Talk:Medusavirus

RFV discussion: June–July 2020

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Medusavirus

Not in ViralZone or ICTV. Might be in Google News or Scholar. DCDuring (talk) 18:00, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Press releases date from March 2019, but I'm not sure about durable archiving. DCDuring (talk) 18:09, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Added three uses in three different journals, including the discovery paper. The term is barely over a year old. My understanding is official names of viruses are approved at periodic meetings, in contrast to official names of plants and animals which are valid on publication. Unless somebody objects I will change the language to English for now to reflect the unofficial status of the name. It does not appear in italics in the journal articles I checked. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 19:38, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

medusavirus with English plural medusaviruses is not Medusavirus.
Also definition as "A genus of .." with example ".. medusaviruses .. represented .." don't seem to match. Here the sense should rather be: "a virus of the genus .." or "the viruses of the genus .. collectively". --Marontyan (talk) 22:34, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

The two cites of the lower-case spelling belong at [[medusavirus]]. DCDuring (talk) 22:55, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

I split the page so we now have Medusavirus and medusavirus with independent definitions and three citations of each. This is not ideal, but one is Translingual and one is English for now. I continue to think Medusavirus is being used as an English word until it is formally accepted. I am not seeing uses in durable non-English publications. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 23:20, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

You will find that we have numerous instances of English unitalicized lowercase common noun entries and Translingual italicized uppercase proper noun entries for more or less the same virus. It also occurs for non-viral organisms, but not uniformly, eg, forsythia and Forsythia. DCDuring (talk) 23:47, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

There are English words of variable case. "A true grammar Nazi would never write 'grammar nazi'." Evidence of use as a translingual term can come from typography, italics when italics are called for. But the papers I cited under Medusavirus did not use italics. It can come from a name being nomeclaturally valid and used in an apparent technical sense. But Medusavirus does not seem to be an official name yet. The two scientific papers may have been using it as if it were, but the writer for The Atlantic probably was not. Anyway, I have left it translingual but I have restored the original typography of the quoted sentences. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 12:22, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

I have made this an English entry. If it ever gets accepted by ICTV, we can make the decision whether to convert it back to Translingual or add a separate Translingual L2. DCDuring (talk) 06:29, 23 July 2020 (UTC)