Talk:Astatotilapia stappersii

Move?

The following is a closed discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was move, tidy the end result of an IUCN error. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 08:55, 11 October 2009 (UTC)
Haplochromis stappersii → Astatotilapia stappersii — as per FishBase — Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 01:34, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

• Astatotilapia stappersii is a redirect to Striped nothobranch, which is about Nothobranchius taeniopygus. Are these the same species of fish? Can a biologist please comment here? Anthony Appleyard (talk) 09:20, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

No, they are not the same at all - this here is a cichlid, and the notho is a toothcarp. Both pages were created by bot from the IUCN Red List database, and something in the database must have gotten mixed up.

OK, so put the move on hold, I shall check this out in the next days. I am doing a complete overhaul of Haplochromini genera; when I'm, finished I can look into the matter. Probably either some scientist has gotten the names mixed up, or the IUCN database editor has. The lack of comment in the database suggests the latter. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 15:31, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I checked it out. I have no idea what exactly went wrong, but as it seems someone at the IUCN messed up the synonymy:

They do have an entry on A. stappersii, under its old name H. stappersii. FishBase, meanwhile, does not list anything similar in the synonymy of N. taeniopygus, nor does any other source I can find at present.

A confusion in some primary source (field notes or something) that got copied on is possible, but extremely unlikely, since secondary sources would be prepared from the primary by manual work of people who have expert knowledge. Likewise, a printer's error is unlikely to go unnnoticed for long.

Every Web source I can find that treats A./H. stappersii as synonymous with the notho can be traced back to the IUCN Red List as its original source. Now, the IUCN changed its URLs of the online Red List, and thus we can tell that the error was present in the Red List before 2006 (try out the IUCN links in the articles - they still have the old format and are broken).

Since both Red List entries pertaining to the issue are very brief, they were a) automatically generated and b) review has not been thorough. There was possibly only a single "review" (in the loosest sense) of both entries, in 2006: the 2009 Red List entry has "2006" as last review date, while the old (2006) format in the articles gives "2005". "2005" may be a review of an already-extant article, but Least Concern species were generally only added en masse in 2006, and thus "2005" probably refers to the primary source that was automatically parsed to become the Red List. The Red List entries of Least Concern species have no data that allows to track the review history (those of more threatened species do), but all things considerd the only good explanation is that the error was a mix-up in the primary list that was automatically parsed to form the Least Concern entries in the 2006 Red List, and has since dwelled there unnoticed by the one cursory review. The IUCN Red List database works similar to Wikipedia in that it will "redirect" (not automatically, but it will prompt) taxa that are listed as synonyms. So, listing Astatotilapia stappersii in the synonymy of the notho will probably block creation of its correct entry.

(It is interesting to note that Polbot, which parses the Red List entries to Wikipedia, is prone to make similar errors: if species A was formerly considered a subspecies of species B, and if the Red List lists this in the species' entries, Polbot will make a redirect from species B to species A, and skip species B's article because the redirect is already there. We got dozens of these cases in frog articles. It is also interesting to note that spelling errors are comparatively plentiful in the IUCN Red List's Haplochromini - I found more than 2% of their Haplochromis names had spelling mistakes a la "Haplochromis gowersi", while in their bird articles the error rate is close to 0.01%. Their bird articles are thoroughly reviewed each year, so that makes the difference.)

As regards taxonomy, the IUCN has not reviewed its Haplochromis since 2006, at least for the most part. I found that following FishBase for all Haplochromini is the only sensible thing to do, as it is the only reliable source (though for these critters, no source is really that reliable) that provides consistent taxonomic coverage. FishBase may not be 100% correct (the entire group is in revision, see Haplochromis article), but at least this way we'll be consistent throughout. Hence:

• mv Haplochromis stappersii over the redirect at Astatotilapia stappersii
• I shall then copyedit the two articles affected (Astatotilapia stappersii and Striped nothobranch), adding the information from the Red List (what little there is) and complete synonymies from FishBase, fixing the IUCN ref to the new URL, polish up the layout etc.

Thanks! Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 18:43, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.