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Talk:Entomologica Americana (New York Entomological Society)

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Proposed merge with Journal of the New York Entomological Society

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This is the previous name of the journal now published as Entomologica Americana (New York Entomological Society). The content of both articles is largely identical and needlessly complicated. Normal practice for academic journals is to redirect former names to the new name and present the journal history at that place. Randykitty (talk) 02:20, 20 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • I think it is useful to have separate articles for different journals. It means we can include key data such as ISSNs, links to scanned content, publishers, etc. in Infoboxes for all journals. All of these things can change when journals are renamed, but relegating this to the text of the article about the current journal loses this information. This also facilitates links between Wikidata and Wikipedia (each instance of the journal links to different Wikidata item). While some users of Wikipedia may only be interested in what the journal is called now, others (such as anyone working with content from those journals) is likely to benefit from having separate accounts for each journal. Yes, the content of the articles in question overlaps, but they have just been started. "Needlessly complicated" they may be, but the history of these journals and their publishing societies is also complicated.--Roderic D. M. Page (talk) 07:07, 20 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Journals often change names. And like with people, we have only one article for them, not different articles for the periods that they had different names (The Artist Formerly Known as Prince appropriately redirects to Prince (musician), for example. We have hundreds of articles on journals that underwent sometimes multiple name changes. Wikidata is no problem: the redirects can have entries there with the ISSNs and whatever other info is particular to that specific instance of a journal. Similarly, we sometimes have multiple infoboxes for articles on closely related journals (e.g., journals that have the same main title, but are divided into different series -generally indicated by capital letters: A, B, etc) and, in any case, any important information like previous ISSNs can be listed in the infobox or, if necessary, in the text. At this point, I see no reason at all to change this practice. And as far as "complicated" goes, I don't think that this is very complicated at all: originally there were two different journals, at some point they merged and now there is one. --Randykitty (talk) 12:55, 20 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • To be pedantic, it's not the case that we have two journals that merged, we had two journals published by two different societies, one ceased, then later on other journal adopted the name of the ceased journal. I don't see the harm in maintaining different articles for different journals (or names of journals). Your argument simply seems to be that "we don't normally do this", which seems more an appeal to tradition than an argument about whether what I've done is reasonable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rdmpage (talk • contribs) 14:40, 20 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Another solution is to edit the translcuded table to also include a text-based history of the journals so that this is consistent across the different articles for each journal. Yes, the text for each article is short but they are stubs, pretty much every Wikipedia article has to start somewhere. Some fields, such as taxonomy, care deeply about the history of journals, particularly publication date of particular issues, the different versions of an article (e.g., original article, offprints, repackaging, etc.). These are topics that can be added to these pages as we flesh out the history of these journals. The phrase "really very minor journal" depends on how you measure importance. Do these journals have high impact factors? No, but between them they contain the descriptions of some 5,700 new species of arthropods, and I suspect that articles in these journals will be cited long after most of the contents of a high impact, short citation half-life journal such a Nature is forgotten (the taxonomic literature is essentially immortal). There are likely Wikipedia articles for species that cite papers from these journals (or, indeed, could be improved by citing such papers). I understand that you do not see a need for separate articles, that doesn't mean that there no value in doing so. --Roderic D. M. Page (talk) 00:08, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Criteria for what is a journal worth including in Wikipedia seem somewhat arbitrary (certainly you and I disagree). Consider the WikiCite 2016 project whose goal is to create a "repository to store all citations and source metadata across Wikimedia". Would it not make sense to have an article in Wikipedia for each journal that contains one or more articles cited in Wikipedia? This would be a resource not only for people outside Wikipedia who are interested in journals, but also Wikipedias working on projects like WikiCite who want to have clean, definitive versions of bibliographic metadata.--Roderic D. M. Page (talk) 00:22, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am not arguing for deletion of any article. Do note, however, that a lot of the stuff that you mention (e.g., publication dates of issues) are not encyclopedic and should not included in WP articles (violating the spirit of WP:NOTCATALOG: phone directories are very useful for many people, but we don't include them here either). If there is so much different content on these journal titles, then I suggest that instead of wasting your time here, you start adding that to the articles. For the moment, you have not made a convincing case that there is added value in having separate articles and that we should deviate from current practice where older titles of journals redirect to current titles. The publishers are in this respect rather irrelevant either: many journals change publishers over their lifetimes and that is no reason to have separate articles on them either (although -if sourced- this info should be added to the article, of course). Your proposal to change the table by adding text just makes the problem worse, as it really is silly to have different "articles" that basically all say the same thing, it's actually a strong argument for merging all of them. --Randykitty (talk) 07:17, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed merge with Entomologica Americana (Brooklyn Entomological Society)

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Journal published until the society merged with the NY Entomological Society, which then renamed its journal "Entomologica Americana", indicating that the new journal was a merger of the two journals, taken the title of one and continuing the volume numbering of the other. Again, the content of this article largely duplicates that of the other two. Randykitty (talk) 02:24, 20 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Two societies merge. After some time, they discontinue publishing two journals and merge them, too. Seems pretty straightforward to me and I don't think you have made a good case (or actually any case at all) that the current iteration of the journal is different from the historical ones. As I argue above
  • even if they would be different, it makes sense to cover what we know about them in a single, more meaty article. BTW, I propose centralizing the discussion in the above section. --Randykitty (talk) 16:34, 21 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • The journals have had different publishers, and have different ISSNs. I agree that it makes sense to have a centralised article covering the history (in addition to the articles about each journal). The transcluded table could be used to do this). --Roderic D. M. Page (talk) 00:13, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed merge with Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society

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Same as for the other iterations of the journal. Randykitty (talk) 16:24, 21 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]


  • The library practice for this is very clear: since about 1950 we librarians have always made a new record for every significant name change, though the exact rules for when we think a change significant enough to count have varied. The former practice of moving the record for each significant change is basically a nineteenth century practice, adapted to the use of printed book-form catalogs, obsolete in a era of card catalogs. Electronic records of course give the possibility of doing it any way we please--its no harder one way than another.
All bibliographic services consistently use the name at the time of publication--this makes excellent sense for printed journals, because the reader wants to go directly from the record to the actual journal. Electronic records again make any variation possible.
The advantage of keeping everything together is that it clarifies the overall history of the journal, which would seem appropriate for the basic encyclopedic purpose of reading about the journal, not using the journal. For this purpose, our present rules make sense.
However, this is not the only use of an encyclopedia , because WP also serves as a source from which people find references--this has several times been found to be the major academic use of the encyclopedia. And there are indeed plans for a common database of references, analogous to Commons--this move is being pushed by the European WPedians. It will have some important advantages--in particular, removing the need to enter everything separately each time it is used. It is absurd to do basic things differently than the rest of the world. The fundamental principle of the MOS is that the style of WP should reflect current usage., especially when it is such consistent usage.
This particular situation, in which t journals have merged, is one which especially merits the clear separation of the titles. It is exactly this situation which leads to confusion unless the various parts are clearly separated. The table makes things clear, and there is ho harm in repeating it in each article The normal bibliographic custom in discussing is to use line diagrams, but this is harder in WP than tables
This is quite different from the proper manner of handling the Wikipedia articles on the organizations. Here, we normally do write single articles for merged organizations--and this seems to correspond ot the academic practice in writing company histories. DGG ( talk ) 19:30, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • @DGG:, I understand your reasoning. Library practice makes sense, because it is based on the ability of library users to find stuff easily. In almost all libraries that I know, journal volumes are stored alphabetically according to title. This makes sense: if I am looking for a reference published in 1980 in a journal named ABC, I don't care that since 1985 it's named KLM, but walk to the "A isle" and find my reference. After the 1984 volume of ABC, there will be a placeholder informing me that the journal is continued as KLM. For physical libraries, with physical volumes of journals, where users come to find a particular article in a particular journal (or perhaps only to browse though a journal out of curiosity), this makes perfect sense. However, WP is not a physical library and users don't go to an article about a certain journal to find information published in that journal. Instead, they come to find information about the journal. That is why we have the practice here of redirecting ABC to KLM if a journal changes titles. Physical libraries have no redirects (except for those placeholders forcing you to walk to a different part of the library), WP does. Now, as I said above, if we would have "meaty" articles about every iteration of these journals, having separate articles might be acceptable. However, we don't. If readers now want information on Entomologica Americana, they are directed to a disambiguation page and they now have to choose between two journals with the same name, just differing in the location of the society publishing them (NY versus Brooklyn). This presupposes knowledge they don't have (that's why they're coming here). If they click on one of the two links, they come to very brief stub articles, which both have the same clumsy table. Exploring the links in that table brings them to two more stub articles (Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society and Journal of the New York Entomological Society), each equally brief. I think this is extremely confusing and it would be much better to have one single article, explaining the combined history of these journals. That would make for a more substantial and, I am sure, interesting article than the weird collection of stubs that we have now. Converting the table to text, will certain improve reader comprehension. --Randykitty (talk) 15:01, 3 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Steve Quinn, DGG, and Randykitty: Any further thoughts, as this has been stale for a while. I'm fence-sitting, so would be inclined to close on the basis of no consensus. I don't mind these short pages, and the table is very clear (I don't think that converting it to text would help). Klbrain (talk) 22:17, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Given the intermingled history I still feel that it makes more sense to have one article clearly explaining that instead of having two articles that are almost identical, which I think is more confusing. I don't see a problem with deviating from what librarians do, WP is not a library card index, we're electronic and can do things differently. --Randykitty (talk) 09:21, 27 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
One solution might be to have one page to which all of the journals were merged; something like Journals associated with the New York Entomological Society. Then each journal has its own section, preceded by the very helpful table.Klbrain (talk) 22:06, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Given that no alternative suggestions over a month,  Done Klbrain (talk) 10:37, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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