User talk:Peter M. Brown

Welcome material has been commented out.

My Advice

By definition, a biological synonym is obsolete. Also, if you encounter an obvious error in the fossil record portion of a taxobox, feel free to go ahead and change it, then find a suitable reference later. I've done that a couple times before, like the time I saw that the taxobox for sand dollars said they were from the Silurian, even though the oldest known sand dollar dates from the Paleocene.--Mr Fink (talk) 00:29, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Taking the urea or uric acid

Hi, Peter. Recently you started a discussion at User talk:Philcha#Urea in Triassic therapsids. I've found something you mind find interesting and possibly useful - see my Talk. --Philcha (talk) 10:08, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Your interest in paleontology

Hi, Peter, I looked at your User page and found your interest in paleontology, especially for 4th or 5th grade children. Some things you might find useful:

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Paleontology is an "association" of people in WP who are interested in paleontology. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Palaeontology is a page for discussing and for getting advice. Wikipedia:WikiProject_Paleontology#Resources has notes about where to get information and sources for citations - including a list of academic journals that give info for free!
• User:Philcha#Useful stuff is my "toolbox". I particularly recommend how to build citations and how to (often) revive dead links. I suggest you copy any you think useful into a Wikipedia:Subpages of your User page - and include in your User page (top-level) an index of your Subpages. On my User page the pic of a pen at the top right links to my index of my "Essays" subpage - I find it easy than text as my eyesight is lousy.
• You may find useful User:Philcha/Essays/Advice for new Wikipedia editors - if so, make a copy in a subpage of your User page.
• Have a look at User:Philcha#Improved and got passed as GA - "GA" means its passed the Good Article criteria. You'll see a few paleontology articles there, and I got into zoology articles when I realised that my ignorance of zoology was a problem for further work on paleontology articles - although the zoology articles have become an end in their themselves, as I found that the articles on higher-level taxa were mediocre at best.
• I disagree with a lot of WP's style guide as it's based on a paper-based style guide for academics, and IMO is unsuitable for readers on screens and for teenagers (and often too difficult for their parents too). I have some notes on that at User:Philcha#My thoughts on style, and I guess these may be even more relevant for the age group you're aiming for. --Philcha (talk) 12:18, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event

I reverted this edit of yours in the article. I was going to move it, when I realized that we already had some significant information about marsupials and monotremes in the Mammals section. The lead of the article needs to present general information, not a lot of specifics. If we discussed what happened to marsupials, really a very small part of the mammalian clade, we'd have to mention a vast number of genera in the lead. It becomes unwieldy. And honestly, anyone who comes to read the article is probably there to find out what happened to the dinosaurs. It's no big deal, but several people have given you some ideas on how to edit these articles. One more thing. A lot of these articles are featured articles. They meet the highest standards of Wikipedia, and represent the best that the project has to offer. K-T is a featured article, and as such, it has been meticulously cleaned up and maintained. One of the big things I watch for is the quality of citations and sources. If you are going to add a source, I would highly recommend you learn to use the "cite" feature of Wikipedia. For example, the book you cited can be written as such<ref name="isbn0-632-05637-1">{{cite book |author= |title=Vertebrate palaeontology |publisher=Blackwell Science |location=Oxford |year=2005 |pages= |isbn=0-632-05637-1 |oclc= |doi= |accessdate=}}</ref>. It would show up as: Vertebrate palaeontology. Oxford: Blackwell Science. 2005. ISBN 0-632-05637-1. See WP:CITET for more information. Good luck in editing. It takes time to learn everything, and we are all here to help! OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 05:14, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Margarine

Sure enough, if margarine is from the Greek, it probably shouldn't be in the section dealing with Romance languages. I moved it to the non-Romance paragraph. I actually hadn't known the etymology of margarine before, and I was a classics major! Vanisaac (talk) 00:22, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

I think that did it. We went from awkward, to misleading, finally to infomative. Vanisaac (talk)

Definition of clade

I agree strongly with the point you made when editing Phylogenetic nomenclature, namely that a wikilink is not a replacement for a definition, so a definition of "clade" is needed before its use. The one you gave, though, is not quite precise enough. "A group consisting of a species and all its descendants" doesn't exclude the possibility that there could be other species in the group. Ereshefsky [Ereshefsky, Marc (2001), "Philosophy of Biological Classification", Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, Chichester, UK: Wiley, ISBN 0470016175, retrieved 2011-02-05] defines a monophyletic taxon (i.e. a clade) by saying that it "contains an ancestor and all and only its descendants". Although the qualification is needed, I find the phrase "all and only" clumsy. Somehow I don't like "a group consisting only of a species and all its descendants". I usually write something like "A group consisting of a species and all its descendants, and no other species", but that's not very elegant either. I'd really like to find a sentence which expresses precisely what is required. Any ideas? Peter coxhead (talk) 19:18, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

I actually copied that definition from the Clade article. The way I use "consisting of," the components listed are exhaustive. Otherwise I say "consisting partly of" or "consisting mainly of." Perhaps, though, mine only a regional use of the term. Would "consisting entirely of" work? How about "composed of" or "made up of"? Peter M. Brown (talk) 20:30, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Your usage and mine match. It's one of these classic issues in language use. In many contexts, we don't have any doubts as to what "consist of" means. "The team consists of three people" can't possibly mean there are more than three. This source gives one meaning of "consist of" as 'composed of' and then refers on to this discussion which, annoyingly, doesn't include "consist", but does say of "comprise" (which to me is an exact synonym of "consist of"), that it usually implies that all of the components are stated. So I've taken it that, contrary to my personal use, "A consists of B and C" does not rule out to some people that it may also contain D. Then I note that not just Ereshefsky, but other sources, add some extra qualification to the definition to rule out extra species. "Consisting entirely of a species and all its descendants" or "consisting solely of a species and all its descendants" both seem to me better than "consisting only of a species and all its descendants", though I'm not sure why, and this may be down to personal preference or dialect differences. Perhaps it's best left alone, but I thought I'd mention the issue to you, since you seem to care about precision in language (which not everyone does, I find). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:28, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

"Solely" it is! Peter M. Brown (talk) 15:45, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

"A group consisting of a species and all its descendants, and no other species" IS elegant writing. Use italics for "no other species." It will add emphasis and serve the additional purpose of notifying editors that you wrote precisely and it does not require editing. Very respectfully, Tiyang (talk) 08:35, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

"Solely" is more concise; I regard that as a virtue. If you peruse my contributions, you will note that I never use italics for emphasis in the article namespace. Wikipedia is for the presentation of facts, and editorial views—this is more important than that—are not appropriate. Peter Brown (talk) 14:36, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Personally I feel Peter C. and Peter B.s suggestion of "solely" makes for a more elegant wording. Petter Bøckman (talk) 19:43, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Monkeys and paraphyly

Monkeys surely are a paraphyletic group, by the definition that a paraphyletic group is formed by removing a smaller monophyletic group from a larger monophyletic group. Simiiformes are the larger monophyletic group; Hominoidea are the smaller monophyletic group. Taking Hominoidea away from Simiiformes leaves monkeys. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:29, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

I hadn't thought of the baboons as monkeys. I was right, though, albeit for the wrong reason, as Catopithecus was a member of Simiiformes and not of Hominoidea or the monkeys. The accuracy of my edit, anyhow, is more important than the accuracy of my edit summary. Do you agree that monkeys are polyphyletic? Peter M. Brown (talk) 22:25, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Actually I don't. I didn't revert your edit because you're a serious editor and I wanted to discuss it first. If you look at Monkey#Classification, you'll see that it uses what I think are the traditional terms: Platyrrhini = New World monkeys, Cercopithecidae = Old World monkeys, therefore monkeys = Platyrrhini + Cercopithecidae. This group is definitely paraphyletic. The article Baboon begins "Baboons are African and Arabian Old World monkeys ...".

There are (at least) two senses of "monkey":

• A popular, completely non-scientific sense, which depends on superficial appearance and behaviour. In this sense, baboons aren't typical monkeys (whereas gibbons are more likely to be called monkeys by non-biologists, in my experience, based on their arboreal behaviour).
• A sense based on grades, in which monkeys form a grade between prosimians and apes/humans, which used to correspond to the scientific classification (cf. reptiles). This is the sense used in Wikipedia, pretty consistently. This sense is paraphyletic.

So I think your edit should be undone. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:30, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Undoing the edit would restore the claim that monkeys are paraphyletic.

They are not, if this is taken to mean that the group consists solely of animals in one clade but not in exactly one subordinate clade. Though a complete phylogeny would be unwieldy, the particular summary in Monkeys#Classification is misleading in that it does suggest paraphyly. As the phylogeny in the List of fossil primates#Simiiformes makes clear, genera like Catopithecus, while included in Simiiformes, do not belong either to Hominoidea or to the monkeys (Platyrrhini together with Cercopithecidae). The list includes many other genera of this sort.

The wider sense of polyphyly, allowing the subtraction of more than one subordinate clade, is nearly empty. Every group with any common ancestor at all qualifies as paraphyletic unless a limit is set on the number of clades that may be excluded.

If, by monkeys = Platyrrhini + Cercopithecidae, you mean that the monkeys consist solely of the Platyrrhini and the Cercopithecidae, then they are polyphyletic, as they do not include their common ancestor in the basal Simiiformes. The lead paragraph of Monkeys, as I have modified it, is therefore correct.

Now that you have called my attention to it, I should probably modify Monkeys#Classification as well. Peter M. Brown (talk) 16:59, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Two separate issues:

• I think you mean "The wider sense of paraphyly, allowing the subtraction of more than one subordinate clade, is nearly empty." The precise definition of paraphyly in the case of more than one clade being removed is an issue which the current WP articles don't fully deal with, and which is indeed confused in the literature. It's something I intend to return to; I have collected sources on this, but not yet written anything.
• The classification section in the Monkey article only discusses extant species. (I've changed it to make this clear.) So what I meant was extant monkeys = Platyrrhini + Cercopithecidae. If extinct species are included, the question is then whether monkeys (extant + extinct) = Simiiformes - Hominoidea, or in more self-consistent language whether monkeys (extant + extinct) = simians - (apes+humans). What's the evidence that this isn't how the word "monkey" is used?

Peter coxhead (talk) 18:56, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I meant "paraphyly."

I look forward to reading your presentation of the varied senses of the term.

There isn't a question whether

extinct Platyrrhini + extinct Cercopithecidae + extant Platyrrhini + extant Cercopithecidae = Simiiformes - Hominoidea.

They are not equal, since the expression on the right-hand side denotes a group including Catopithecus but the expression on the left-hand side does not.

In the legend to the diagram in Monkeys#Classification, as you have revised it, you continue to call the monkeys paraphyletic. It seems that you are introducing the extant/extinct distinction somewhere (where?) in the definition of paraphyly, something that none of the -phyly articles do. Do you take the same approach to monophyly: for a group to be monophyletic, is it necessary only that it include a species and all of its extant descendants? Mammalia would then be monophyletic, but so would mammalia minus the multituberculata. Is that your intent?

I do not understand your final question. What's the evidence that what isn't how the word "monkey" is used? Certainly, the word is used for extinct species, the Jamaican Monkey for example. Peter M. Brown (talk) 21:37, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

The edit I made to Monkey was only intended to be a "holding" one: to point out that the classification and phylogeny described there are only for extant species. No position on the paraphyly issue was intended; this is as yet "unsettled" between us, in my view.

The question is whether "monkey" means all simians (i.e. all members of Simiiformes), extant or extinct, minus all hominoids, extant or extinct. If it does, then monkeys are unquestionably a paraphyletic group. If it doesn't, i.e. if there are some other simians, extant or extinct, which are excluded from the group "monkeys", then although under some definitions of paraphyly monkeys would still be paraphyletic, I wouldn't say this in the Monkey article, because it would need too much qualification to be useful.

[Side remarks: There are some sources which use terms like "monophyly" and "paraphyly" only in relation to a given tree, so they might well say that extant mammals are monophyletic based on the tree topology for extant mammals. I do not wish to say this; sorry if that wasn't clear.]

So at the risk of repetition, here's my argument.

1. All monkeys = all simians - all hominoids ≠ all Platyrrhini + all Cercopithecidae
2. Extant monkeys = extant simians - extant hominoids = extant Platyrrhini + extant Cercopithecidae
3. The paraphyly (under most but not all definitions of the term) of the extant members of a group depends on the paraphyly of all its members, extant or extinct.
4. All monkeys are a paraphyletic group because of (1).
5. Extant monkeys are a paraphyletic group because of (3) and (4).

The key question is whether (1) is correct as to the way the term "monkey" is used, i.e. whether extinct simians which are not in Platyrrhini or Cercopithecidae or Hominoidea are called monkeys or not. I think that they (probably) are. The sources I can find either don't use any common term or used monkey. But there may be other sources that I don't know that are clear that monkey is not used in this way. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:43, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Addendum: On reflection, in terms of the article, it doesn't seem to me to matter whether monkeys are paraphyletic or polyphyletic; the key point is that they aren't a monophyletic group. So I've edited Monkey so that it consistently says that monkeys aren't monophyletic. Given the confusion in the literature over the precise definition of "paraphyly", and the fact that the key issue in current scientific classification is whether a group is monophyletic or not, not whether it is paraphyletic or polyphyletic, it may almost always be best to use "not monophyletic". Peter coxhead (talk) 11:00, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

You beat me to it! I, also, was going to substitute "not monophyletic."

Over a thousand words in our exchange, and it turns out that all we disagree on is a minor matter of usage! Peter M. Brown (talk) 18:05, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

No, I still think that monkeys are a paraphyletic group and that your change to "polyphyletic" was wrong. But I doubt that either of our views can be attributed to reliable sources, so agreeing on "not monophyletic" is the best solution. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:36, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Evolution of mammals

I understand your position in re citations. Yes, there are a hundred but some of the material isn't properly sourced. I am under the impression that a tag like refimprove is to be added in order to alert the main editors (the 'maintainers' if you will) that there's an issue to be addressed. However, it hardly cripples an otherwise good article. No reason for an edit fracas over it. Cheers. PainMan (talk) 02:42, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

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Mammals

Hi, Peter. How far do you to go with this article - I was about to go for GA. I've done a few on zoology and paleontology. If you was about to go for GA, I'll help providing I get clear credit as 2nd nominator in the nomination. .

I have an illness which make it for me to hear and say words, and use online dictionaries. So your "A resource on the pronunciation of paleontological terms" is important to I, and I have some ideas.

Also my illness makes it difficult to use {{ref ... }}, so I use SfnRef for the full citation in the "References" and Sfn for 1 use of the citation. E.g. {{ref ... }} (ref to avoid error messages), so I use Sfn and SfnRef, e.g. at Brachiopods and Robert Rossen

• {{[[Template:Ruppert, E.E (2004). Invertebrate Zoology (7 ed.). Brooks / Cole. ISBN 0030259827. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) |Ruppert, E.E (2004). Invertebrate Zoology (7 ed.). Brooks / Cole. ISBN 0030259827. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) ]]}} is the full citation at "References"
• {{sfn}} is 1 use of the citation. --Philcha (talk) 07:14, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I take it, Philcha, that you approve of my edits to the Mammal article. It's great to know that. Positive feedback on these Talk pages is rare; the article has over 200 watchers, but there's no way of telling whether the fact that they have offered no serious challenges to my edits means that they approve of them or that they don't care. As the article averages over 3000 hits daily, I certainly hope that some are paying close attention. Ucucha seems to be doing so.

As you can see from my user page, I am very much an amateur when it comes to mammalogy. As I am in no position to maintain that all sections of the Mammal article are factually accurate, I cannot nominate the article for GA.

My main concern in editing Mammal as well as Mammaliaformes and Evolution of Mammals has been to oppose the arrogance of many devotees of the phylogenetic school and, in particular, of those who limit Mammalia to the crown mammals. (Many adherents totally fail to distinguish these two positions.) Having cut my teeth on Kemp and Benton, I started out with a different orientation, one I still think coherent. I do, however, respect both the phylogenetic approach and responsible advocacy of a narrow definition of Mammalia; Rowe's 1988 paper, the foundation for much recent nonsense, is itself a superb piece of work. As I have argued elsewhere on Wikipedia, though, many enthusiasts are concerned with being fashionable rather than promoting a view that they fully understand.

I do think that I have largely achieved my objective of rendering the three articles neutral in this respect. If you want to bring the Mammal article up to GA standards and then nominate it, by all means go ahead. According to the guidelines, "Nominations for articles that are unstable because of constructive editing should be placed on hold," and I have certainly rendered the article unstable in this manner. I'll be happy to stay out of your way until you have gone through the process.

I certainly welcome any help that you can provide on the pronunciation of paleontological terms. http://dinosaurs.about.com is the only source I have found that is at all comprehensive, and I trust it not at all; they put the stress on the fourth syllable of "morganucodon", for example, but I am quite sure that it belongs on the third. My procedure remains the crude one explained on my user page.

Peter M. Brown (talk) 15:30, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm watching mammal too. I quite agree with Peters stance. The mammal article (as well as the related stuff) has a lot of good info, and should clearly be FA material, perhaps with a slight bit of polishing. Petter Bøckman (talk) 18:59, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Monophyly

Please see Talk:Monophyly#Definition of monophyly. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:11, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Template:Taxonomy/Chiniquodontoidea/Amniota

Peter; can you explain what the point of this template is? I'm just trying to understand what all the issues are/etc. Thanks! ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 06:56, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

See my discussion at Template talk:Taxonomy/Mammalia. Peter M. Brown (talk) 16:01, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Finishing touches to Transitional fossil

Hello Peter M. Brown, I am the GA reviewer for Transitional fossil. The review has been stuck for some weeks now, with the only outstanding actions being to supply a few missing citations. I notice you've done some work on the article. Would you be up to sorting out the gaps, or do you know other editors who could do the work? with best wishes Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:32, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

No, my interests lie elsewhere. All I've contributed to this article is one reference. The best person for the job is Petter Bøckman; as he has made substantial contributions to this article, though, I expect you've already contacted him. Peter M. Brown (talk) 14:22, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

reptiles

This is the fourth time you have deleted the explanation that coldbloodedness, scales, and egglaying do not define reptiles although historically such distinctions have been made. The historical evolution of the definition is covered in the article and should be summarized. There is nothing factually wrong with or confusing about what you have deleted. Please revert your last deletions and discuss the matter on the talk page rather than violate wp:3rr. μηδείς (talk) 23:17, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

The fourth time? I reverted on 7 June at 21:07 and 22:42 UTC; I don't know what other edits you are concerned about. In each of these two cases, I think that I provided clear edit summaries. If you regard them as inadequate, please use Talk:Reptile to explain why. Peter M. Brown (talk) 15:07, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Sourcing

I'm not sure if there's anything specifically about this in official policy, but IMO adding something you know in your gut to be true and then worrying about doing the research later is simply sloppy editing and goes against the spirit if not the letter of the Verifiability policy. I'm not very familiar with the FV template but I was under the impression it was for statements that seem at least somewhat common sense and can likely be sourced with a little digging. The statements on the Cladistics article seemed to be more along the lines of original synthesis, and a source would have to be extremely specific to back up those claims using those specific examples. I've long had an issue with that article as a whole as it looks like the editors who contributed most of the current text are not familiar with Wikipedia style. A lot of it seems to be written like a research article citing sources only as examples in support of the claims being made, rather than as sources which explicitly make those same specific claims as required by Verifiability. As a random example, it would be inappropriate to write "lions are carnivores" and cite one source which describes the limb function and another which describes the tooth morphology. Rather, the claim "lions are carnivores" needs to be backed up by a source that also says explicitly that "lions are carnivores." So, if I saw the statement "lions are carnivores" marked with the FV template, I'd have no problem, because that's obviously likely to be verifiable. But if I saw a statement to the effect that "the carnivory of lions is supported by a suite of characters including their limb and tooth morphology", FV wouldn't be enough, because the likelihood of anybody else coming along and adding a source with that specific claim, clearly originating with the editor, is pretty low. MMartyniuk (talk) 13:00, 18 July 2012 (UTC) Just a heads-up, I started a discussion about this here: [1] Looks like the FV is just another version of citation needed, which is ok to use, but I personally detest it. If something lacks a cite it should be deleted, period, IMHO, not simply flagged as undocumented. But others will disagree with me there :) Anyway, WP Verifiability policy states that it is up to individual editors how to handle unverified content. The responsibility is on the eidtor adding content to document a source. If they fail to do so, or provide a source which does not support the content, the next editor may flag it, delete it, etc. Once it's deleted, a person restoring the info must add a source. So I guess my editorial style of simply deleting unverified content simply accelerates this process... MMartyniuk (talk) 14:17, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Mats Envall

This user was community-banned indefinitely blocked because of a long history of disruptive edits. The fact that he freely returns and basically thumbs his nose at Wikipedia community consensus is itself disruptive. By engaging him, you validate his disruption. I have seen others attempt to engage with him in the past, with no positive outcome for the encyclopedia. Perhaps your interchange will turn out differently, but you need to understand that I and no doubt others see it as disrespectful of the Wikipedia community. If you delete this, please extend me the courtesy of indicating in the edit summary that you have read it.--Curtis Clark (talk) 23:53, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Your advice and background information is most welcome. I certainly shall not delete it. Peter M. Brown (talk) 00:03, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

See here for the kind of behaviour that led to Envall's ban, as well as User talk:Consist. I think there's a community ban discussion somewhere but I can't find it now. The biggest problem with Envall is that he's the sort of user who can drain huge amounts of others' time and energy, without ever leading to an improvement in a Wikipedia article. Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 04:00, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your reference to the Administrator's noticeboard, which provided me with the reference to Envall's 2008 article. He seems to be influenced by the process philosophy of Whitehead although his general grasp of philosophy is weak; his representation of Aristotle is quite inaccurate. A new development is his reliance on Russell's paradox; he now seems to realize that his denial of the existence of classes requires more justification than he has provided in the past.

The material in User talk:Consist mostly consists of shouting; there is no real attempt to engage Envall's views.

I fully concur that he has no respect for Wikipedia guidelines and that a permanent block is appropriate. Until that happens, however, I see no problem with pursuing an exchange. Peter M. Brown (talk) 17:36, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not about engaging Envall's views. If you wish to engage him further, I have no doubt that you could find contact information for him somewhere else on the web, but he may not post here. Danger! ^{High voltage!} 19:46, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

I suppose you're right. My thought was that, since Envall has published in a respected journal, I could incorporate his view in an article as a criticism of cladism. Unless someone else has brought process philosopy into the debates over taxonomy, however, his must be regarded as a fringe view. Peter M. Brown (talk) 20:03, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to remove the entire section of Talk:Clade; there's no point to blocking if blocked editors can come back and post at will. Apologies in advance, Peter, for removing your responses, but they'd seem kind of silly sitting there without the rest of the conversation.

I seem to remember that, in the early days of cladistics, others made similar arguments, so although his specific take might be fringe, you can probably find plenty of references from the 1980s to support the general view.--Curtis Clark (talk) 20:10, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Defining and illustrating polyphyly

Peter, could you please look at User:Peter_coxhead/Work/Phyletic terminology#Diagram to illustrate polyphyly? It tries to explain my puzzle over how to define and illustrate "polyphyly". I've felt obliged to put this on one of my user pages, rather than a talk page, because of the need to include quite a number of diagrams. I'm inviting Petter Bøckman and Curtis Clark to look at this, too. There may be others who should be asked to comment. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:11, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

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Mats Envall, again

Please do not engage him on Wikipedia. He was indefinitely blocked, and by posting he is evading his block. It has sufficed to simply delete his posts as he makes them, but if other editors engage him, it will be necessary to go to AN/I to get a rangeblock on his IP (unless we're lucky enough that it's static). Independent of his arguments, he was blocked for disruptive edits, and none of us should encourage him to evade that block.--Curtis Clark (talk) 23:40, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

And I'll add that, other than perhaps violating WP:UNDUE, there's no reason not to include his ideas; the prohibition is on him personally.--Curtis Clark (talk) 23:43, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Darn it, this time he had a point! And he was not using a talk page for general discussion of the article's subject but making a specific suggestion as to how it might be improved. If the mechanisms and policies of Wikipedia interfere with my responding to an intelligent and relevant post with a post of my own, the policies need to be changed. Please provide or refer me to a fuller explanation of the way things work and instructions as to how to propose such a change. Of course, if Envall is blocked so that he cannot post, I obviously won't be responding, but it's absurd to permit posts but scold me for my response. Peter M. Brown (talk) 00:03, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

I now note that you have deleted both his post and mine. Okay by me. Presumably you would have deleted his contribution if I had not responded. Is it really that much more trouble to delete mine as well? Based on my experience, I expected the section to be deleted, but my comment is still there in the history. Peter M. Brown (talk) 00:11, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

An administrator has now protected the page so that only autoconfirmed registered users can post. I should have asked for that the first time; it is the appropriate response. I apologize for not having thought of it.

Please try to understand the bigger issue. Mats was blocked for disruptive editing. The block was made indefinite, which means that any indication of sincere contrition on his part could well result in the block being lifted. Instead he posts from an IP and identifies himself: he is in effect saying "Your decisions mean nothing to me". It's only because (in my estimation) his posts have been spaced out that no one has gone to AN/I asking for an IP block. And so the only tool left is to ignore him and delete his posts.

I understand that you might want to engage him, and of all the people I've met on Wikipedia, you seem to have the best background to engage him effectively (assuming that he didn't make up his mind years ago). I have no problem with your engaging him, just not on Wikipedia. It's disrespectful of the editors who supported his block, and the editors since who have maintained the block by deleting his posts. Again, I could have left your response (and would be happy to undo myself and remove only his post, if you wish), but (1) your response without his post would seem sort of disconnected, and (2) if it became a pattern to delete his posts but leave the responses, he could still use that to disrupt the encyclopedia.

If he wants to contact you directly, he can use Wikipedia email. I did a quick Google search to see whether I could find an email address for him, but there are several people with his name, so it wasn't immediately apparent, although it shouldn't be hard to figure out. (In the process, I found and deleted some posts he had made to Talk:Holophyly.)--Curtis Clark (talk) 04:20, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

Just a thank you for your tireless effort to help bringing order to the many systematic related topics! Petter Bøckman (talk) 11:36, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Amphibian

I have been working on the article Amphibian and have addressed your "citation needed" tag. If you see other things that concern you about the article, especially the Evolution or Classification sections, your help on improving it would be much appreciated. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 10:40, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

You should know...

...that Administrators cannot change someone's username. That can only be performed by a Bureaucrat, and it's difficult because of SUL. dangerouspanda 16:45, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I do know. I thought that "Adminstrator" was more newbie-friendly than "Bureaucrat" and anyhow bureaucrats do administer, don't they? Your correction is certainly appropriate, though. Peter Brown (talk) 18:26, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Tetrapod classification

Hi!

I'll answer you here rather than on my talk page:

I think we should have a more or less "classical" taxonomy as suggested by the edit somewhere. It is far better than the last one in that it 1) is about tetrapods rather than a lot of fish, and 2) actually deals with the whole of tetrapoda. Finding a suitable one should be no problem, I'd suggest one from Romer and Parson or Edwin and Morales, both are "consensus view" taxonomies with most known extinct groups included. Where they differ from modern taxonomies (splitting up of Insectivora for instance) we could add annotations.

I don't know how far down in detail we need to go though. Perhaps only detailing it down to subclasses would suffice and make it more stable. Petter Bøckman (talk) 10:58, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

I am very much in favor of limiting detail. For our readership, there's little point in having more than a couple of dozen subordinate taxa. However, while I don't have immediate access to the books you mention (Romer & Parsons is available at a local public library), I note that The Taxonomicon shows the family Whatcheeriidae, among others, right under superclass Tetrapoda; there isn't even a class, never mind a subclass. Unless Romer & Parsons has another idea, would you suggest omitting these families entirely? Peter Brown (talk) 16:34, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

The Taxonomicon and TOL-web are both both run by hard core phylogenetic taxonomists, partly the the very same people sitting on the board of the PhyloCode. Poor Whatcheeriidae falling outside Amphibia is a result of a strict crown-group approach to naming, something which is not a majority approach. Since the phylogenetic tree at that point is all but well understood, it is an approach we need to stay well away from (though it needs to be mentioned). If you want to have an idea of the complexity of the problem, see Labyrinthodontia#Origin_of_modern_amphibians.

Romer and Parson has the "classical" scheme. It is a bit dated, but it is stable. I think it should be included even if only for an historical reference:

• Cl. Amphibia
  • Subcl. Labyrinthodontia (including all contentious groups like Whatcheeriidae)
  • Subcl. Lepospondyli
  • Subcl. Lissamphibia
• Cl. Reptilia
  • Subcl. Anapsida (including non-crown reptiles like "cotylosaurs" and Mesosauria)
  • Subcl. Diapsida
  • Subcl. Synapsida
  • Subcl. Euryapsida, usually considered biphyletic and thus dropped
• Cl. Aves
  • Subcl. Archaeornithes (birds with bony tails)
  • Subcl. Neornithes (in Romer's work also including a number of toothed birds)
• Cl. Mammalia
  • Subcl. Monotremata, egg-laying mammals
  • Subcl. Theria, live-bearing mammals

As you can see, this is old-school classification: Orderly and neat and easy to understand. The same or similar schemes are found in any number of standard text books, see e.g. Hildebran & Goslow 2001 "Analysis of Vertebrate Structure". Petter Bøckman (talk) 09:04, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

The Taxonomicon is not limited to crown groups, as it includes Order †Multituberculata, but the taxa listed do all seem to be arguably monophyletic. A limitation to clades is not a fringe position although, as you have said repeatedly on various talk pages, it is a minority approach. Based on my date-limited search of Google Scholar, however, Labyrinthodontia and Euryapsida are fringe and should be mentioned only in an explicitly historical discussion; in papers published since 2000, they seem to be referred to only in historical contexts. Anapsida seems to be minority, though not fringe; a cladogram in Reisz & Scott (2002) shows Anapsida as a clade with Mesosauridae and Parareptilia as the immediately subordinate taxa. I have not read the article in detail, but I note that the Captorhinidae are not shown.

I have no objection to providing historical information so long as it is clearly indicated as such. Readers are more likely, however, to want a high-level taxonomy limited to terms in current use, which would exclude Euryapsida. Can this be provided?

Peter Brown (talk) 22:23, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Hildebran & Goslow would do I think. The are more recent (2001), yet "historic" in their approach, using a systematics that is the linear descendant of Romer's. It is fairly similar to the one above (I have it at work, been home with a nasty cold for a couple of days), but from memory I think it has Amphibia divided into Ichthyostegalia, Anthracosauria (=Reptiliomorpha), Temnospondyli and Lissamphibia, and have excluded Euryapsida from the reptiles. It also has an extra subclass for Enantiornithes (bringing Aves to three subclasses). So it has no polyphylies and no use of explicitly archaic terms like Labyrinthodontia. I think it would suit the purpose extremely well. Petter Bøckman (talk) 19:19, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

It's Hildebrand, not Hildebran. Whatever. I can readily get access to the 1995 edition, but not to the 2001 version. If 1995 isn't adequate, have you the inclination to undertake a revision of the article?

Get well soon! Peter Brown (talk) 01:21, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll post the Hildebrand (sigh...) & Goslow scheme here come monday, and if you think it will do, I'll edit the article. Petter Bøckman (talk) 13:08, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Michel Laurin's problem

See Polydactyly in early tetrapods: Revision history. There is no one on earth better qualified to address this subject than Michel Laurin. User:MrOllie is evidently stalking him, reverting his contributions without comment, in this and a number of other areas, including Reptile, Tiktaalik, Acanthostega, and Mesosaurus, though Laurin consistently provides adequate references. Laurin does cite his own work, but always in a manner that "is relevant and conforms to the content policies" in the language of WP:SELFCITE. A world-renowned expert with significant contributions to a field cannot provide adequate coverage if he ignores his own work, all of which appears in peer-reviewed publications. MrOllie's edit summaries, when he provides them, reference WP:COI, though there has been no violation.

MrOllie has even deleted reference to Laurin in the list of Robert R. Reisz's students in the article on Reisz, though there is no doubt whatever that Laurin was among his students. The relationship can easily be documented. I reverted this change today.

See User Talk: Michel Laurin#Welcome, really, a thread that I started. I have no doubt that, if MrOllie persists in this petty harassment, Laurin will be driven from Wikipedia, which would be a great loss. I, User:Medeis and User:Stranger forever have been reverting MrOllie's deletions, but this will clearly be insufficient. Is there anything else that can be done? Laurin himself asks this question on his talk page; an answer there by some knowledgeable person would probably be of more value than an answer here, though I can certainly relay information.

MrOllie has even complained of COI at User talk:Stranger forever, although this editor's only contributions are reversions of MrOllie's baseless reversions of Laurin's work.

Peter Brown (talk) 19:43, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I believe WP:AN3 is the place to go for assistance with edit wars, using {{uw-3rr}} on relevant user talk pages if users may be unaware the of polices regarding edit warring. --wintonian ^talk 20:00, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

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talk:Dinosaur

Hi Peter - looking forward to your thoughts on the peer-reviewed literature usage. Also, if you have ideas for the article, I'd love to see them laid out at talk:dinosaur. de Bivort 03:21, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

By the way, I restored the section you removed from the talk page. It's obviously relevant to Abyssal, and Firs, and my preference for the taxobox with the bird in it. It addresses your concerns with said image. Also a continuation of the previous section, which was ultimately about EWT's proposed change. de Bivort 03:26, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Just in case you were wondering...

what this was all about; I was trying to click on the IP's contributions link before the page had fully loaded on my iPhone. When it finished loading, the buttons shifted slightly and the spot I had just touched on the screen activated the rollback button instead, which is "hot". I have decided to stop editing from my phone btw :-) --RacerX¹¹ Talk to me^{Stalk me} 23:25, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Amphibian

Having taken many hours of editing to bring Amphibian to FA status a couple of months ago, I am a bit sensitive about people making alterations to the article. There was nothing wrong with your image caption but the citation provided led to an error page, and my replacement source didn't support the statement of most toxic animal, only most toxic frog. I also had to move the image about to get it to agree with the MOS requirements of portraying creatures facing the centre of the page and not squeezing the text between images. Another requirement during the FAC led to the removal of locations from the image captions in general. The careful selection of images in the article for the FAC does not make me welcome additions but this one is relevant to the topic under discussion. In the matter of "my" FAs, I'm like a mother hen fussing over its chicks :) Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:26, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

I have no problem with the link, so I expect that many others find it usable as well. Do you think that we should append a note to the citation noting that there is sometimes a problem? As you may know by now, I have sent you a wikipemail with more information. Peter Brown (talk) 17:38, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

The present link is fine. It was the original link, given by the editor who added the image to the article, that gave me an error message. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 19:15, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Contributions to Dinosaur article

Hi,

I've been a maintainer of the Dinosaur article since late 2005. Just wanted to let you know that I think your recent contributions were excellent. Please keep up the good work! Killdevil (talk) 18:57, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

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Opisthokont edit

Your recent edit to Opisthokont involved a very interesting paper, which I've now read. It does raise again for me the whole issue of how molecular phylogenetic studies should be used in Wikipedia. The problem is that we mostly don't follow WP:PSTS by using secondary sources. In a few areas there are secondary sources (e.g. the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group for the phylogeny and classification of angiosperms). In many other areas we can't use secondary sources, because they either don't exist, or are seriously out of date. So we use primary sources, journal articles. But these simply don't agree in the case of "deep phylogenies" like the divisions of the eukaryotes, or of the major animal phyla. Sometimes there appears to be consensus; consider Eukaryote#Phylogeny, where the second paragraph (the one that begins "As of 2011, there is widespread agreement that...") has five refs. However, three of these are Burki's research group, so actually there are at best three independent primary sources supporting this statement. How does a reader know whether these three are representative? When I've edited this stuff, as I have, I've tried to find as many relevant articles as I could, but I'm not a subject expert. I don't have any answers, only concerns. I'd be interested to know what you think. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:51, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Though we are both computer programmers professionally, you must be aware by now that you are far more expert in matters biological than I. I have taken children on nature walks, however, pointed out a tree with shelf fungus growing on it, and told them that they were more closely related to the fungus than to the tree, not thinking that I was saying anything controversial. I was therefore unhappy when I stumbled on this article. I cannot unsay what I said—the group is long since dispersed—but a least I can note the controversy on Wikipedia.

No, we cannot use secondary sources. Where there is expert disagreement, though, neutrality requires us to acknowledge it. Per WP:UNDUE, a contribution of any length does require us to represent viewpoints "in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources," so one needs to cast a wide net for relevant articles. To modify a single sentence, though, I didn't think this necessary. Molecular Biology and Evolution is a prominent enough peer-reviewed journal that I'm pretty sure it wouldn't publish fringe material, so I'm confident that I can cite it as dissenting view. If you know enough to replace "Some studies support the monophyly" by "Most studies support the monophyly", please go ahead. Peter Brown (talk) 23:33, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

No, my view is quite the contrary – see below. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:24, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you gents for pointing out this paper, extremely interesting reading! I do lack the computing background of the two of you, but I know enough statistics and genetics to recognise thorough work when I see it. Now I need to edit some of my PP-presentations ever so slightly... Petter Bøckman (talk) 13:53, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that this seems very thorough work. I have long been somewhat sceptical of the methods used in computer-based constructions of phylogenies. I personally think that too many WP articles have treated selected primary sources too uncritically, so I wasn't objecting to the edit – quite the contrary. I think that we need to indicate more often that these methods are critically dependent on the selection of the input data, for which this article is an excellent source. I suspect we really shouldn't write "most studies" based on primary sources, although I know I've done it. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:24, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

This article has other uses too I think. It (finally) provides a nice example of what happens with the with a clade name when phylogenetic knowledge changes. My panda-example was not quite there, the Opisthokonts would do nicely. Petter Bøckman (talk) 16:14, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Paraphyletic groups

Hi Peter, respectfully: "For the many biologists who accept paraphyletic groups…" I don't even understand what it would mean to "accept paraphyletic groups." That sounds to me synonymous with accepting wrong groups, or, more sympathetically, arguing against revisions to a traditional classification. What am I missing here?Stenen Bijl (talk) 08:52, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Let me give as an example Stace's standard Flora of the British Isles. In his latest revision (Clive Stace, 2010, New Flora of the British Isles, 3rd edition) while mainly using APG III he explicitly retains a few paraphyletic families "where the segregate taxa ... are very distinctive and do not easily fit in with the paraphyletic taxon from which they are separated", one purpose being to maintain families which are "recognisable morphologically" (Introduction, p. xx). An example is segregating Lemnaceae creating a paraphyletic Araceae. Since this is the standard Flora for the geographical area, recent county Floras, checklists, etc. are all using these paraphyletic families. This is what I mean by "accepting paraphyletic groups". Peter can say for himself what he means! Peter coxhead (talk) 13:07, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

All peer-reviewed contributions in biology utilize some taxonomy or other. Often, taxa not previously acknowledged are proposed with the idea that they will be of use in future work. To accept a paraphyletic group, in my sense, is to use it as a taxon in the assumed or proposed taxonomy. The "many biologists" to whom I refer include, for example, the 150 distinguished specialists from all over the world who joined to urge such "acceptance" in Nordal & Stedje (2005). My use of "accept" is not idiosyncratic.

Using paraphyletic groups this way reflects the view of Willi Hennig, who freely acknowledged their utility for some purposes. One of the merits of monophyletic groups, in his view, was that they could be used to define paraphyletic groups. If paraphyletic groups were wrong groups, this would not be a virtue.

I am defending the clause at issue mostly because its wording represents the resolution of an edit skirmish (of course, we do not edit war!) between me and Matt Martyniuk.

Peter Brown (talk) 18:24, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you both very much for the explanation! Personally, I still find it weird, almost like a multigenerational edit war between Aristotle and Watson and Crick, but you've demonstrated to my satisfaction and well beyond that acceptance of paraphyltic groups is a real phenomenon in biology. For all the things I despise about Wikipedia, this kind of learning interaction is what I like. Thank you.Stenen Bijl (talk) 05:44, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the interaction is most rewarding. Without it, editing Wikipedia would be a lonely hobby; I doubt that I could keep it up. As regards Watson and Crick, I see them as intellectual heirs of Democritus; if Aristotle's arguments against Democritus had some validity, they would apply against Watson and Crick as well. Aristotle was mistaken, but not weird. His distinction between form and substance is relevant to today's concerns: the ICZN Code is founded on a view of taxa as forms while the PhyloCode sees them as substances. Peter Brown (talk) 14:04, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Reference

• Nordal, I. & Stedje, B., coordinators (2005), "Paraphyletic taxa should be accepted", Taxon, 54 (1): 5–8, doi:10.2307/25065296{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link).

Range

I agree that the source is reliable as to Metatherian divergence, but as I noted in the edit summary, this is not the way it's done in 99% of current taxoboxes. I wouldn't have a problem using inferred range based on divergence time or molecular clock evidence rather than fossil evidence, but this would require a change to so many taxoboxes it should be discussed first. MMartyniuk (talk) 17:19, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

Loved your edit summary

on Marsupial! It is depressingly frequent to see authors' names omitted, only the first author listed, journalists citing only an institution rather than people, and worse yet a for-profit publisher being emphasized over the people who did the work. Seeing your edit was cheering. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 14:52, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

There really ought to be a guideline or something. Peter Brown (talk) 02:05, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there seems to be nothing beyond "typically includes". I've no experience with proposing guidelines, and rather despair of being able to negotiate such a fraught process. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 16:53, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

edits to Cladistics page

You deleted my edits to the cladistic pages, suggesting that they gave too much credit to Steve Farris. I see that you are not a systematist, and I wonder just how you justify your editorial choices, given that the section called for greater detail, which I provided. Are you suggesting that the historical information I provided is not true? - Andy Brower — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abrower (talk • contribs) 13:00, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Issues of neutrality are appropriately dealt with on the article talk page, not on a user talk page. Failing that, they go to WP:NPOVN. I have copied your concern to Talk:Cladistics#Neutrality issue, changing second person constructions to third person. Let us see what the community has to say. Peter Brown (talk) 14:50, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

A Barnstar for you!

Honorary Systematist Award

Despite your modest statements on your user page, and some doubt that has been expressed by another user, I wish to state that I consider you to be an extremely competent systematist (and, lest that seem odd, I'll state that I am a systematist myself, with some publications in the area). Perhaps training in philosophy helps, but I suspect that it has more to do with taking an interest in the area combined with a lot of reading and careful thought. Best wishes. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 17:54, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I am honored!!! A cephalopod barnstar? Don't expect me to know much about cephalopods. They're Lophotrochsomething; Lophotrochilidae? No, the Trochilidae are birds. I don't think that cephalods are birds. . . . Peter Brown (talk) 18:20, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Who can say, the tree of life needs more investigation ... A cephalopod reminds me of a systematist: appearing very cerebral, able to juggle several pieces of data at once, likely to squirt ink if annoyed. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 18:30, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Obsolete taxonomic groups

Just to say that I strongly support your removal of some of the recent categorizations as "Obsolete taxonomic groups". I'm not even sure about this category, as it seems to me that using it often violates WP:NPOV: in the text we can discuss whether and why a given taxonomic group is currently considered incorrect, but categorization is all or none. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:28, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion Concerning "History of the Earth"

With your edit here, perhaps it could be clarified by referring to the mammals as the "dominant terrestrial vertebrate" (group)?--Mr Fink (talk) 23:15, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Dominance (ecology) provides two meanings for "dominance" in a ecosystem:

• The taxon is more numerous than its competitors, or
• It makes up more of the biomass.

Among terrestrial vertebrates, it is not clear that mammals are dominant in the first sense, since they may be outnumbered by the birds. A source would be required, at the least. Mammals are probably dominant in the second sense, but the use of ambiguous terms does not contribute to clarity. Peter Brown (talk) 23:35, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Good point. A peculiar dilemma.--Mr Fink (talk) 23:58, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

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extinct dino species -- Repiles article

Hi Peter, I'd thought we'd agreed that while all dinosaur species, without exception, are extinct, some of those particular species did not (as species) "die out", which is a lay term that I think most people will recognize as meaning extinction-by-death and won't interpret as extinction-by-evolution-[of-some-lineages-within-the-species]-into-living-descendant-species(which we know is sometimes termed "pseuto-extinction" though we're avoiding this term)

Maybe "wiped out" is clearer than "died out"? I assume you wouldn't say: "All dinosaur species were wiped out." Therefore we can say the dinosaur species were wiped out except {insert specification of those species whom we aren't claiming were wiped out}. I wasn't going to use the term "wiped out" simply because it starts to allude (a little too early i think) to the causes of a die-out, e.g. mass extinction events that did the "wiping".DavRosen (talk) 17:10, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

I think "wiped out" should be avoided; it suggests that there was a wiper, a big environmental change, a new competitor, or whatever. I'm quite willing to say that the multituberculates were wiped out by the rodents. We agree on rejecting "died out", though perhaps not for the same reason. As applied to species, I think "extinct" is as neutral as we're going to get—it just means that no members are around anymore. I do think that my proposed parenthetical expression makes immediately clear that "extinct", in context, allows extant descendants. When we deal with supraspecific taxa, things do get fuzzier. Peter Brown (talk) 19:04, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

June 2013

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Sortkey

Hi. Just to get sure we are on the same page. I changed ndash with minus in DEFAULTSORT per WP:SORTKEY. All ndashes should be replaced with minus in sortkeys. Happy editing! -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:55, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

I believe that I follow the MOS rules on hyphens and dashes. Should I have done something different? I have no idea what sortkeys and categories are; neither WP:CATEGORY nor Help:Category provides a definition. Despite this gap in my knowledge, I have been editing Wikipedia with no trouble for 2½ years; may I simply continue? Peter Brown (talk) 18:59, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

You are doing fine. This edit of your was great apart from line 482. Inside DEFAULTSORT we should use minus instead of ndash. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:06, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Crown groups

Once again, you have deleted my edits with minimal, cryptic explanation. The page as it now stands states, "the crown group of a collection of species consists of the living representatives of the collection together with their ancestors back to their last common ancestor as well as all of that ancestor's descendants. It is thus a clade, a group consisting of a species and all its descendants."

OK, so the edit you deleted said, "In phylogenetics, the crown group of a collection of species consists of the living representatives of the collection together with their ancestors back to their last common ancestor as well as all of that ancestor's descendants. It is thus a synonym for "clade." The term is mainly used by paleontologists who wish to distinguish such groups from related extinct paraphyletic assemblages.

As far as I am aware, "all of (an) ancestor's descendants" is the definition of a clade. Thus, synonyms.

In your justification for this change, you said, "Clade and crown group are not synonyms. Dimetrodon was in the clade synapsida but not in crown synapsida"

That example means precisely nothing: discussing the membership of particular taxa does not bear on the general meaning of the term. Both are clades, one is a less inclusive clade than the other. The crown clade of archosaurs includes Dimetrodon. All clades but the clade "life" are included inside other clades, and all of these clades include some extinct members.

If you think that the meanings of "clade" and "crown group" are different, then I encourage you to come up with a definition that clearly explains the difference. It is not productive to simply delete the contributions of others.

The only difference I can think of off the top of my head is that crown groups seem to always have extant taxa in them, while some clades consist of only extinct taxa. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abrower (talk • contribs) 22:32, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

best wishes,

Andy Brower — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abrower (talk • contribs) 22:21, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry if you found my explanation cryptic. I do try to be clear. All crown groups are clades but not all clades are crown groups, so the two are not synonyms. Synapsida, for example, is a clade but not a crown group, as I show in the following.

Both "clade" and "crown group" are defined many places in Wikipedia.

• According to the definition in the Crown group article, which you quoted,

"the crown group of a collection of species consists of the living representatives of the collection together with their ancestors back to their last common ancestor as well as all of that ancestor's descendants."

There is no collection of species whose crown group under this definition is Synapsida. If the living representatives of the collection consist entirely of mammals, the last common ancestor lived in the Mesozoic or Cenozoic, so no descendant lived in the Permian; as Dimetrodon was a Permian synapsid, the crown group of the chosen collection is not Synapsida. On the other hand, if the collection contains a living nonmammal, that animal will not be a synapsid (all living synapsids are mammals) so, again, the collection's crown group will not be Synapsida. Either way, Synapsida is not the crown group of any collection of species.

• According to the Clade article,

"a clade is a group consisting of an ancestor and all its descendants."

Synapsida consists of the earliest amniote with extant descendants that was not an ancestor of any birds together with all of that amniote's descendants. Synapsida, therefore, is a clade.

I certainly agree that, aside from reverting vandalism, "It is not productive to simply delete the contributions of others." An account needs to be provided. Often, as in this case, I supply it in the edit summary. I am sorry that it was not clear enough.

Peter Brown (talk) 23:50, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the more complete explanation. I was mistaken in synonymizing the terms. I have been doing some reading on some of the foundation books and articles - Ax 1987, Jefferies 1979, Meier and Richter 1991 - and I think I have a better understanding of this now. I am still not completely clear on the meaning of plesion. Patterson and Rosen seemed to be mainly concerned with classifications rather than defining it in terms of a tree.

cheers,

Andy BrowerAbrower (talk) 12:14, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

"monophyletic with respect to"

Actually, if you do a Google search you'll find plenty of uses of this exact phrase in scientific publications. Whether they all mean the same, and if so, precisely what they mean is another question! Maybe this is yet another example of biologist's imprecision of language, which we've met before. It certainly shouldn't be in the article without a sourced explanation. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)w

History of evolution article

In regards to the addition of Charles Darwin to the Human section on this article - Would you reccomend moving the Charles Darwin information to the introductory paragraph of this article, since he and Wallance had such a huge impact on this topic?

See my comment in Talk:Evolutionary history of life#Recent edits in the Humans section. Peter Brown (talk) 15:11, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Books and Bytes: The Wikipedia Library Newsletter

Books and Bytes

Volume 1, Issue 1, October 2013

by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs)

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December 2013

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Merger discussion for List of Dimetrodon species and Dimetrodon borealis

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Changed at Dash

Agreed with removal of redundant sections, but can you please double-check and make sure we lost no information, links, etc. by just lopping the section out? The dup. sections need to be merged rather than treating one as a copy-paste of the other. Maybe you already did that; I'm trying to catch up on a long watchlist after a day of cat. and template cleanup, and I'm also not prone to scrutinizing what experienced contributors are doing. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  15:38, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Leonardian

Hello Peter M. Brown,

I wanted to let you know that I just tagged Leonardian for deletion, because it seems to be promotional, rather than an encyclopedia article.

If you feel that the article shouldn't be deleted and want more time to work on it, you can contest this deletion, but please don't remove the speedy deletion tag from the top.

You can leave a note on my talk page if you have questions.

Onel5969 ^{TT me} 10:30, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

"Save As..." style

Some menus do look like that. Others do not. It took me under 1 minute on Google Images to prove it:

• Spaced ellipsis: [2], from [3]
• Lower-case two-letter prepositions (including "as"): [4] from [5] again; [6] from [7]; [8] from [9]; [10] from [11]; [12] from [13]; Sometimes it's not even consistent in the same menu (e.g. "Save As", "Save in", and "Save as" all at once [14]).

When RS usage is not consistent, WP does not capitalize. First rule of MOS:CAPS. I agree it's not worth fighting about; the thing to do is apply our style unless real-world RS overrule it with near uniformity (e.g. the trademark is iPod not "Ipod").  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:16, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

You clearly have more competence with Google Images than I! I don't know how to find any of that stuff.

As I've noted, I regard "Save As..." to be a quotation, so MOS is inapplicable.

Aside from that, what MOS:CAPS says is that "only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia." Well, I don't know how to argue that the apps on my computer are representative, but all of Microsoft Office plus LibreOffice, Adobe Acrobat, and ABBYY Transformer+ have "Save As...". Firefox follows the pattern, with "Save Page As..." and WinZip has "Save As (to PC/Cloud)..."; in all of these cases 'As' is capitalized and the ellipsis is unspaced. Only Google Chrome has a lower-case 'a' ("Save page as...") and even here the ellipsis is unspaced. A substantial majority of my apps, anyhow, do capitalize 'As' and follow it by an unspaced ellipsis. Is that a reasonable sample? In choosing them, I certainly did not consider whether, in their menus, 'As' was capitalized or whether ellipses were spaced.

As to spaced ellipses, your example [2] has "Manage SmartCard ..." and [13] has a space and ellipsis following a timestamp, e.g. "11:20 ...". What's different about "Save As..." is that 'As' is a preposition demanding an object. "Manage SmartCard" is a clause, complete in itself, while "11:20" is a timestamp requiring no completion. If you have an example of a menu item ending with a preposition followed by a space and an ellipsis, please provide it.

 —  Peter Brown (talk) 23:01, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

The point is, it's not consistent in the RS (i.e., the primary sources, namely the OSes and apps that actually implement menus like this), so default to MoS's instructions. I'm not sure why you're bringing up "SmartCard". Anyway, I already provided you examples of short prepositions in these menus not being capitalized. Here's an example of a lower-case trailing preposition that "demands an object" (which has nothing to do with capitalization at all): [15], from [16] (and further illustrative of inconsistency; the same menue veers quickly into overcapitalization, even after a hyphen in "Read-Only", which pretty much no style guide on earth would agree with.) Here's two examples of lower-case trailing preposition in one image: [17] from [18]. Note also that it uses ▶ instead of … – an increasingly common style (especially for fly-out rather than pop-up menus), and is most often done flush-right, not fused to the text. That style is also sometimes applied to ellipses in such menus (i.e., the idea that the ellipsis must be fused to the last word is just counterfactual): [19] from [20]. Here's a similar case, using > or a similar glyph for the same purpose (and with lower-case two-letter trailing prepositions): [21] from [22]. I'm not sure why you're asserting that an example we're providing, of the kind of text that might appear in a menu, is "a quotation". "I want some pizza" is an example of something various people say, every day, but it's not a quotation, it's an example of something one might hear. Anyway, different development projects (commercial and non-commercial) have their own internal stylesheets and interface guidelines (or none at all, and leave it to random developer whim). Some end up capitalizing every single word in menus, others follow more normal English orthography, and some are mixed. WP isn't AppleAndMicrosoftPedia, and we're not bound to mimic what their UI habits are. Here's an example of "Save as..." lower-case but without the space: [23], from [24] (and then it veers into capitalizing "To" in the middle of a menu item, which isn't something any writer would normally do in any circumstance, not even signage or album titles).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:06, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

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Etymology of Metaphysics

Concerning this edit summary, one of the meanings at the wiktionary link you give says "besides, over and above". Those words would have meant approximately the same as "beyond" in the position where you removed it as unsourced, and I think "besides, over and above" probably represents a more conventional understanding of how the term originated. Arguably we know nothing at all of how it originated, but more importantly it seems to be how the term has been understood since it appeared in written records. Wikipedia seems to be the main source anywhere for making a lot out of the Andronicus the editor speculation on the Stanford webpage? (There, it is clearly a passing speculation.) I am a bit concerned that these edits which have been made now on several webpages is WP:UNDUE and not well-sourced.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:44, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

"Explanation" at Clade

I applaud your recent removal of text at Clade. I think that, as has happened before, there's a confusion between Linnaeus's use of ranks and the formal nomenclature codes, and in particular their use of types. Assigning a name to a taxon via a type cannot guarantee that the taxon is monophyletic (or indeed has any other particular properties) because determining which organisms are sufficiently similar to the type to belong to the same taxon is entirely subjective. But there's no obvious reason why assigning ranks to groups of extant organisms should be incompatible with the groups being monophyletic, and clearly no-one was able to provide one. Peter coxhead (talk) 01:44, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

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Notifications

This is very cheeky I know, but reading your reply at Unicode, you mention finding and setting "Notify me when someone links to my user page". In my Preferences/Notifications, for the life of me I can't find that setting. May I beg a favour and ask where you found it? Feel free to ignore if you have better things to do. --Red King (talk) 21:56, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't quite accurate. I was referring to a line with the legend "Mention" followed by a ⓘ. Clicking on the ⓘ yields the text I quoted. Peter Brown (talk) 23:56, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

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InTech is neither PNAS nor the Transactions of the Royal Society

I don't know what you searched on google, but that paper was not published in either venue. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:24, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

WP:EDITWAR

The material's reliability is clearly disputed, don't re-insert it without consensus. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:30, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb:Clearly disputed? Citation needed — who disputes it? But I haven't time for this nonsense. I have replaced your {{citation needed}} by the 2017 paper.

Peter Brown (talk) 19:48, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

"Who", I for one. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:51, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Logic - Revision #931709809

Thanks for the grammatical corrections you did. They were left by previous editors, however, since English is not my first language, I usually prefer to not alter the constructs of the phrases, even when they sound ugly to me too. Therefore, I often add or remove some content while trying hard to preserve as much as I can of what is the current version. Furthermore, I often prefer to leave unchanged even some plainly wrong assertions until I get some degree of certainty of being able to edit them properly. Again, thank you a lot — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fabio Maria De Francesco (talk • contribs) 17:46, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

On copyvio links and citation template fields

I noticed your most recent edit to Logic, some of which I reverted. The links that you added to the citation templates in that edit appeared to be copyvio links, that is, links to copyright infringing material, which is against the official English Wikipedia policy on copyrights (Wikipedia:Copyrights), which says, in part: "... if you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work." See also: Wikipedia:External links § Restrictions on linking. Also, please do not remove OCLC fields from citation templates as you did in that edit, because that metadata is important not only for humans but also for automated citation analysis. Thanks, Biogeographist (talk) 22:42, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist:

Thanks for sharpening up citations. Many of the defects, such as the inclusion of the author's entire name in the "last=" parameter, were present prior to my edits. My chief objective, as my edit summary indicated, was to eliminate links to WorldCat, which provided no support for claims in the Logic article. I expected none of the three works cited to be available on the internet but, just to make sure, I looked up author+title on Google and, to my suprise, found links to all three. I just assumed that they were all legit—is there a way I could have checked?

I'm particularly surprised that you deleted an Academia.edu link. Isn't that a legitimate outfit? If it isn't, the article on the firm needs to be updated to reflect the fact.

I am puzzled that you eliminated the dashes from ISBNs. In the examples in Template:Cite book, dashes are always included.

In two of the three citations, the OCLC code you provided differs from the one I deleted, so I suppose the old code was wrong. In that case, wasn't deletion appropriate? Where do I look to find correct OCLC, doi, and JSTOR codes? Does Wikipedia have a relevant "How to … " article?

Advice is most welcome.

Peter Brown (talk) 23:58, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Great questions! First, keep in mind a general knowledge of Copyright law of the United States § Duration of copyright and Berne Convention § Copyright term. The Wikimedia Foundation is based in the US (Wikipedia:Copyrights § Governing copyright law) and all of the books in question were published in the US. (The citation of the Colin McGinn book has a London publication location but it was published simultaneously in the the UK and the US, and perhaps elsewhere as well since Clarendon/OUP is such a large publisher.) The three books were published in 2017, 1986, and 2000 respectively. Since all three books were published after 1977, the copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years in the US. So they are all still copyrighted. Anyone who is distributing the books would either need to be the copyright holder or have a license from the copyright holder to distribute them. All of the three links that you added are to websites of "user-uploaded content"; thanks the the DMCA and similar legislation, the operators of the websites typically do not take responsibility for copyright-infringing content that users have uploaded, although they may remove the content when there is a complaint. If the user that uploaded the content is the copyright holder then there is no problem, but at those three links there is no indication that any of the users who uploaded the content is the copyright holder. In the case of the Academia.edu link, the user is not McGinn, so if it's McGinn's book then it's not legit. I have seen a lot of copyright infringement on Academia.edu.

Second, I am assuming that these books are not available under a public copyright license, but if you can show that they are available under such a license then the links aren't copyvio links after all. The easiest way to find out if they are available under a public license is to visit the author's official website (if there is one) or the publisher's website and look for statement of a public license for that particular book.

Third, about the citation template fields: Whether or not there are dashes in ISBNs, or how many dashes there are, doesn't seem to be important—any program that parses ISBNs can parse them with or without dashes. In this case, I copied and pasted ISBN information that didn't have dashes. The change of OCLC number was because I changed from an OCLC record for the ebook to a record for the print edition. But sometimes an OCLC record includes multiple editions: hardcover, paperback, ebook, etc. Which OCLC number to use seems to involve some editor discretion; there are often multiple (sometimes many) OCLC records for a book, because WorldCat is a union catalog for many libraries, and data is often imperfectly combined. Still, I find that WorldCat is usually the best source of bibliographic data. I like to use the OCLC number of the most widely shared record for the print edition of a book; by "widely shared" I mean the record with the most library holdings in the FirstSearch interface to WorldCat. The FirstSearch interface to WorldCat is only available through OCLC member libraries, so if you are not affiliated with an OCLC member library you can't use this strategy for choosing an OCLC number. The public interface at https://worldcat.org combines OCLC records in some way that I don't understand: for example, you removed OCLC 441298020 from Quine's Philosophy of Logic in your edit, and I added OCLC 12664089 to the same book in my edit. Clicking on both of those links to https://worldcat.org, I see in both cases a page that looks almost exactly the same even though there is a different OCLC number in the URL for each link, and in both cases I see a list of libraries that says: "Displaying libraries 1-6 out of 1609 for all 37 editions". In contrast, a search for title "Philosophy of Logic" and author "Quine" in the FirstSearch interface to WorldCat shows a record (441298020) for an ebook version of the 1986 2nd edition held by 1318 libraries, a record (112913) for a print version of the 1970 1st edition held by 983 libraries, and a record (12664089) for a print version of the 1986 2nd edition held by 444 libraries, as well as other records for translated editions, etc. (Notice how much smaller the OCLC number for the 1st edition is, because the record for it was added in 1970, whereas the record for the print version of the 2nd edition was added in 1985 and the record for the ebook edition of the 2nd edition was added in 2009.) As I said, I like to use the OCLC number of the most widely shared record for the print edition, which in this case is 12664089 for the 2nd edition. But both of those OCLC numbers for the 2nd edition direct to an almost identical page on https://worldcat.org, so for most purposes either number would work. If you understood all that, you're a quick learner; if not, don't worry about being an OCLC number wizard.

DOI and JSTOR numbers (if they exist for a particular reference) are considerably easier to find and understand, at https://search.crossref.org and https://jstor.org respectively. Wikipedia's automated citation tools such as WP:REFILL and WP:REFLINKS and certain citation bots may add DOIs and other numbers automatically. Biogeographist (talk) 03:12, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Logic - revision #932119893

Thanks for your edits of the citations. When they were automatically created by Wikipedia I didn't noticed they were wrong. Above all, I'm not able to understand why the "Add citation - Automatic" generated wrong links. I'm sure that the ISBN I input were right, because I copied them by the cover of the books I own. Any hypothesis? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fabio Maria De Francesco (talk • contribs) 12:18, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

I've missed the section before this. Maybe it is related to the issue. However I still don't understand why ISBN's generate wrong links. Fabio Maria De Francesco (talk) 12:25, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Fabio Maria De Francesco: Since my comment above in § On copyvio links and citation template fields was also about Special:Diff/932119893, I will note that I don't use the automated citation tool that you mentioned (there are many different tools to choose from—see Help:Citation tools), but if that tool generated the citation templates that you inserted, then when you use that tool you will want to clean the citations before publishing them, because the code that the tool generates is not very clean. I suppose you can think of the code that the tool generates as a "rough draft" that you may need to clean before publishing. For example, the author's whole name was erroneously put into the last name field in those citations, the publication date was missing from one of them, and the URL field unnecessarily included a link to https://worldcat.org (which is not necessary when there is an OCLC number in the OCLC field, because the OCLC number itself is automatically linked to https://worldcat.org). So you will want to clean those kinds of details when using that automated citation tool, or you can choose a different citation tool that works better. Biogeographist (talk) 13:48, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist: Thank you for your kind help. Now I understand how the tool should be used properly. Fabio Maria De Francesco (talk) 14:03, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Fabio Maria De Francesco: Also, I am not sure what Peter M. Brown meant when he said "WorldCat links do not support the claims made" in his edit summary. He can correct me if I am misinterpreting that statement, but that statement seems to imply that a source must be freely publicly available online to be verifiable, but that implication is incorrect per Wikipedia:Verifiability § Access to sources (see also WP:REREQ). Biogeographist (talk) 14:22, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist: I had noticed this issue, however I didn't want to start discussions with more experienced editors on how Wikipedia's policies and guidelines should be interpreted and applied. Thanks for pointing it out anyways. I'd like to read more on this subject from Peter M. Brown. Thanks. Fabio Maria De Francesco (talk) 15:17, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist and Fabio Maria De Francesco: I do not advocate limiting sources to publicly available material. However, when a public link is made available in a footnote attached to a claim in an article, should not following the link provide support for the claim? If it does not, should not an editor reviewing the article either delete the link or provide a better one?

Consider, for example, the statement "More broadly, logic is the analysis and appraisal of arguments" which Fabio Maria De Francesco added to the Logic article, citing Gensler's Introduction to Logic. He included in the citation an internet link which one would expect to lead to a copy of Gensler's paper and hence more directly support the claim about what logic is. What the link led to, rather, was a WorldCat page offering no support whatever for the claim—offering nothing that was not already explicit in the citation. Offering less, actually, because the citation itself provides the OCLC number, a number not provided on the WorldCat page. Biogeographist indicates that the OCLC number is available to users who can avail themselves of FirstSearch, but apparently the rest of us cannot.

Biogeographist, I think that both I and Fabio Maria De Francesco will welcome your take on this.

Peter Brown (talk) 18:01, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Peter M. Brown and Fabio Maria De Francesco: I agree with Peter that any link in the URL field of a citation template should point to a freely available online copy of the cited source, if there is one; as editors we just need to make sure that any freely available online copy is not copyright infringing. There is one qualification to this: if registration or subscription is required to access the URL, set the url-access field of the citation template as described at Help:Citation Style 1 § Registration or subscription required. If the citation includes an identifier such as DOI or JSTOR, and those identifiers point to free full text, set the corresponding identifier parameter such as |doi-access=free or |jstor-access=free. I didn't know about those identifier parameters until just now when I was reviewing Help:Citation Style 1 § Registration or subscription required, which also notes: "Some identifiers always link to free full texts. In this case, the access level is automatically indicated by the template. This is the case for |arxiv=, |biorxiv=, |citeseerx=, |pmc=, |rfc= and |ssrn=." Also note that the OCLC number of a record is available at https://worldcat.org, but just not with the library holdings data that I use to choose an OCLC number; most people should just use whatever OCLC number is inserted by their automated citation tool (but remove the WorldCat link from the URL field). Biogeographist (talk) 18:37, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist and Peter M. Brown: By reading carefully this entire thread I think everything is clear, at least clearer than before. Cited books aren't required to exist online in some website or to be freely accessible, However it is required that citations point to some kind of online catalogue that have information about the book. For example, among many others, citations can point to The Library of Congress (https://catalog.loc.gov/) or to The Taylor & Francis Group (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/). Editors may input ISBN's in Special:BookSources and find an online catalog with information about the book and then use a link to the specific page of the mentioned catalogue. I hope I've understood, didn't I? Fabio Maria De Francesco (talk) 20:45, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist and Fabio Maria De Francesco:

I'm afraid not.

According to Biogeographist, "any link in the URL field of a citation template should point to a freely available online copy of the cited source, if there is one", not  to a catalogue that merely has information about the book but to the book or article itself. Thus, one can use Isaac Newton's Opticks as a source with a link such as https://www.wilbourhall.org/pdfs/newton/Opticks1704EnglishWH.pdf, which provides the actual text of Newton's work, but not to a catalog or other source that merely provides bibliographic information.

Biogeographist, you say "the OCLC number of a record is available at https://worldcat.org". Going to that site, e.g. for the Gensler book, I can't figure out how to get an OCLC number. Advice? You write of an "automated citation tool", but I've never used one of those; for a book, I just code as described in the {{cite book}} instructions.

Peter Brown (talk) 21:41, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Fabio Maria De Francesco: Peter's response is correct; don't link to an online catalog in the URL field. Including an ISBN in a citation template generates a link to Special:BookSources where various online catalogs can be searched (including WorldCat). What I like about the OCLC field is that it generates a direct link to WorldCat from the OCLC number which immediately shows a list of libraries near the reader where the source is available. Most readers probably don't know that, but all they need to do is click on an OCLC number once to see the list of libraries.

@Peter M. Brown: Let's say you type "introduction to logic" gensler into the search box at https://worldcat.org. In the list of search results, there are various records. You know you're looking for the edition published in 2017. The second item in the list of search results has a 2017 date, so click on "View all editions" for that item. Now you see a list of editions. The first item in the list is an ebook record. The second item in the list is a print book record. I prefer the print book record, and indeed this second item has the OCLC number that I chose: 957680480. If you click on that second item, you can see the OCLC number further down on the page (search for "OCLC number" with your browser's find command to locate it). It is also in the URL of that page (https://www.worldcat.org/title/introduction-to-logic/oclc/957680480?referer=br&ht=edition) in between the last slash and the question mark. You may want to look at some of the tools at Help:Citation tools; you may find something there that you like that will make citing sources easier. Don't use the Google Books tool; the bibliographic data in Google Books is horribly inaccurate. (We all love Google Books for full-text searching though.) Biogeographist (talk) 22:11, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist and Peter M. Brown:

Ok, I must admit I am still confused...

Please take the statement "More broadly, logic is the analysis and appraisal of arguments". I provided a link, using automated insertion of the ISBN that I read in the 4th of the cover of my own copy but the tool generated the wrong link, therefore you edited that citation. Current versions of doi and ISBNpoint to an online catalog owned by The Taylor & Francis Group. There one cannot read the book, therefore one cannot verify the statement that I inserted in the article because the book is not free (as in "free beer"). That site provides only the metadata of the book (the title, subject, author, edition, publication date, ISBN, and so on), instead the data (the words in the 414 pages of the book) aren't there. Clicking to one of the above mentioned links, how can readers verify that the statement is true and that it comes from Gensler's book?

Unfortunately English is not my mother tongue. Please forgive me, because I'm sure that I still miss something that I need to understand in order to become a better editor. Thanks a lot for your time.

Fabio Maria De Francesco (talk) 22:55, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Fabio Maria De Francesco: It is a little complicated. Let's look at the citation to make sure we are talking about the same thing: {{Cite book|last=Gensler|first=Harry J.|date=2017|origyear=2002|title=Introduction to logic|edition=3rd|location=New York|publisher=Routledge|isbn=9781138910591|oclc=957680480|doi=10.4324/9781315693361}} renders as: Gensler, Harry J. (2017) [2002]. Introduction to logic (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315693361. ISBN 9781138910591. OCLC 957680480.

• doi:10.4324/9781315693361 points to https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315693361 which is the publisher's official page for the ebook (the book's publisher, Routledge, is a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis).
• ISBN 9781138910591 points to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781138910591 which shows links to many online catalogs.
• OCLC 957680480 points to https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/957680480 which shows a list of libraries near the reader where the book can be read.

All three of these fields—DOI and ISBN and OCLC—provide potentially helpful information for the reader, but none of that information should go in the URL field (|url=). That is, we don't need to put https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315693361 or https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/957680480 in the URL field because they are already linked from the DOI and OCLC fields, respectively. Biogeographist (talk) 23:15, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Continuing: If the free full text of the book were available online from the publisher at doi:10.4324/9781315693361, then we would add |doi-access=free to the citation to indicate that the DOI points to free full text, which would look like this: Gensler, Harry J. (2017) [2002]. Introduction to logic (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315693361. ISBN 9781138910591. OCLC 957680480. You can see the "Freely accessible" icon next to the DOI. But in this case the publisher does not offer the full text for free, so we do not add |doi-access=free. We also do not add a link in the URL field to any other website that has the full text, because any other website that has the full text is infringing copyright, since as far as we know there is no public copyright license for this book. So in this case, "Clicking to one of the above mentioned links, how can readers verify that the statement is true and that it comes from Gensler's book?" The easiest way, I think, is for a reader to click on OCLC 957680480, look at the list of libraries that own the book, and go to the nearest library to read the book. Or if the reader wants to spend some money, click on ISBN 9781138910591 and buy the book from a favorite bookseller. Biogeographist (talk) 23:30, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist and Fabio Maria De Francesco: Fabio, check out what access you have to interlibrary loan. I doubted the claim in the Dinosaur article that Mesozoic birds thrived in cool climates, sourced by a book unavailable in my state, Drawing out Leviathan by Keith Parsons. It took weeks for me to obtain a copy of the book through my local public library but eventually I was able delete the claim, which I did here. Just don't be in a hurry. Peter Brown (talk) 01:18, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

I am a heavy user of interlibrary loan; I once ordered a book through interlibrary loan to verify claims in a Wikipedia article and ended up helping to unmask the article as a hoax. (The sequence of events was more complicated than that, but it did involve consulting an interlibrary loan book and the subsequent deletion of the Wikipedia article.) Biogeographist (talk) 13:05, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

@Biogeographist and Peter M. Brown:

Until this morning I had completely forgotten your message and therefore first of all I apologize for the delay in replying. However, I can't be of any help, since I haven't entered any public library since college. For my study and for the citations on Wikipedia I use my private collection of more or less 300 books, of which over 90% concern topics of philosophy, mathematics, computer science, physics. I have nothing on paleontology.

When I need it, I also access several online research journals, both free and paid. So if you can provide the doi of articles regarding the topic that interests you, I will be happy to help with the verification of your doubt. Fabio Maria De Francesco (talk) 11:08, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

Search

You can search words or phrases in Wikipedia by doing so directly at the search special page Special:Search.... Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00078-0.--Moxy 🍁 21:39, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

@Moxy: The book I am interested in is Sex, Science, and Stem Cells by Diana DeGette. I plugged the title into the search box in Special:Search; 1,273 results were returned, apparently including every article containing the word cell. Fortunately, the article I was after was the fourth one returned, which meets my immediate need. But could I have restricted the search to articles with the precise phrase, "Sex, Science, and Stem Cells"? Your response suggests that this is possible. Peter Brown (talk) 23:53, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

• Keep the quotes in your search.😊

template:snd

Your edit to Infinity reminded me of this. Another editor once explained to me that {{snd}} should always be butted against the preceding word because it resolves to {{nbsp}}{{ndash}}, which means that a new line will never start with just an orphaned dash. That is what makes it better than just using plain old {{ndash}}. Clever or what? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:48, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Unicode input

"In many applications this only works for numbers less than 256." How is this even available to the application? Surely it is an OS function?

I wonder is this text a relic of DOS or Windows 9x? If nobody defends in within the next few weeks, I would just delete it. But then again, that is what I do ! :-) --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 21:22, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

@John Maynard Friedman: According to Alt code#Transition to Unicode, some software interprets numbers greater than 255 modulo 256. If so, the Alt code technique indeed "only works for numbers less than 256" in such software. Do you think that this claim is this also vestigial, a candidate for deletion? Peter Brown (talk) 22:17, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Well it is an unsourced assertion there too, so should equally be put on notice: cite or be deleted. (I have tagged that statement using {{which}} and {{example needed}} following your model). I wonder if this text dates back to Visicalc, WordPerfect and DBase? I find it hard to believe than any software is still in use today that was never updated beyond 8-bit ASCII /ISO Latin1. Oh wait, half the government systems worldwide, I suspect. And air traffic control too, no doubt. Sigh. But even so, no citation no survival. Off with its head!--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:29, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Alt+0nnn

Maybe you can figure out talk:Pound sign#Explanation for Alt keycode 6556? because it beats me! --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:28, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

@John Maynard Friedman:

On RichEdit-based applications like Word and Wordpad, four-digit codes like 6556 or 0163 yield the corresponding unicode characters ᦜ and £, respectively. Notepad interprets them modulo 256, so they both produce a £. That's also true of Chrome and Firefox.

On all these applications, three-digit codes use Code page 437, so 163 produces a ú.

Is that helpful? Or am I missing something?

Peter Brown (talk) 19:14, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

Clearly it is I who is missing something, otherwise I wouldn't need to ask. It is (was!) my understanding that Alt+163 means "choose character at code-point 163₁₀ from the current code page" and Alt+0163 means "choose character at code-point 163₁₀ from the Unicode standard" – which is £. (Modulo 256 is irrelevant in this case as the number is <256). But Ozaru reports that it is returning a code-page dependent glyph selection. So clearly my understanding of the significance of the leading zero must be wrong. Or of course there could be a bug in Windows(!). --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:48, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

A bug? Meaning a defect? Only if it contradicts something Microsoft asserts! Interesting that Ozaru has to specify the US or UK keyboard for "just use Unicode" to function properly. He/she can easily copy £ from ISO/IEC 8859-1 § Code page layout or even from Pound sign, however, so I don't regard this as a serious matter. Peter Brown (talk) 21:22, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

I am trying to clarify the underlying principle, the £ is just a test case. Are you saying that my belief that "the leading zero indicates that Unicode is intended" is actually just wrong? that Microsoft does not assert it? Is it just another "everybody knows" factoid that is just not true? Does the leading zero have any significance at all? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:09, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

Sure, 198₁₀ = C6₁₆ so Alt+0198 yields U+00C6 = Æ, unlike Alt+198 which produces ╞. This won't work, though, for 80 to 9F, which are control characters in Unicode. 128₁₀ = 80₁₆ but — despite the leading zero — Alt+0128 yields € in accordance with the Windows-1252 § Character set.  —  Peter Brown (talk) 02:30, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Windows code page

When you get to the bottom of Unicode and Alt code, the lead of Windows code page will need attention because there is a similar statement there. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:57, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for August 27

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Alt code, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Excel.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:15, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Computer keyboard, keyboard layout

If you should have some time and inclination to spare, I'd welcome your critical eye, please. I have been cleaning up and distinguishing computer keyboard and keyboard layout, which were overlapping and lacking in focus. As you have probably noticed, I am not a Completer/Finisher :-) so no doubt I have left some howlers and there may be some babies in the discarded bath-water. No worries if you don't. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:47, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

September 2020

Hello, I'm 67.85.37.186. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. You can have a look at the tutorial on citing sources. If you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you.

Cladograms, etc.

A more general point than the thread at Talk:Cladogram: I think part of my problem is the separation of the articles Monophyly, Paraphyly, Polyphyly, Clade and Cladogram. They are so tightly connected that you either have to repeat material or assume it's already known, and they can also easily become inconsistent. I think one article explaining the "phylies", clades and cladograms would make more sense, with Cladistics then being concerned with the historical aspects. However, there does seem to be a wikipedia bias in favour of "one term – one article", even when the terms are part of what is effectively a single topic or concept. (There are similar examples in the coverage of linguistics: why have separate articles on Noun and Noun phrase?) Peter coxhead (talk) 10:52, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

Filename

Hello Peter,

I have noted you reverted my fixing of the text in the article Filename. In fact if you read the sentence carefully you will see it has the verb "have" placed near the end and applied to the two characteristics noted at the begining.

Also the sentence as originally written does not make sense, as it does not indicate "by which time" did these characteristics appear, so one way or the other the sentence needs a fix.

I would appreciate you please undo your reversion.

Best regards,

--Uruk (talk) 15:54, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Thks, but still I do not understand what does it mean the expression "around this time". The time of what ? or when ? (Or rather they appeared more or less at the same time ?)

Disingenuous

Just as an aside, I wondered if you were aware that disingenuous primarily means 'dishonest' and the meaning 'dis-ingenious' (as in Nelson's alleged "I see no ships" by choosing not to look) is quite recent. I found this out the hard way by accusing a colleague of being disingenuous and then had to apologise for having called him a liar, as his dictionary attested. I should have checked its date! I wonder which of us was the ingenue. :-)

And just to extend the stream of consciousness, I see that ingénu is translated as ...... disingenuous!

In the case of Unicode hyphen, I detect a cock-up, not a conspiracy. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:08, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Best wishes for the holidays

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Stonehenge at mid-winter sunrise is my Wiki-Solstice card to all for this year. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 14:48, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

@John Maynard Friedman: Cheers, and the same to you and yours. I'll include the image as one of my lock screen options. (Per Creative Commons, though, don't you need to include an attribution?) Peter Brown (talk) 19:32, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

January 2021

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Holy Spirit in Christianity; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus, rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Points to note:

1. Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made;
2. Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes and work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Elizium23 (talk) 23:09, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

This might be an off topic but...

Since you have phd in philosophy what do you think about the bhagavad gita? 950CMR (talk) 12:49, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

This editor has multiple warnings for disruptive time wasting. Ignore. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 14:17, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Was That a personal attack or sum thing i don't really get it 950CMR (talk) 14:34, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

If you are not the same person as user:245CMR, I take back the repeated. But you did add disruptive nonsense to Talk:Bharata Khanda. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 14:54, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Do you have a some type of personal thing with 245CMR Btw? 950CMR (talk) 15:00, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia users are little bit dramatic like Bengalis i'm not racist since i'm a Bengali tho 950CMR (talk) 15:02, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Symbols

At Christian Cross an editor cited WP:NOSYMBOLS as rationale for removing symbols from the text if the same symbols are present as figures. Hence my edit at Infinity. David notMD (talk) 15:23, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I think that I'm now conformity.Peter Brown (talk) 00:15, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

HTML entities

To answer your implied question in this edit summary: Mostly I'm following MOS:MARKUP, which says to keep markup simple, and that wikitext syntax is preferred to HTML syntax. In practice, most instances of &thinsp; are actually unnecessary and can be deleted or converted to a regular space. Because HTML entities show up on spell check reports but templates don't, for cleanup purposes it makes things easier to convert the thin spaces that are necessary to use the template instead. -- Beland (talk) 18:34, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Personally, I remain baffled as to why MOS:MARKUP considers {{em|...}} better than <em>...</em>. I very much doubt that new editors find the former clearer than the latter, and experienced editors will be happy with either. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:17, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Multiplication sign

If you wanted to multiply two vectors, would you use a 'normal' multiplication sign? ==John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:21, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

To obtain the cross product? Sure. Maybe even a seven-dimensional cross product.

More to the point, I wouldn't call a vector a "number". Numbers can be prime, perfect, natural, rational, imaginary, complex, transfinite, surreal, etc. but they aren't vectors. Calling a number "scalar" adds nothing.

Peter Brown (talk) 19:49, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

All those years to learn, never used, now completely forgotten. ;-(

Ok, my reversion was a knee-jerk reaction to "what's a scalar anyway?". It wouldn't have been too difficult to look at the linked article and then say "not a necessary qualification, removed". --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:00, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Pending changes reviewer granted

Hello. Your account has been granted the "pending changes reviewer" userright, allowing you to review other users' edits on pages protected by pending changes. The list of articles awaiting review is located at Special:PendingChanges, while the list of articles that have pending changes protection turned on is located at Special:StablePages.

Being granted reviewer rights neither grants you status nor changes how you can edit articles. If you do not want this user right, you may ask any administrator to remove it for you at any time.

See also:

• Wikipedia:Reviewing pending changes, the guideline on reviewing
• Wikipedia:Pending changes, the summary of the use of pending changes
• Wikipedia:Protection policy#Pending changes protection, the policy determining which pages can be given pending changes protection by administrators.
  

Go Phightins! 22:00, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Use of "contradictory"

My feeling was that to say that "X and Y are contradictory" is to imply that "Either X contradicts Y or Y contradicts X", but as you noted in your edit summary, both cladograms are hypotheses, so neither actually contradicts the other. However, maybe this is just my idiolectic use of "contradictory". It's not something I feel strongly about. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:27, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead:According to your user page, you're a native speaker of English affiliated with a major English university, so your ideas about the meaning of "contradictory" are unexpected. A contradiction, per Wikipedia, "consists of a logical incompatibility or incongruity between two or more propositions." The locutions "X and Y are contradictory", "X contradicts Y", and "Y contradicts X" are three ways of saying the same thing. Whether they're hypotheses or not is utterly beside the point. Peter Brown (talk) 18:03, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

A Google search shows me that "contradictory hypotheses" or "hypotheses are a contradiction" are quite widely used phrases, contrary to my prior belief. My real concern was to be sure that readers not familiar with cladograms will be clear that both could perfectly well be false. Is there a difference in meaning between "contradictory hypotheses" and "competing hypotheses"? I still prefer the latter, but, as I said above, this is probably my idiolect. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:20, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

PS As you might expect, I prefer Jts1882's version. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:27, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

How to describe spaced en-dash usage: Category:Too difficult?

I won't put this on talk:Dash because I suspect that it is an edge condition that would just bog down an already overlong article in even more detail. But given your way with words and in case you enjoy a challenge, can you describe succinctly the usage in this (perfectly literate) headline?

• Zoe Williams (20 July 2021). "Who is to blame for the sweltering weather? My kids say it's boomers – and me". The Guardian.

One for Category:Just too difficult? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:18, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

@John Maynard Friedman: This falls under item 3 at Dash § Usage — the spaced en dash is used "to indicate a rhetorical pause." Shall we incorporate the Guardian headline in the Dash article as an example? Peter Brown (talk) 20:17, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

I KNEW THAT! I KNEW THAT! (sorry, I guess you wouldn't recognise that catch phrase from Goodness Gracious Me – a blustering reply like "just testing" meaning that I should have known that). Yes, it is a good and topical example if you can get it in nicely. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:27, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Abbreviation of "Ga" on History of life

Hi Peter, I undid your revert on History of life because I believe you misunderstood my edit. The original text read: "3.8 Ga (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum)" which makes no sense - "Ga" is not an abbreviation of itself. I simply moved the parentheses earlier in the paragraph, so it now reads "4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum)". Ga is, of course, equivalent to "billion years ago".

If you still disagree, I will not insist. Otherwise, I consider the issue resolved. - Tronno ( t | c ) 22:56, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Chicxulub crater Featured article review

User:Hemiauchenia has nominated Chicxulub crater for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:05, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Premature publication

Is this relevant to your complaint about edits being published prematurely?

• WP:Teahouse#When writing an edit summary, is there a way to stop the enter key generating a "Publish"?

The solution offered does exactly what it says on the tin. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 10:32, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Paragraph break

Hello Peter M. Brown. If you have the time or desire, could you illustrate in the sandbox how "an edit that also adds, deletes, or alters text following the break makes it hard to see changes in the 'diff'"? Or link to relevant guidance. (Per your edit summary in the diff in the page The Devil. ) Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 20:10, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

@Thinker78: See this diff], for example. In one edit, I split a paragraph in two as well as replacing the word "firmament" by "dome", the NRSV translation of the Hebrew word, following the break. Because of the paragraph break, the word replacement is invisible in the 'diff ' unless one is prepared to compare the versions word by word. If diffs are to inform as to the changes in an article, those representing paragraph breaks must not be combined with text changes following the breaks. They must be done separately. Peter Brown (talk) 16:53, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

I have added guidance to Help:Wikitext#Line breaks (see diff). I didn't link to your example because it's in your general use personal sandbox. Thinker78 (talk) 21:27, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

I added an example. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 21:47, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Stripmarker error

Your edit here restored the stripmarker ref error message (which I corrected) which can be seen at ref 232 in the page version current at the time of posting. Using the curly brackets within a cite like that produces the error message and the source does not use them. Did you not preview your edit to check for an error message (which would have contained a 'help' link). Eagleash (talk) 03:47, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

@Eagleash: I am baffled. The error message on reference 223 reads "{{cite journal}}: templatestyles stripmarker in | title= at position 117 (help)" but the argument of title= is only 90 characters long; it doesn't have a position 117. Clicking on the "help" link gets me to Help:CS1 errors § invisible char, which provides a list of invisible characters, none of which appear in the citation. Shall I go to the Help Desk or can you explain what's going on?

How about CO&#​8322; and CO₂ which normally yield CO₂ and CO₂, respectively? Will they produce errors in {{Cite journal}}?

You're not correct that "the source does not use them." {{CO2}} and {{CH4}} produced CO₂ and CH₄, as I intended.

(I know that you wrote "ref 232" but I was looking at ref 223, which seems to have the same problem.) Peter Brown (talk) 19:28, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes oh dear bit of a typo there (at 4AMish UK). I think if you use the mark up you suggest for the 'small' numbers it might not produce an error message. Try it and see!! If it does produce one then HD (or Trappist would almost certainly know). Eagleash (talk) 19:42, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Idle bystander remark: the output of CO&#​8322; likely violates MOS:ACCESS. Same reason that we should use {{frac|1|2}} (1⁄2) rather than U+00BD ½ VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:21, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

@𝕁𝕄𝔽: Say more! I think that I always have used {{frac}} or {{sfrac}}, but I don't know the rationale. I have used code like &#​x00BD; in edit summaries, where templates don't work; I hope that's OK? Peter Brown (talk) 00:55, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

the issue is visual acuity for sight limited readers. And the competence of "screen readers" (html interpreters) for blind readers. I don't think there is as much concern over edit summaries. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 10:20, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

@𝕁𝕄𝔽: According to the article Screen Reader, these devices are quite sophisticated. Do many of them find 1⁄2 easier to handle than ½? The former consists of three glyphs in a rather complex relationship while the latter is a single glyph and is available on Windows-1252. Do you have a source that suggests that the former is better handled by the typical screen reader? Peter Brown (talk) 14:51, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

No, only that I have been reprimanded in the past for it and referred to MOS:ACCESS. Interestingly, I suspect that partially sighted readers cope better with 1⁄2 but screen-readers cope better with ½ – size matters more in the former case. "Not my field". --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:19, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Evil entities

Evil entities in Christianity should be deleted. If it purports to talk generally about the topic of "Evil entities", shouldn't it at least contain a Christian view of what "evil" is, generally speaking? As you point out in the history, in explanation of your reversion, there is no room in the article for a Christian view of evil: because the article is not about that. I don't see what it contributes. — Mark (Mkmcconn) ** 04:27, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

@Mkmcconn:The article has been nominated for deletion. It lacks sufficient secondary sources, notably in the § Beasts section, but somebody might undertake to remedy that. I suggest that you contribute to the deletion discussion page.  — Peter Brown (talk) 23:08, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Great Britain and all that

An easy reading you might enjoy: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/oct/01/union-with-david-olusoga-bbc-england-scotland-northern-ireland-wales-britain-uk (The author, David Olusoga, is a respected historian (and a full professor at the University of Manchester).

I doubt you will ever see the TV series, but his article gives a good sense of the murky waters and the reason for the widespread misuse of names. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 10:05, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Solstice greetings

Sunlight entering the chamber of Newgrange

My best wishes of the solstice season and for the coming year. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 18:13, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

When is a hyphen not a hyphen

Longer ago than I care to remember, I took extra classes in Fortran. Guess who couldn't understand why variables called OPTION-A, OPTION-B and OPTION-C refused to behave as planned? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 00:25, 7 March 2024 (UTC)