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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. –MuZemike 20:02, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Higher waterbird

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Higher waterbird (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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No mention of such a avian taxon/clade on Google Scholar. The cited tolweb link does not make such a claim either. At best it would appear to be a misunderstanding of a phrase that was used in some specific context. It would be WP:OR to interpret the diagram from one paper. In general with a neighbour-joining type of scheme there are N-1 clades for N terminal taxa. Shyamal (talk) 03:37, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a relevant figure from Hackett et al. It does contain the proposed superorder that this article is about, as does the tolweb site. The only difference is that it's called "water birds", not "higher waterbirds". I don't there's any misunderstanding.
Should this article be deleted? That depends, I think, on whether the listing of this group by Hackett et al. and at tolweb is enough for notability. (By the way, how connected are these groups? This long blog post discussing Hackett et al., perhaps too enthusiastically, calls the authors the "Early Bird Assembling the Tree-of-Life Research Project".) If the article should be kept, then I see questions such as what it should be called and how skeptical it should be. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 04:21, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
There is probably little disagreement on the existence of a well-marked waterbird clade, but a typical taxon article has to be on the basis of a recognized clade - typically one with a formal name. This appears to be a casual name, ill-defined and leaves little scope for multiple editors to collaborate and improve the article especially when one cannot find reliable sources using this exact term. Compare something similar like Manlike ape which has been redirected to Anthropoid ape, which makes for a legitimate entry as a widely used term but not as well defined as Hominidae. If there is some recent literature with a more formal name, this article could redirect there. Shyamal (talk) 04:56, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/document/112272 has a similar clade where they casually mention a clade of "3)‘aquatic and semi-aquatic birds’ e.g., pelicans, cormorants, herons,storks, cranes, rails, loons, penguins and albatrosses, as well as the less aquatic groups cuckoos, turacos and bustards)" - does this mean we can we have an article on "aquatic and semi-aquatic birds" ? Shyamal (talk) 07:14, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and maybe rename. I'm far from an expert on bird taxonomy (and spending a few minutes browsing wasn't enough to fix that), so I'm not sure exactly what this should be called or which orders it should include, but (a) it appears that there is some such group, although I didn't read the Hackett et al. article cited by tolweb.org, and (b) it appears that the group is large enough to not easily be just merged into next-higher clade (which I think would be Neoaves). Dealing with articles describing classifications which are still being worked out by researchers is never easy, but I don't find throwing up our hands and deleting articles to be a particularly appealing solution. Kingdon (talk) 17:38, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Perhaps under one of the titles Lavateraguy mentioned (although it'd have been better if he had added citations for those), but the current title appears to be a neologism. In this context, it is surprising that we don't have an article on Neoaves, a well-supported and significant clade. From looking at the Hackett et al. tree, it appears Neoaves had a very rapid basal radiation (perhaps coinciding with K-T?), resulting in much of the current diversity of birds. It would seem most proper to have an article on Neoaves that discusses these points and the competing hypotheses on relationships among its orders, including clades such as the one we are discussing. Ucucha 18:37, 15 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Certainly delete, as scarcely anybody thinks the recent bird phylogenies justify new taxonomies; it is still a fairly new hypothesis of marginal importance. As for near passerine, I would go for "keep" in a deletion discussion; the article probably just needs to be rewritten. —innotata (Talk • Contribs) 00:49, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and rename, now that Shyamal has said there's little disagreement on the existence of this clade and Lavateraguy has said it's been named (and unfortunately we have our choice of names). Consensuses in classification are too precious to ignore. I'm going to say something more about that at the TOL talk page. In response to Innotata's vote above, I'll add that we don't need to change our taxonomy. We can have articles about taxa that aren't part of the scheme we've adopted, such as Accipitriformes. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 05:20, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Just a note that the problem really is that an average publication in a journal dealing with phylogenetics includes many clades among their illustrations. If a tree has N terminal nodes on it there are N-1 clades, most of which are unnamed, that are available for making articles on. The suggestion being made by many here is that there should be a disambiguation style page for "water birds" with citations to the Hackett paper noting that many of the groups are evolutionarily related but that would be a very different article. Shyamal (talk) 06:50, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Here is a non-WP:RS source mentioning several "good clades" - http://slybird.blogspot.com/2008/07/avian-relationships-what-do-we-know.html how many of these will make for an article that has more than a single source? (The "Seriama-Falcon-Parrot-Passerine" clade?) Shyamal (talk) 07:09, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Can we close this then and move it to a renaming discussion on the article talk page? --IP69.226.103.13 | Talk about me. 18:32, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid I don't understand. What "good clades" did you have in mind? "Good" according to Hackett et al., or in the sense that there's a consensus on it? We have a well-referenced article about the Cypselomorphae, and the blogger gave several references for the Mirandornithes, which we have just a stub for (by the same person who wrote Higher waterbird). I think you must be joking about the Seriema-Falcon-Parrot-Passerine clade, since the blogger expressed very strong doubts about it (and I would too, if my opinion counted for anything). —JerryFriedman (Talk) 04:34, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The problem really is that although there is implicit notability for species level taxa, there is a serious problem when it comes to un-named clades (with mere mentions of the group in a paper) - Cypselomorphae is a very different case, explicitly declared as a group in a paper that defines its circumscription (actually twice, once by Huxley and refined later by another worker). Even if it is not valid, (witness things like Ecdysozoa) it could be of historic importance and is well supported by more than one citation and much discussed in the scientific literature. "Higher waterbird" (wonder what "lower waterbird" is) is a very different case, the group is really not well defined except within the context of this study. Note how confusable it is with the other clade from literature "aquatic and semi-aquatic birds". One could for instance ask how the author name in this taxobox was for instance determined. Writing about this poorly defined clade should mean that one can write about the Seriema-Falcon-Parrot-Passerine clade based on even a passing mention of the grouping in just one paper. I can see the contents here being well covered under an avian phylogeny article. I mention "good clade" since this is an interesting neologism used on that blog-site that mirrors the old mihi-itch-era-taxonomists who would talk about "good species" (the mihi-itch is a cousin of OR in the systematics world) Shyamal (talk) 07:31, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
To emphasize the fact that this article represents WP:OR by interpretation/synthesis I can also suggest that this article should include "cuckoos, turacos and bustards" based on this paper. To further emphasize that it is OR, the author for this "taxon" should be Per G.P. Ericson (March 2008 versus June 2008 of Hackett et al.) Shyamal (talk) 07:59, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This non-reliable source calls the taxon Pelecanimorphae, a name Livezey and Zusi credit to Huxley, 1867 (but see below). It gives the following references for the clade, in addition to Hackett et al.:
  • Cracraft, J., F.K. Barker, M. Braun, J. Harshman, G.J. Dyke, J. Feinstein, S. Stanley, A. Cibois, P. Schikler, P. Beresford, J. Garcia-Moreno, M.D. Sorenson, T. Yuri, and D.P. Mindell (2004), Phylogenetic relationships among modern birds (Neornithes): toward an avian tree of life. in “Assembling the Tree of Life” (Cracraft, J., and Donoghue, M. J., eds.), Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Ericson, P.G.P., C.L. Anderson, T. Britton, A. Elzanowski, U. S. Johansson, M. Kallersjo, J.I. Ohlson, T.J. Parsons, D. Zuccon, and G. Mayr (2006), Diversification of Neoaves: Integration of molecular sequence data and fossils, Biol. Lett. 2, 543-547.
  • Gibb, G.C., O. Kardailsky, R.T. Kimball, E.L. Braun, and D. Penny (2007), Mitochondrial genomes and avian phylogeny: complex characters and resolvability without explosive radiations, Molecular Biology Evolution 24, 269-280.
  • Morgan-Richards, M., S.A. Trewick, A. Bartosch-Harlid, O. Kardialsky, M.J. Phillips, P.A. McLenachan, D. Penny (2008), Bird evolution: testing the metaves clade with six new mitochondrial genomes, BMC Evol. Biol. 8:20.
I haven't tried to look at them, so I don't know whether they all give the clade the same membership. (Livezey and Zusi's Natatores is almost the same: the difference is that it adds the grebes, flamingos, and tropicbirds.) But if there are several references for this clade or maybe something very close to it, then I think this could be a good article. Especially if I understood you correctly when you said above, "There is probably little disagreement on the existence of a well-marked waterbird clade"—did you mean these very species, as I thought, or were you allowing for significantly different circumscriptions of the waterbird clade?
Incidentally, I imagine the different authors sort out the relationships differently, but I don't think that's an obstacle. The easiest place to discuss those differences is in an article based on some kind of firm ground—"These species are all the extant descendants of a common ancestor. However, various authorities differ on which are closer to which, as follows."
I think certain things are irrelevant to the discussion of deletion. One is whether the article as it stands is OR—the question is whether it can be fixed to be well sourced and notable. Another is the falcon-etc. clade and the cuckoo-turaco-bustard clade, since those are proposed in only one paper each and I gather that at least the falcon one is dubious on technical grounds. Finding a good name is a bigger obstacle ("Pelecanimorphae" was defined quite differently by Livezey and Zusi, and I think in other ways by others, and I don't see a need to cover the history of this name). But I think that's secondary to deciding whether to have an article on this topic. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 05:17, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I see what you are saying. From whatever lack of reliable citations we see, it looks like there is a need to rename the article, probably make the current article redirect to "water bird" or "waterbird", change the contents and remove the taxobox (since there is no reliable citation for the taxon-name and authority). AfDs for conceptual articles seem to require a change of concept to fix them! Circumscriptions (the contents) of a taxon can change while retaining a name which is why the term sensu is used to specify the usage. Shyamal (talk) 10:13, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • This no longer appears to be a discussion about this article, but something personal. I can only do with the science. I am going to copy the article into my user space and possible write something useful later on, but there's no discussion going on here about this article. --[[

|IP69.226.103.13]] | Talk about me. 21:07, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If there's anything personal, it's not on my side. I think Shyamal and I are disagreeing civilly about whether this article should be deleted. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 05:17, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Me neither, our few little disputes have been net-positive and only helped settle matters (witness Urohidrosis) ! Actually I think the entire discussion above has been on the science and the focus of the discussion is on the absence of reliable sources for specific things (clade name, authority, circumscription) and the presence of reliable sources for other ideas (the relatedness of various groups). Shyamal (talk) 10:25, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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