User talk:Torbjörn Sunde

Welcome!

Welcome to Wikipedia, Torbjörn Sunde! Thank you for your contributions. I am Beeblebrox and I have been editing Wikipedia for some time, so if you have any questions feel free to leave me a message on my talk page. You can also check out Wikipedia:Questions or type {{help me}} at the bottom of this page. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that will automatically produce your username and the date. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Beeblebrox (talk) 01:02, 23 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

reply on your reply

Thank you for the reply. I agree that there is no need to cover this discussion, I just wanted give you a chance to correct your mistake without making it public or to claim your opinion if you peristed. Obviously it was the latter, so then I do prefer to have the discussion in public.

Yes, I am fully aware of that the subject moose/elk/wapiti has been discussed a lot, not only here on Wikipedia, but also on other places. My experience is that there is commonly a clash between US English speaking people and people speaking other versions of English or other languages.

You point out that I have not given any evidence for that Wapiti is the most common term for Cervus canadensis outside US English. Well, I gave a reference to Oxford Dictionaries that states that elk is a North American expression for Wapiti. Else, on Wikipedia on the article on Cervus canadensis, among the 43 languages using latin or cyrillic alphabet, 4 got Elk (or similar) in the title while 24 got Wapiti (or similar) in the headline. Of the 15 that does neither have elk nor wapiti in the headline, most uses the latin name Cervus canadensis. Among these 15, a single one mention elk in the first sentence while 7 mention wapiti. So without doing any qualified statistics, the wapiti-to-elk ratio is in the order of 6/1 to 7/1.

Then I don't understand why you stress that this was one of my first contributions to Wikipedia. Despite if you are an experienced writer or not, you have to prove what you state, that's basic. In my case I gave references to well established sources like Oxford Dictionary, Merriam-Websters Dictionary, ITIS and Wilson & Reeder's Mammal Species of the World. You, on the other hand, just wiped that out without giving the slightest evidence on the statement you restored.

I do like the idea of a free, independent, public encyclopedia so I have regularly given an economical contribution to Wikipedia. Now my intention was to give also a bit of my time and knowledge to improve on the content by adding objective, proven facts in the usual academic way (yes, I'm a PhD but not in biology). Obviously that is not the way on Wikipedia. So I give up this Orwellian Department of Truth, I will not waste my time on research and write contributions that are rejected without any reason. I could have understood if it concerned if the subject was political controversial, the sources doubtful or similar but not concerning a well documented trivial name of an animal.

//Torbjörn

reply to your email

Replying here as I see no reason this conversation needs to be had off-wiki.

The naming of the Elk page has been the subject of a great deal of contention and debate over the course of many years. The FAQ page was developed for pretty much the sole purpose of helping to calm these disputes and to make it clear that the naming of the page was carefully considered. In other words, the FAQ was meant to help explain the hard-won consensus on the matter and to help explain to those who have known an elk as a different animal why there is contradictory information on the subject. If you look in the talk page archives for the article you will find a great deal of discussion of these matters. So, I would think you could understand that when someone comes along and as their second edit ever to this project, completely changes the wording of that FAQ page so that it no longer reflects that consensus but instead appears to represent their personal opinion on the matter, that's a problem. For example, your apparent contention that outside of the US and UK literally all English speaking people use the term "wapiti", an assertion for which you have provided no supporting evidence. I would suggest that you open a new thread at Talk:Elk to propose any changes you would like to make, and see what consensus emerges from that discussion. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:19, 23 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]