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User:Plantdrew/Essay

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I am a big fan of common (vernacular) names for organisms. Names in folk use for decades or longer are fascinating. I'm less interested in vernacular names that have recently been coined by scientists for organisms that aren't really known to the general public, but this class of names is worth addressing to best serve readers. I have created tens of thousands of redirects that are really just scientist coined vernacular names (I have created several tens of thousands of vernacular name redirects. period. more than enough to claim 10k scientist coined). My big issue s that there has been no systematic evaluation of organism titles; is pig finally going to move?

Originally, COMMONNAME was about using (what was deemed to be) the most likely search term for a biography (in an era when Wikipedia wouldn't necessarily be highly ranked in any particular search engine): "John F. Kennedy" (but not JFK or Jack Kennedy or John Fitzgerald Kennedy) or Cat Stevens (but not Yusuf Islam). Fair enough. NCFAUNA was originally about using IOU/MSW capitalization for bird/mammal vernacular names (per contentious discussions on the ENWIKI-l mailing list), but was soon converted to recommending capitalized vernacular names as titles for all animals (without discussion). RECOGNIZABILITY xxxxxCheck thisxxxxx came along a little laterXXXX.

WP:ASTONISH; are readers searching for any one of "banded parrotfish, blue wrasse, kelpie, New Zealand banded wrasse, purple parrotfish, saddled wrasse, Southern purple wrasse, Southern wrasse, winter bream or yellow-saddled wrasse" going to be more astonished to find the article with a different vernacular name title, or the scientific name?

Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Fishes/Archive_1#fauna_article_naming_conventions; fish discussion, 20 March 2007-2 April 2007 (advice to use Fishbase name was present in the initial edit creating the project page, 1 December 2004

NCFAUNA created 3 June 2003, expanded from birds & mammals to fauna on 12 June 2003. Clarified what "common name meant on 27 March 2006. Significant rewording on 28 February 2012 5 critera wording added on 14 September 2017.

Rodents discourages common name 26 January 2010

Wikipedia:Official names written 20 Jan 2008

(this thread has no longer very active editor who was quite enthusiastic about vernacular name titles questioning that practice).

Cordulegaster bidentata; earlier phrasing in lead gave vernacular names but nothing the reader would recognize; that's the cargo cult.

As a cargo cult[edit]

Vernacular titles are a cargo cult; cargo cults promise to bring in cargo, "common names" promise to bring in readers. "Common names" are used because that's how Wikipedia does it without really thinking about why Wikipedia does it, or what would best serve our readers. Sometimes vernacular titles hinder readers; sometimes they have no advantage in recognizability, and sometimes readers will be comfortable with the scientific name anyway.

Taxonomy is really the only area of Wikipedia where there is a mentality that the precise name used by people who are deeply interested in the particular field is to be avoided (largely because COMMONNAME is a term of art in both taxonomy and Wikipedia, with somewhat different meanings). We have patella (not kneecap), fluoxetine (not Prozac), and (486958) 2014 MU69 (which survived a move request to "Ultima Thule"), and M4 Sherman (not Sherman Tank). People are able to navigate to those articles just fine via redirects, and search engine algorithms.

History[edit]

The shortcut WP:COMMONNAME was created on 10 October 2006. At that time, the target read as follows. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora) was created in the same time frame (22 September 2006). Wikipedia had ~500,000 articles at that time, and wasn't quite yet into the 10 most globally viewed websites

Active obfuscating[edit]

There are vernacular name titles that make it more difficult for readers to find the information they seek; cardinal (bird), turkey (bird) and pig cover genera and families, when there is clearly one particular species that readers are looking for. These titles haven't really been questioned by Wikipedians, because hey, that's three less articles that are using scientific names for titles (meanwhile, readers leave comments on the talk pages wondering why there isn't information about the species they are interested in). People in North America searching for "beaver" (which is fine at that title) probably want North American beaver, a term that is extremely unlikely to be searched for, less likely than "American beaver" or "Canadian beaver". Readers may find their way to the species article from the genus article, but I don't see any major harm from using the Castor canadensis as a title instead of the least common of three vernacular names.

  • red imported fire ant. bedbug, chimpanzee,
  • Wrong species; blobfish, mangrove oyster

Not helpful[edit]

In a lot of cases, I don't see much concern on Wikipedia, or by scientists who coin vernacular names as to whether the names are actually helpful to a layperson. Barahona amphisbaena? Most people have no clue what an amphisbaena is, and if they do have a clue, they're probably not going to be put off by scientific names. We have a fork of dorcopsis (as a vernacular name) and Dorcopsis (genus). Again, very few people have ever heard of a dorcopsis, and these were also called "forest wallabys" before MSW people got their hands on them. MSW common names are frequently TERRIBLE; they overrode many pre-existing vernacular names because they weren't phylogenetically correct; maybe dorcopsises aren't "true wallabys", but "wallaby" is a word that is more recognizable and it isn't totally off base phylogenetically. And English is full of vernacular names that are totally off base phylogenetically and it really don't confuse anybody; prairie dog, starfish, jellyfish. Using a genus name as a part of a "common" name and translating the epithet doesn't help anybody (especially when the epithet is an eponym; e.g "Slater's amphisbaena").

Who is actually reading these article?[edit]

We do write Wikipedia for a general audience. However, Wikipedia is full of niche topics that are mostly of interest to specialists. Laypeople already recognize some scientific names, even if they may not recognize them as such: rhinoceros, boa constrictor, fuchsia, hippopotamus (and "E. coli" and "C diff", "MRSA" as abbreviations). Everybody knows dinosaurs by their scientific names. Getting into more specialized audiences (but not taxonomists), gardeners are likely to recognize more plants by scientific names than the general public (gladiolus, zinnia). People who keep fish and reptiles as pets may use vernacular names in everyday speech, but are more likely to be aware that vernacular names can be imprecise and the scientific name is a more useful search term. However, the majority of species are of interest only to taxonomists, or people who are so specialized that they are more likely to know an organism by it's scientific name than any vernacular name. Newly discovered species with well-crafted press releases may attract a brief surge of attention to a vernacular name, but if a species was unknown before the 21st century, it's not likely to have any long term interest for the layperson (and in some cases, the scientific name of a new species can drive public interest; e.g. Neopalpa donaldtrumpi).


New species of birds and mammals pretty routinely have vernacular names invented by their describers and included in the original description. That practice exists for other vertebrates, but is less prevalent.

every niche article assumes some familiarity with the subject. Don't need to define "goals" in a footballer article.


Regulated vernacular names[edit]

Birds are a very special case, where the vernacular names are tied to a particular species concept, and are thus more precise than scientific names. With many of the articles that have vernacular name titles, the names are coined by scientists (without the order provided by the IOC) and not really used at all by laypeople. You've been using vernacular names as titles, when you can only find a single name. I think as species become better and better known, they tend to accumulate more vernacular names. However, at some point, there's a threshold where a species is so well known that pretty much everybody knows it by a single common name. That threshold is what we should be aiming for in titling articles, not species that are so poorly known that only one scientists has bothered to coin a vernacular name for them.

Best practice[edit]

Some things I think are good practice in considering vernacular names title. WP:GOOGLETESTs have flaws, but if a vernacular name performs poorly against a scientific name, it's not a good choice. If taxonomic specialists were unaware of the existence of a species before the 21st century, laypeople certainly don't care about it; there's no reason to prefer a vernacular name coined in the original description. If databases that record multiple vernacular names only show a single one, that is a red flag for a poorly known species. If a vernacular name doesn't contain a word that is readily recognizable to a layperson as referring to a kind of organism, it's not really a helpful title for readers.

Common foo is a red flag. It's not going to be common everywhere. US/UK commonness should be priviledged.

Can a particular vernacular name refer to a broader or narrower taxonomic circumscription? If so, consider what readers are most likely to be seeking? (turkey, pig, cardinal)

Does the vernacular name require disambiguation? Reconsider. Grayling is a disgrace.

Results of plant guideline[edit]

Plants do use vernacular name titles sometimes. While 99% of plant articles use scientific names, almost half of the taxa in the 1000 most viewed articles use vernacular title (I've compiled an analysis at User:Plantdrew/Holarrhena pubescens). And the highly viewed articles that don't use vernacular titles provide evidence that readers are able to find them anyway, via redirects and search engine algorithms. There are a small number of very highly viewed articles (not just plants) where vernacular name titles make a great deal of sense. There are many other cases where vernacular titles don't really help readers at all.

To add[edit]

history of Wikipedia; high page rank wasn't guaranteed, didn't cover taxa articles that a traditional encylcopedia wouldn't

multiple vernacular names; different taxonomists have different styles blacktail vs. black-tailed. Avoiding incorrect phylogeny or not. Consistent names with genera (common names are usually binomial; the REALLY common ones are uninomial (see most of the plants with vernacular titles; traditional encyclopedia wouldn't cover many subjects with vernacular binomials).

WP:AT criteria

Wikipedia influence; not wikipedia's role to standardize vernaculars.

Editors enforce this more than readers demand it. Some readers are unhappy with "wrong" vernacular names being used.

I actually like common names and have done a lot of work adding them to Wikipedia

Many:many relationship between vernacular names and taxa. Secondarily, similar vernacular names referring to very different taxa and superficially different vernacular names referring to one taxon (bats, purple tang).

"Common names" in other subject areas[edit]

WikiProject Medicine (and Pharmacology) does not use common names. Knee cap, Viagra. Medicine sometimes tries to claim topics; testosterone, scopolamine (and sure was quick to take over bed bug): or just steamrolls over reasonable disambiguation cases; sex, copulation. Sometimes they do get seduced by COMMONNAME; incoming links to diabetes could more precise, and nobody is typing the sequence of characters that tozinameran redirects to. Merge of Orthocoronavirinae on 14 February 2020 is a snapshot of a moment in history; 4 weeks earlier or later people searching "coronavirus" would've entirely different subjects in mind.

Astronomy has resisted flash in the plan common names; Pluto's heart, that thing New Horizons visited after Pluto (no, not Ultima Thule; the first designation was awful, and I'm not recalling what it is now, but if NASA was last stodgy in their press releases, "Mu-69" (nice! throw a 420 in there for good measure) might've stuck by COMMONNAME standards.

Arsenic life


Military; Duck boat redirects to DUKW. Duck tour is relevant. Sherman tank is a long standing redirect. Hughes H-4 Hercules. Counterexample; Big Bertha (howitzer), but the official name is pretty messy

Jumbo jet; originally the 747

Fiction; Baby Yoda

Commons rule of COMMONNAME; if Commons (or iNaturalist?) doesn't have an image of a species that occurs in English speaking countries, it's not common enough to have a common name. (this prompted by reverting moves on several range-restricted Australian lizards).

Rule of thumb: if it doesn't occur in an English speaking country, isn't a bird, and weighs less than 1 kg, it doesn't have a common name.

FNA/(BSBI?) vs PLANTS style for plant common names; many-flowered vs manyflower, thin-leaved vs thinleaf (often just a translation of the epithet anyway). PLANTS may be the outlier in actively curated source (does it follow Kartesz more closely?), but has spread over the internet very effectively. Similiar variant styles in just about every other group of organisms with assigned common names (and *ahem* Capitals).

PLANTS spread pretty much being that if you wanted to download a database with a large number of plants in 2004, it was the best available (or more broadly, ITIS).

American mammals[edit]

  • ostrich/osprey/giraffe; splits that screw up well known vernacular names. Splitting goes forward, but vernacular title hasn't been cared for
  • pigeon/cardinal/robin, some of the best known birds in eastern North America

Neotropical frogs I know by common names

  • cane toad (but I wasn't certain it was Neotropical before I looked)
  • poison dart frog I presume this is Dendrobates (are any particular species more used in poisoning darts?)
  • golden toad famous extinction, I don't know the scientific name
  • red-eyed treefrog (did I get the common name as a blue (not green) link there? Agalychnis callidryas, no? (post-preview; no, common name a redlink and I got the scientific name right)


Herald (moth); nobody calls it this. Various Lepidoptera had capitalized titles with a definite article (e.g., The Herald, The Brick). Parenthetical disambiguation after decapitalizing and dropping "The" is a Wikipedia invention. iNaturalist has Herald Moth.

Ray (fish); ray is ambiguous, Batoidea is not a good search term.

Paleontology. Just about everything with a plausible COMMONNAME has pedants arguing about it accuracy (with these view expressed in Wikipedia's lede); Irish elk sabertooth tiger dire wolf. Mammoth and mastodon are not inaccurate, but does the general public know that they are distinct topics and subsets or synonyms? (I thought mastodons were a subset of mammoths until my mid 30s; (in my defense, hadn't really read anything about mastodons since childhood books that didn't freak out about Irish "elk").

  • Coccinellidae well recognized and better known by common names to many people. But what common names? Ladybug? Ladybird? Ladybird beetle?

Did you know: While there are several common species of tree frogs which occur in English speaking countries, the common tree frog occurs in Southeast Asia, where and " In its native range, it is also called "white-lipped tree frog"".

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