The more articles this affects, the more desirable it is to coordinate with the editors who do most of the housekeeping work in the subject area - both to clear up possible conflicts, and to get some cooperation going. I will therefore port this discussion to the Tree of Life WikiProject, and would invite you to continue it there. I'll post a link here as soon as that is done. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 16:26, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

@Sus barbatus: I have opened a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#New / expanded taxon articles with highly detailed diagnosis material. Please feel free to contribute. Cheers --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 16:26, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

(I don't understand why the following text was used to replace the previous exchange; please don't do that, it is misleading. Restored both. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 02:42, 30 May 2020 (UTC))

Hi Elmidae, I would like to be part of this discussion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robinswilson. Disclosure: I'm a colleague of Sus barbatus we are working on this project together. We take your point that monograph-style content was not inappropriate without glossary term links (we are working on that). However some detailed information is required otherwise projects and categories like Category:Crustaceans of Australia and Eunoe (animal) are just lists with little value (and incomplete, by the way, and furthermore these pages have insufficient detail to pass muster as encylopedic - we are trying to rectify that). It comes down to at what level an encyclopedia should be encyclopedic. A page for every species would seem a minimum, to many of us, this was the vision of E. O. Wilson to which https://eol.org/ was the response. However in the judgement of many https://eol.org/ is less usable (to scientists AND layfolk). Nor IMHO does it have guarantee of long term support and stability - the Wikipedia community looks to us like the better bet for longevity and maintenance of our contributions. If not Wikipedia, where?? Please watch these pages, we will respond with a better attempt. Your constructive comments most appreciated, they are a good example of why Wikipedia is still our preferred platform. We want to persevere with providing content in our field of expertise and which is minimally comprehensive, digestible to all, informative directs to primary sources. Bear with us! Robin Wilson, Museums Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (talk) 01:45, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

@Sus barbatus and Robinswilson: It would be a really good idea to continue this discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#New / expanded taxon articles with highly detailed diagnosis material instead, where a fair number of editors have weighed in already. Could I ask you make a similar statement there? I'm sure we all agree that an article for every species is what we are gunning for in the long run, and this is just about how the contents ought to be configured. Let's talk it out with the taxonomy editors! --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 02:49, 30 May 2020 (UTC)