Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lists of Salticidae species

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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. Admittedly the situation has changed a number of times during the discussion but I think editorial action can take it from here, whether that be userfying, redirecting, or merging. Someone should also try to fix the fact that some of the references are in parentheses and others are not. Stifle (talk) 09:21, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Lists of Salticidae species

Lists of Salticidae species (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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There are over 5000 species of spider in the family Salticidae. New ones are constantly being added and old ones are frequently synonymized or moved to different genera. There is no possibility of Wikipedia maintaining an up-to-date list of these 5000+ spiders while also constantly updating the redundant lists under the 560+ genera articles for this family. Indeed, this list already includes dozens, if not hundreds, of errors. The normal way this is handled is by having a list of genera (which we already have at List of Salticidae genera) and maintaining the species lists under each genus article. For comparison, the number of bird species is roughly the same order of magnitude, but no one has created List of bird species. Instead we have the manageable List of birds, which lists only the subgroups, while the actual species lists are one or two levels further down the article hierarchy. Also consider that there are dozens of editors working on birds and only 2 or 3 editors working on Salticidae (minus Philcha who passed away recently). Please have mercy on us! Kaldari (talk) 07:25, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note. I've added the following subarticles to the deletion nomination:
Kaldari (talk) 20:54, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Support, per WP:NOTDIRECTORY. There are already several online databases that are regularly updated, such as ITIS and Catalog of Life, that contain virtually the exact same data here.--Animalparty-- (talk) 08:34, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral I created these pages, and they came in very handy when working on the spider section, but now that I don't have time for it, it is probably not of great use. Keeping it updated would not be a great problem though, I have a script somewhere that parses the World Spider Catalog and creates these Wiki pages. I just haven't been running it for a while. --Sarefo (talk) 11:34, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Sarefo: It looks like your script hasn't run since 2009. If you started running it again, I would be happy to withdraw the deletion nomination. Otherwise, it is pretty much hopeless to keep this list up to date by hand (and extremely tedious). Kaldari (talk) 21:57, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I abandoned the spider work some years ago. As nobody seems to have picked it up, I don't think the Salticidae Species list has a lot of use these days. As I said, it was really helpful while building the Wikipedia Salticidae scaffolding. I will look into running the script again though, I'll try to do it within a week or so. That should update all of the Spider family pages. However, should you consider deleting the Salticidae species page(s), I will not be the one to stop you.--Sarefo (talk) 14:01, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Sarefo: is the script something that a typical programmer might be able to figure out how to use? If so, posting it to the main talk page could be of use to a future editor. ––Agyle (talk) 00:48, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organisms-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:20, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:21, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:21, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Do not support. Having the list(s) available for editing by people connected with Wikipedia gives one way of keeping data easily available and also for making notations on matters under dispute, why Wikipedia articles have chosen to give priority to one or another disputed interpretation, etc. Nobody who knows what is going on in current attempts to revise species designations to conform to new research would expect to find a final answer to any question. P0M (talk) 18:58, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Patrick0Moran: The data is already available under each of the genus articles. Why do we need a consolidated list? We don't have list articles for any other groups of organisms this big (at least that I have ever seen). Kaldari (talk) 05:44, 5 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Userfy. Keep this as a user subpage - for technical reasons. Indeed, having this list seem excessive and redundant. In theory, it would be sufficient to only have a normal hierarchy of articles that reflects biological classification. But we even have List of Salticidae genera with sub-articles! That's enough. However, the list still may be handy for technical reason, e.g. for running the scripts. However, this is something Kaldari and Sarefo should decide. My very best wishes (talk) 23:25, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • If so wished, I could put it under my user account. The main point of the list is to make it easy to have a wikified version that is up to date. --Sarefo (talk) 07:43, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, postdlf (talk) 23:50, 11 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do not support (Weak Keep). To anyone saying WP:NOTDIRECTORY, which of the six criteria do you think this violates? On the flip side, in WP:LISTPURP, the purpose of lists, I see it as qualifying in two of the three main purposes: navigation and development. In many cases, navigation and development both seem better served by the list of genera, and the species is simply duplicative, but for finding which species actually have articles, the species lists would take a 550 fewer clicks, so they do have an advantage for at least some uses. Kaldari's argument about maintainability is almost convincing, but 560 genera articles seem much harder to maintain than the 8 species lists; List of Salticidae genera says it hasn't been updated since 2008, so it's either incorrect or even more out of date than list of Salticidae species. A sensible approach to maintenance of the species lists might be to make a Unix script (somewhat like a macro, if you're unfamiliar with them), which would reformat another web page's species list(s) into the format for WP articles, and post the script in the Talk section for future maintainers to use once in a while. I might actually give that a go, except that both the species and genus lists seem like they're likely WP:COPYVIO violations, unless WP has permission from The World Spider Catalog to copy their data. Even lists/collections of facts are subject to copyright. If there is a copyright problem, itis.gov or another source could provide less comprehensive data. ––Agyle (talk) 00:36, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Interesting point. How would "less comprehensive" look like? A complete list is a complete list, so I don't see any way to do this. The WSC contains bibliographical information not included in the wiki pages, doesn't that count as "incomplete"? If I would compile it myself, I would end up with the exact same list. What if only the genera were compiled from the WSC, would that be COPYVIO? Not trying to be snappy, just want to get a feeling for this. I don't have time to delve into this right now, but I could provide anyone with the script if so desired. --Sarefo (talk) 07:43, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • He may be referring to the geographic information. Anything else would be pretty much impossible to present any differently, and thus would not be eligible for copyright protection in the U.S. Kaldari (talk) 08:15, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Deciding what to include in or exclude from a given classification system can be somewhat arbitrary; I doubt any of the major classification sources agree on everything. If you're being precise, all you can say is it's a complete list of species from a given source, at a particular time. It would be vague to say "this is a complete species list" without a footnote of qualifications, and it would be perfectly correct to say "this is a complete list of species included in ITIS as of January 13 2014," even if it's very different from other lists. Concerning the legal minutia of copyrights of collections of data, protection hinges on whether there were subjective choices involved in what to include in the data. I don't know how Dr. Platnick gathers his data, but if he makes subjective decisions on which taxa to accept and which to reject, or which binomial authorities to credit, it is exceptionally unlikely that your own independent decision-making would result in precisely the same list. On the other hand, if he relies entirely on publicly released, public domain data from a third party, then that portion of his data would not be protected. This has a more detailed layperson explanation. ––Agyle (talk) 18:11, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep. From List articles: "Such lists do qualify as encyclopedic: for many of these genera there are specialized monographs to assist in the identification of these species." None of the categories of WP:NOTDIR apply here. It is plausible, although unlikely, that someone might come to Wikipedia and find the list useful, even in its outdated state. Axl ¤ [Talk] 17:03, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, but that's specifically referring to species lists in genus articles, which we already have for all genera under Salticidae. Kaldari (talk) 18:23, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Okay, I see what you mean. Even the largest genus article, "Habronattus", has a list of its species. Changed to "Delete". Axl ¤ [Talk] 19:57, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to List of Salticidae genera. It seems silly to have what is essentially the same information listed in two different places, which as the nom points out, will lead to errors and inconsistencies. Listing them all under the genera articles and having a list of those will reduce the amount of maintenance required and increase the accuracy of the information. Lankiveil (speak to me) 01:01, 19 January 2014 (UTC).[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Mark Arsten (talk) 23:54, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • I now have the new version (WSC 14.5, 2014) ready. It's 2400 lines long. I agree that this list is not terribly useful for the general reader, however it is a good resource for editors updating genus articles: they can just cut+paste the respective genus into the article this way. One way it was supposed to be used was to link to the respective genus subsection from the genus "Number of species" link, so a user can easily see what the most recent state of the genus is. But when somebody (for valid reasons) split the file up into eight pieces, that kind of broke, because the genus page links point to subsections of the main "List of Salticidae species" page. That said, is there any place I could put it that is accessible to the spider project, but is not interfering with Wikipedia style guidelines? --Sarefo (talk) 05:45, 21 January 2014 (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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