Talk:B. markmitchelli

RFD discussion: January–March 2020

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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B. markmitchelli

Such short forms of taxonomic names are usually intelligible only in a context in which the abbreviated genus is unambiguously known from prior use in the document. Exceptions are few, like E. coli and T. rex. DCDuring (talk) 11:32, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

• I think this is the wrong section for Translingual. There is another entry for markmitchelli anyway where this species is listed, so if this is non-standard I think it can be deleted. DonnanZ (talk) 00:20, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

• The thing about E. coli and T. rex is that they are ambiguous terms which are nevertheless freely used in pop science without prior identification of the genus. That is a good reason to include them yet is something that is, strangely enough, not at all acknowledged in our treatment of these terms, which instead suggests that uses of T. rex may just as well stand for Tachyoryctes rex. In this case there is no such argument for inclusion of this standardly abbreviated binomial name.  --Lambiam 10:36, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Just to clarify, I meant non-standard in Wiktionary; it is common treatment in the scientific world. DonnanZ (talk) 16:27, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

• Delete for the reasons mentioned. -Mike (talk) 02:36, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
• RFD-deleted. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:16, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

  Is there any WT:CFI-based rationale for deletion? --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:48, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

  Yes, the fact that these are private language and cannot be used “independently”, so aren’t “words in a language” in the meaning meant here. We can’t include the abbreviations of the Palandt either. Fay Freak (talk) 14:13, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm on the fence about this, which is why I didn't !vote. On one hand, a lot of abbreviations, especially technical ones, are probably explained by the same texts that use them, and we still include them, and it does not stop three unconnected authors who use them from being "independent" in the sense of CFI. On the other hand, any taxonomic name like this can be abbreviated in this way, just like any first or middle or last name can be abbreviated, too, and I wouldn't want to have a huge list at [[M]] saying "abbreviation of Matthias", "abbreviation of Michael", "abbreviation of Macron", "abbreviation of Miller", etc for basically every name that starts with M. To my mind, the main argument against inclusion is then practical/pragmatic. (But this gets tricky fast. We had an RFD recently about some multi-letter abbreviation of yellow where I'm pretty sure I voted keep, but if three works discussing primary colors abbreviated them in tables or whatnot to r, b and y, would I want to include that? I don't think so.) The discussion of initials was Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2018/December#Initials and the abbreviation of yellow was Talk:ylw. - -sche (discuss) 21:22, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

@-sche Well I attempted to give further meaning to “independent”, meaning that the use should also be independent from previous definitions or disambiguations in the same work. In general also including such things is not what a dictionary does. Anyway it is misguided to presume like Dan Polansky that the WT:CFI are exhaustive regulations such as not inviting to use common sense or istiḥsān and I gave examples against such abbreviations that should be obvious (the usage in → Palandt). Somewhere one has to be consequential and practical, which goes without saying. If it is not at the abbreviation for yellow then the line is here. Fay Freak (talk) 21:49, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

1) "Independent" is defined in WT:CFI#Independent; 2) WT:CFI overrides are possible and long-standing English Wiktionary practice but it should be clear these are overrides. Overrides should not be presented as "per CFI". --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:08, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure about CFI, but we simply can't do this justice: the best place to find out what an abbreviated binomen means is in its immediate context, not in a dictionary. If we were to have an entry like this for all the possible species covered by a particular abbreviation, our readers would still have to get enough information from the original text to decide which of the multiple options was the correct one.

This entry is deceptive- species names containing the full name of a person are pretty rare, so they don't tend to repeat. On the other hand, B. australis gets at least 10 thousand raw Google hits, which include various flowering plants, ticks, butterflies, lizards, mollusks (from gastropods and shipworms to belemnites), fish, brachipods, amphibians, red algae, whales, crustaceans, birds- and probably more. Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for w:B. australis, but it lists only 3 plants and a fungus- by searching for australis, you can easily find a dozen more, without resorting to redirects or synonyms. Anything we attempt will be even more feeble. The fact is, there are approximately half a million published genera divided among 26 letters. Even if only an infinitesimal fraction of those end up in entries like this, we still will have too much for our resources without really doing much for our readers. We shouldn't even pretend to try this.

There are some things, like listing all of the different Main Streets or First Streets in all the cities and towns, that aren't specifically prohibited by CFI, but are simply impossible to do right- and this is definitely one of those. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:56, 2 March 2020 (UTC)