Disputatio:Serpentes

Meta

FYI: Lesgles, your deletions today reduced the text below 8K and therefore cut our score by 1 raw point (= 0.0025?) on Meta's list of 10,000 articles, and reduced the text below 10K and therefore cut our score by 4 raw points (= 0.044?) on Meta's list of 1000 articles. So we have gains in the quality of the text, but losses in our interwiki standings. Just so you know! IacobusAmor (disputatio) 02:05, 14 Martii 2020 (UTC)

It won't add many characters, but let me urge both of you, when you create or edit a taxonomic page, to add a category for the taxonomic rank, subdivided by kingdom: "Categoria:Subordines animalium/plantarum/etc." I just did that here. The great majority of such categories now already exist: any others can easily be created on the same pattern. The utility to readers may be doubted (though personally I don't doubt it!) but the utility for future edits and housekeeping will soon become evident, believe me. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:38, 14 Martii 2020 (UTC)

Um, OK. This is a Dewey 500 day, so a new one will soon be forthcoming, but we shouldn't be surprised if hundreds of biological articles lacking such a category still exist. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 12:57, 14 Martii 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the category tip, Andrew. Iacobus, I thought you might notice that. I'll think if there is anything else I want to add about snakes here to boost the numbers. Lesgles (disputatio) 17:14, 14 Martii 2020 (UTC)

A surprising number of the earliest articles (say, before 2010) had minimal or no bibliographic support, so a handy way of instantly boosting their size (not to mention their quality) has been to import a bibliography from one of the big wikis; however, much of the low-hanging fruit has been plucked (so to speak), particularly in regard to articles that needed only zero to 2,000 new characters to cross one of the thresholds (8K, 10K, 16K, 30K). You may still be able to find a few here and here though. ¶ Say, is Anne still around? Some of her tables are a year old and therefore no longer so useful. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 19:48, 14 Martii 2020 (UTC)

Yes, she seems to be :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:19, 18 Maii 2020 (UTC)

Meta again

I have just cheated :-) -- Wikidata's smart, but not that smart. This page used to match up with en:Snake but last month Wikidata was correctly changed to match this page up with d:Serpentes, the taxonomic term. But the 1000 Pages list uses d:snake. English only has one page, with a redirect, like we do (and like various other languages: Arabic has 2 distinct pages, but I haven't found anybody else that does). For the moment, I have put a Wikidata link onto our redirect page, matching what Spanish and Russian have; I had to turn the redirect page into a regular page just long enough to make the WD link. Eventually WD will notice this and probably remove the link, but for the moment we are back to having all of the 1000 pages.

I do not think it is useful to have separate articles for "snake" and "Serpentes," though I can see why it makes sense to have two WD items. Maybe the issue is that the 1000 Pages list should point to the sub-order name, but there are far more pages linked to d:snake. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 20:59, 17 Maii 2020 (UTC)

It's a pity the compilers of the 1000 and 10000 don't rely on the Spanish wiki for identifying their chosen articles in the area of biota. Of all the wikis, Spanish is the most reliable in choosing to use scientific terms for pagenames, and English is the most unpredictable. By using English, they end up with concepts like "nut" with no exact equivalents in other languages.

But I don't expect them to change any time soon ... Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:28, 18 Maii 2020 (UTC)

I get the impression that most of the people who work on those lists in Meta are monoglot anglophones (though not all). Over here in Latin-land we're not typical of the greater Wikipedia community! A. Mahoney (disputatio) 13:16, 18 Maii 2020 (UTC)