Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of plant genera named for people (A–C)/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was promoted by PresN via FACBot (talk) 00:26, 29 April 2021 (UTC) [1].[reply]

List of plant genera named for people (A–C)

List of plant genera named for people (A–C) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Toolbox
Nominator(s): - Dank (push to talk) 20:31, 15 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

When I finished with the previous 6 lists (see User:Dank), I thought I was done with these ... then I discovered that Lotte Burkhardt did some phenomenal work in 2016 and 2018 on plant genera named for people. That tipped the scales in favor of writing 4 or 5 more lists ... and maybe, hopefully, there will be a longer series of lists to follow. AFAIK, her work has never been translated into English, not even snippets ... until now, by me. The main purpose of this list is to connect her work and other academic work with Wikipedia pages in various languages (usually English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese). When I couldn't find a suitable page on any Wikipedia, I checked Wikidata, and the results of that search are on the talk page of the list. It may be that this sails through FLC, or it could run into difficulties ... either way, this is submitted for your approval, and your feedback will be important. Unlike in the previous lists, these lists represent (for me) one of the ways that good science gets done in the 2020s ... I hope you feel the same. - Dank (push to talk) 20:31, 15 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Grrr, I just found out that Template:Interlanguage link uses "expensive parser function calls" (mentioned at the top of that page). That's a potential issue in long lists, such as this one. Working on it. - Dank (push to talk) 13:36, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
ChrisTheDude and Aza24, apologies, I've just made a change after you two okayed the list, replacing all the interlanguage links. My {{ill}} links were pointing to one or two non-English Wikipedias, in cases where the en.wp article on an author is red-linked; what I'm doing now duplicates the function of using {{ill}} with its Wikidata parameter, that is, the second link now sends the reader to the last section of the relevant Wikidata page, with links to other Wikipedias and to Commons, Wikispecies, Wikisource, etc. I now think this is better than what I had, because it sends readers of the English Wikipedia to a page that's in English, and it includes all the links they might find useful, not just one or two. But I didn't make the change because it's better, I did it because it's necessary: as you know, I like to cram as many rows in as I can, stopping just short of the point where the page is so long that images stop loading for some readers, so that I don't need too many pages to cover A to Z. I just found out that {{ill}} has a warning about its "expensive parser function calls", and I need to avoid those. What I lose by tossing {{ill}} is that the second link doesn't magically disappear at the point where the relevant article is created here on en.wp ... but it's not as important now for the second link to disappear, because I'm not sending readers to a foreign-language Wikipedia any more (I'd be happy to manually remove them as needed, or leave them in.) Any questions or problems with this? - Dank (push to talk) 23:04, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Given that there doesn't seem to be much uniformaty in which Wikipedias have links for which articles, the decision makes sense to me. If this were a Chinese history list and every missing article had site links when they all have Chinese articles, that might be an issue, but this type of scenario doesn't seem to be present here. Aza24 (talk) 23:43, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comments
Drive by comments from MeegsC
  • Some of the pictures don't have alt text.
    • All of the images have the "alt=" parameter, and almost all of them have text after that. Whether there should be text and what the text should be continues to be something that some Wikipedians (not me) like to fight about. But my position is "the reviewer is always right" ... if you can pick out some of the blank ones that you think would be improved by alt text, I'll be happy to try to oblige. - Dank (push to talk) 15:26, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • Thought I'd answer this, since I'm not sure MeegsC will since it was just a drive-by, and honestly after following your FLC's for a while, I'm really disappointed in the effort gone to the alt text on these images. Examples include man, seated, flowers, flowering plant, portrait of a man, residential building, tree to name a few (or in some cases multiple images). None of these descriptions tell me anything about the images used, and what they contain to any great extent. Certain ones while minimal at least give some detail to what the picture contains portrait of Rear Admiral Bligh in uniform, plant with berries small palm tree and some of them are just nonsense to people out of context like inflorescence. There are at least ten images that are missing alt text here as well, all of which are easily found using the alt text tool in the toolbox for the nomination.
What's more I went through some of the other lists you've nominated to find alt text just plain missing, the alt= are there, but there is no description of the content of the picture at all and I'm honestly shocked that not a single person has brought it up before. --Lightlowemon (talk) 12:42, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Different people have different views of alt text. I try not to start any fights, and I try to be responsive to the reviewers I get. Do you plan to submit any of the previous 6 lists to WP:FLRC to de-feature them over alt text, or are we just looking at this list? - Dank (push to talk) 14:38, 24 March 2021 (UTC) (I'm asking because I think those 6 lists are special cases. In those, each image is a plant, sitting there looking like a plant, usually without any relevant context. In the current nomination, we've got images of people, which is a different matter. If you can tell me what kind of alt text you're looking for in the plant images, that will help get us started.) - Dank (push to talk) 17:10, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Alt text rules are complicated and not agreed upon, especially for more decorative images like here. Remember that it's alt text + caption, not just alt text, so it's not just "man, seated", it's "man, seated; Daguerreotype of Adrien-Henri de Jussieu". WP:ALTTEXT says "Often the caption fully meets the requirements for alternative text", and I'd argue that pretty much every image has a caption that "describe[s] or identif[ies]" the image. That said, again per ALTTEXT, none of them should be blank, as otherwise screen readers will try to read out the image file name instead. The question in my mind, then is: is "flowers, Aaronsohnia" enough of a description? Alt text is supposed to describe what an image is, not what it looks like, so that caption does that well enough, in my opinion. --PresN 18:41, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That's my understanding too. Does everyone agree that captions and alt text for people and places are, in general, more problematic than the ones for plants? If so: would anyone like to suggest alt text for some of the people and places? We can't always get people to agree on the best alt text, but it doesn't hurt to try ... and if it becomes clear that the positions are far apart and not getting any closer, I have no objection at all to pulling problematic images. - Dank (push to talk) 19:07, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Wait, grrr, I may not be up to speed here. I thought that the point of adding alt= (in cases where the caption is sufficient without alt text) was to avoid the bug of the screen reader reading out the name of the image file ... following the links at WP:ALT, it appears that alt="" may now be necessary to avoid the screen reader bug. If anyone needs more than that, let me know. - Dank (push to talk) 20:42, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Source review – Pass

Another list from Dank... it never ends... you better name a plant genus after me for this... :) Aza24 (talk) 09:42, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Not source related; I'm not a fan of "see ..." it kind of defeats the sorbability for the column (as all the Bolusafra ones don't sort together), I would suggest just copying the same entry over.
    • Really, really appreciate your work on source reviews. I admit that my way isn't the usual way of doing it, and that there are reasons not to do it my way. I'm teetering between "I trust your judgment and it's not a big deal" and "Consistency (database systems) is important, on and off Wikipedia". (And given that anyone can edit, and most people aren't too careful when they edit, and identical lines provide no clue that there's a separate line with the same information that needs to be updated, it will take about two seconds for the list to start contradicting itself if we do it your way.) Give me a few days to mull it over. If I change the sorting parameters so that "See X" always sorts just below "X", does it become a non-issue for you, or are the aesthetics still wrong even if it sorts right? - Dank (push to talk) 11:52, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • It just occurred to me (not enough sleep) that the usual solution at FLC for problems like this is to combine cells. It's not a perfect solution (in this case), and it makes formatting a little harder, and it won't fix the consistency problem, but there's value in doing things in the format people are expecting to see ... and it's probably prettier. I'll think it over when I get up. - Dank (push to talk) 12:12, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Okay, I'm collapsing cells where possible, and otherwise getting rid of "see ...". That should work for now. - Dank (push to talk) 17:19, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Done, I think. - Dank (push to talk) 18:31, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Formatting
  • New Jersey should probably have a city like the other refs
  • Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew seems to be the only ref you don't have a location for, worth adding?
Reliability
  • Is there a really a need for "See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ for license."—
    • 1. If you're saying that I should say this in a more compact way, or use a different parameter ... sure, I can do that. 2. If you're saying we shouldn't mention licensing at all ... I realize it's not one of the parameters at {{cite book}}, and that seems unfortunate to me (and maybe hypocritical, given that we're Wikipedians and we expect people to respect our copyleft license? Not sure.) But I'm fairly ignorant about source review issues. Does it ever cause problems to mention that a source is copyleft rather than copyright?
Verifiability
  • I can't remember if there was a reason in the other lists for this (or if it happened there) but why no page numbers for so many of the citations? If it's because they cover a lot, maybe a page range could be included? It is a big dubious to point readers to an entire book for verification, even more so when this list is only for A-C people Aza24 (talk) 09:42, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Giants and other reviewers seem to be on board; see for instance WP:Featured list candidates/List of plant genus names (D–K)/archive1. Two issues: 1. This list, and my sources, are alphabetical reference works (except for Christenhusz, who starts off with an alphabetical index ... and he's rarely used in this list). If you're looking something up in a printed dictionary, do you ask for a page number or look it up alphabetically? 2. Most readers aren't going to put up with a list spread out over many pages, for the same reasons that people are turned off by multi-volume reference works. So I'm cramming as many rows as I can get into each list. Adding templates to every row reduces the number of rows I can have before some reviewers start noticing problems with page loading (in particular, the images stop loading correctly). - Dank (push to talk) 11:52, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • I agree, but that's not really what I meant. If the sources are alphabetical, surely there is a smaller page range that covers all of them? What I'm wondering is if you can put the page range for all the entries in the citation in the References, not as individual templates for each entry. Does that make sense? I understand your sentiment, I think, but this seems less dubious than essentially citing an entire encyclopedia, and I don't think it's too much to ask...? Aza24 (talk) 05:49, 22 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comments from HAL
  • Could the lede be expanded further?
    • Thanks for the review. Here's my thinking: this lead is the same length as the ones in my 4 genus lists that are FLs, so I think people have been okay with the leads so far. This list is intended to fill a void on the web as a reference work ... I'm hoping people will use it to look things up ... and I'm thinking they won't want a long intro, because then they'll feel obligated to read it in case it has unintuitive instructions or disclaimers, when what they really want to do is jump straight to what they're looking for ... no one reads the instructions in a dictionary unless they think for some reason they have to. I can say more, I guess, but I'm interested in your thoughts. Is there anything specific you'd like to see? - Dank (push to talk)
  • Why are the lifespans and occupation/importance of the namesakes only sometimes included?
    • Good catch ... if you've clicked on the hatnote you'll see that all the lifespans are included there, even when there are blue links ... I intentionally did it two different ways to see if it prompted a request to do it one way or the other .... do you have a preference? Other than dates, when there's a blue link, I'd prefer not to repeat (or worse, contradict) the information available at the link ... this isn't a matter of appearance so much as knowing what tends to piss Wikipedians off ... in this case, a long list of bio material by one editor from just a few sources that contradicts or supplants the work of many Wikipedians from many sources, collected and hashed out over decades in some cases. (Also, there's already about as much text as the page will hold without causing image-loading problems for some readers, and I want to focus readers' attention on the entries that need more attention. But these are secondary points.) - Dank (push to talk)
  • Does the futher reading The Names of Plants contain anything relevent that could be included in this list?
    • Gledhill is an excellent source, but in all my previous lists, I haven't made specific reference to him except in special cases ... and, generally, I found that those special cases don't occur in these lists. There are better sources for these things. I can remove him from the Further Reading if you prefer. - Dank (push to talk)
  • I would cut back on a few of the images. They, at least on my screen, continue past the references section and create a large blank space at the bottom...
    • Sure. I found that on any large screen at any zoom, and on small laptops screens at a zoom of 110% or higher, the pictures didn't create white space at the bottom, but I'll be happy to trim a couple. - Dank (push to talk)
  • For consistency, I would link Uppsala, London, and Madrid.
  • Since Queensland is linked, also link Burgundy.

That's all I got. Nice work as usual. ~ HAL333 00:02, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks much for reviewing. Sorry I've been distracted with my own work for a month, I'll watch FLC more closely now. - Dank (push to talk) 00:34, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
No worries—I've been quite busy irl as well. And, I'm happy to support this nomination. ~ HAL333 00:54, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comments
  • The phrase "including many women and non-Westerners" in the lead feels off. I fully understand the sentiment, but I think it's unnecessary. I personally think it's better to cut this; as it currently stands, it makes it seem like this should be unexpected, which doesn't help to normalize the inclusion of women and non-Westerners in the field.
    • Done.
  • No need for the table of contents at both the beginning and end
    • I'm happy either way, but this is my seventh plant list at FLC and the previous 6 had it in the See also section, so I'd need to check with previous reviewers before removing it ... happy to do that if you want me to. I did it that way following the example of some of Wikipedia's botanical lists, for instance, List of botanists by author abbreviation (A). (And IIRC, at least one reviewer either commented on it or requested it, that's why I'd have to go back and ask.) - Dank (push to talk)
  • Christenhusz is not the only author of Plants of the World, at least according to what I can see. All of the authors should be listed.

Otherwise, great work! RunningTiger123 (talk) 23:47, 16 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Support – nice job! RunningTiger123 (talk) 20:10, 17 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Promoting. --PresN 19:05, 28 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Closing note: This candidate has been promoted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FLC/ar, and leave the {{featured list candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through.
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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