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Requested move

[edit]
The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. 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 move request was: page moved: majority after a month. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 08:15, 19 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]


Freyer's purple emperorApatura metis – The WikiProject Lepidoptera uses scientific instead of common names for butterflies. Most butterflies don't have common names to begin with; species that do have common names often have different common names in different parts of the English-speaking world. Lots of common names are ambiguous; many are used for three, four or five mutually disjoint clades. Apatura metis is literally the only species in the subfamily Apaturinae whose article still uses a common name for its title. For easy verification, a list of all Apaturinae species with known common names is being provided here. Relisting see below. Andrewa (talk) 09:18, 26 September 2011 (UTC) Noym (talk) 20:50, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, it's not obvious that Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera has any more specific guideline, but that's just because it was never formally documented on the project page. Look for example at
  • this discussion from 2007, in which seven out of eight participants favor scientific names and the eighth contributor doesn't really oppose them either,
  • this discussion from 2010, in which the consensus is restated, this time unanimously, and
  • this ongoing discussion, which is about something else but in which everybody tacitly assumes that articles use (or eventually will use) scientific names for titles. The question in this discussion is whether common names should be used in article links; the possibility of using them in article titles doesn't even come up any more.
Aside from that I can only repeat myself:
  1. Most Lepidoptera simply do not have any common names. Just browse around a bit. Some genera contain literal dozens of species and just a handful of them have common names.
  2. Many common names are useless as article titles because they are ambiguous.
  3. Many common names that are not ambiguous are regional. Hamadryas is referred to as "the Crackers", "the Calicoes", and "the Clicks" in different parts of the English-speaking world.
The bottom line is that somewhere between eighty and ninety percent of article on Lepidoptera species will have to use scientific names no matter what. Using common names for some fraction of the remaining percent would achieve nothing except make maintenance more difficult. Noym (talk) 10:41, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ditto. Dger (talk) 20:18, 28 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. 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.