Talk:Animal unit

Proposed merge

Please see discussion at Talk:Livestock Unit#Rename and merge. Thanks, Richard New Forest (talk) 09:19, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Editing and the Scope of Appropriate Article Content

A recent edit summary requested discussion of some article changes. Until July 28, 2012, this article's discussion of "animal unit" pertained exclusively to the term as used by US federal agencies, giving a narrow impression of "animal unit" to readers who may be seeking information applicable in other contexts in the US and elsewhere. Even with regard to usage by US federal agencies, the content was somewhat misleading, because it failed to acknowledge some differences relating to certain US federal regulations and applications. Some recent edits attempted to redress this, removed some article content (e.g. problematic content and content that was not about "animal unit"), and provided numerous inline citations to support inserted content. A subsequent edit reintroduced considerable US grazing fee information. However, there is a separate Wikipedia article for Grazing fee. Consequently, beyond briefly giving examples to illustrate fees charged per AUM, details regarding grazing fees would seem more appropriately placed in the Grazing fee article, rather than the Animal unit article. The reintroduction duplicated some article content and put some reintroduced information under arguably inappropriate headings in different parts of the article. It would seem desirable to avoid duplication of content within an article and to ensure appropriate organization of content. The reintroduced content includes wording taken from a Congressional Research Service document, without using quotation marks and without identifying specifically which content that source pertains to. That approach to editing is problematic for readers who wish to check specific article content. Such checking can be facilitated by use of inline citation. Checking is also made unnecessarily complicated because the restored link directing to the CRS document leads to a "Page Not Found" message, requiring search of the NCSE website or use of an alternative source of the document. (It would be helpful if such a link were directly to the document cited.) Some cited references in recent edits indicate that even the AU equivalents used by US federal agencies differ in relation to various laws and regulations. Because the CRS document does not acknowledge such differences, its assertions with regard to AU equivalents can be misleading. Consequently, uncritical re-insertion of the quote regarding AU equivalents from the CRS document seem inappropriate. If that information is to be included, the scope of its application should be specified, even if this requires some re-wording and use of an additional source, and the information sources should be identified. The reintroduced material includes a comment that the US EPA does not use animal units with regard to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. But many other government agencies in the world do not use animal units either, and there is no attempt to provide a list of such agencies (nor would one seem appropriate), so there is no obvious rationale for digressing into information about US EPA usage for CAFOS in this article. (There is a separate Wikipedia article for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.) Despite the above comments, there may be some good reasons for the restoration of some content that had been deleted. If so, perhaps those reasons could be discussed on this Talk page. Schafhirt (talk) 01:16, 1 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You fail to note there is a worldwide article, Livestock grazing comparison. It is also fine to keep a summarized portion of one topic even when there is a more extensive article elsewhere if the two are related. It's fine to improve sources and fix redundancies, but such wikignoming should be explained in the edit summary or noted on talk if it's major, particularly when the editor in question appears to have a pro-CAFO point of view that is being inserted across multiple wikipedia articles, which is something that may be a potential problem with WP:NPOV. Montanabw^(talk) 21:58, 2 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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