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Need for the "Species Latin name abbreviation disambiguation pages"

This series of disambiguation pages was created between 15-10 years ago Category:Species Latin name abbreviation disambiguation pages by now blocked editor Neelix, and I dont think anything has been done with it since. New species have article pages now, but are not represented in the disambigs, extant species with no article were included, but extinct species are missing, and no updates have happened as splits/synonymizations/depreciations have happened. I feel the whole lot is much more work then its intended benefit and should be deleted. Thoughts?--Kevmin § 17:07, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Wow. Somehow, in decades and tens of thousands of edits, I never came across these, or if I did, didn't realize how extensive the categorization was. These would be an absolute nightmare to keep updated and accurate, given how many taxa change generic placement, and it seems like most wouldn't have many articles that link TO them. The first one I picked at random, A. maxima, lists 12 names (one redlink), and has zero articles that link to it, not even the 11 names that have articles. Moreover, no one should be putting abbreviated scientific names directly into links. That really seems worthless. Dyanega (talk) 17:45, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

I am quite fond of lists of interesting things, but I am unable to think what real benefit these categories dispose on Wikipedia. Donald Albury 18:11, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Also wow from me; I was aware of C. elegans (disambiguation) but didn't know so many of these had been made. I'm going to be contrary and suggest possible uses for these pages:

• disambiguation of common abbreviated binomials (see C. elegans above), a scientific literacy function since taxonomic abbreviations are extremely common in scientific literature
• historical research value – older scientific literature often uses abbreviated names, and these pages could help researchers tracking down species mentions in archival materials
• linguistic/etymology – shows which descriptive terms taxonomists frequently use (like "elegans", "vulgaris", "officinalis", "communis"), which gives insight into the historical practices of taxonomic naming
• educational value: helps students understand the meaning and patterns behind scientific naming conventions (e.g., why so many species are called "vulgaris" or "australis")

Maintenance is an issue, but I think a single purpose bot could be made to partly clean up the existing pages, and have a maintenance function to scan new species article titles for binomial names, extract abbreviated forms, and update relevant disambiguation pages (or produce a weekly report of potential changes that need to be made).

Instead of focusing on the state of the pages as they are now (incomplete and sometimes outdated), think of what else it could be used for if it were up-to-date, complete, and regularly maintained?

• research prioritization: could help taxonomists identify naming conflicts before assigning new names to species (hello hemihomonyms). If they see many species already share an abbreviated form, they might choose a different epithet to reduce potential confusion in the literature
• literature mining aid: could assist in developing better automated tools for extracting species mentions from scientific literature, by providing a comprehensive list of possible species for each abbreviated form
• historical trends analysis: with complete data including dates of species descriptions, could reveal patterns in naming conventions over time and across different taxonomic groups.

Esculenta (talk) 20:56, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

• Trends for whom though, Keeping in mind a portion of your suggestion leans very close to or falls into WP:OR.--Kevmin § 21:05, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

  What portion is that? I'm suggesting possible uses of a theoretical up-to-date, well-maintained system of abbreviation disambiguation pages. Esculenta (talk) 21:09, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

  Lets look at your points closer.

  "disambiguation of common abbreviated binomials" Its a poor source that doesn't give a full binomial at the first usage, and if it doesnt, is consulting a random disambiguation page here really what should be encouraged?

  Historical research value – see reply to the first point and note that its compounded by the high likelihood of generic placement changes.

  Point three we already have a list of the common specific names.

  For point four, see point three.

  Whom will be doing the updating and maintaining, which would include the addition of hundreds of thousands of abbreviations (see List of prehistoric cartilaginous fish genera for just the shark relatives that are missing) unicellular organisms (see the species list at Bacillus for one missing genus of bacteria) and all the outdated jr synonyms, homonyms, and rejected names in plants, fungi, prootists, and animals. I have enough problems keeping up with the numberous synonyms that paleobotany generates (see the synonym lists in the eudicot species entries at Paleobiota of the Green River Formation, European formations area even more convoluted).

  The next three points are all OR territoty though, and also WP:Crystalball that people would even use the pages that way. Everyone here has mentioned they knew of 1 of the random pages, but not that there are hundreds of them. Ive been on wiki for over 15 years and in the time since the disambiguation pages were created, I have rarely visited any of them. Additionally disambiguation pages do not get sorted upwards in google results so you will not see them unless you actively type "Pantera (disambiguation)". How are the hypothesized researchers and students finding these pages in the first place given the depreciated search status on search engines?--Kevmin § 23:27, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

  • ""disambiguation of common abbreviated binomials" Its a poor source that doesn't give a full binomial at the first usage, and if it doesnt, is consulting a random disambiguation page here really what should be encouraged?" What's "random" about going to Wikipedia and entering "A. maxima" if you read it in a poor source and want to find out what species it is? Where else is a layperson going to figure this out?
  • "Historical research value – see reply to the first point and note that its compounded by the high likelihood of generic placement changes." see my response to your point; in the hypothetical up-to-date, complete, and regularly maintained disambiguation paged Wikipedia I'm talking about the synonyms are listed on these pages.
  • "Point three we already have a list of the common specific names." Great! Too bad a reader can't tell get a full list of species with htese names, even even tell how often these "common" names have been used historically. And how was it decided what was common?
  • "For point four, see point three." ditto my response to point 3
  • "The next three points are all OR territory though" Of course they're OR, as I explained already, these were possible use cases. "Patterns and Evolution of Species Epithet Usage in Biological Nomenclature: A Cross-Taxa Analysis from 1758–2024" would be a lot easier to write in the alternate universe.
  • "Whom will be doing the updating and maintaining" as I said already, these kind of tasks are not difficult for a bot. Esculenta (talk) 00:22, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
  • "Additionally disambiguation pages do not get sorted upwards in google results so you will not see them unless you actively type "Pantera (disambiguation)"." Wrong. I went to Google, searched for "A. maxima", and the dab page was the second hit. Esculenta (talk) 00:22, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Honestly I was very skeptical about this but after reading through your points I really like this proposal. I am happy with maintaining these pages for those purposes. — Snoteleks (talk) 17:29, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

As someone who spends all day researching scientific names, I can vouch for such an index of abbreviations being something I would never use, and given that there are nearly 2 million valid published names (plus over 3 million more that are junior synonyms or unavailable), with approximately 100,000 unique species epithets, I would anticipate that making the system anywhere near complete would be one of the most monumental tasks in WP history. If people have that kind of time, then they should be spending it turning redlinked taxonomy articles into actual articles, not making a half-baked index. I can think right now of only three scientific names that are very commonly referenced only using the abbreviation of the genus: T. rex, E. coli, and C. elegans. If there are other taxa that have these same abbreviations, then yes, by all means, let's give them disambiguation pages. But no one, researcher or lay person, is going to come to Wikipedia trying to research "What is "A. maxima?". If they did, but can't already tell from context, then that's a problem that WP isn't actually going to solve. Dyanega (talk) 23:52, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Making Wikipedia anywhere near complete will be one of the most monumental tasks in WP history; creatinga script to update and maintain a set of index files would not be. Esculenta (talk) 00:34, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I do think there is at least some value in creating disambiguation lists for common abbreviations, and my only real gripe with them is in relation to issues with maintenance and quality control, so I'm very interested in your idea to develop a script to manage these lists. Ethmostigmus 🌿 (talk | contribs) 01:42, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with Esculenta that there is some potential use. If someone sees the name (say reading a newspaper or website) and puts it into Wikipedia search they get a result. They may not be complete, but maintenance is not a problem. If a species gets moved, redirects should handle that. Someone looking for A. maxima that is now known as B. maxima would end at relevant article. I wouldn't advocate creating such a system from scratch (a lot of work for limited use), but the pages already exist (no work needed for the limited use). I see no benefit from deleting them. One of the benefits of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia is its massive capacity and ability to host information that is of use to few.  —  Jts1882 | talk  07:01, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree with User:Dyanega on the futility of this. Search engines would anyway pick up the "A. maxima" via the taxobox text as pointed out by User:Esculenta. Would suggest that we ignore and add a guideline to avoid any further addition. Shyamal (talk) 07:17, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree that "If someone sees the name (say reading a newspaper or website)" then that abbreviated name could be considered in common use and would definitely warrant a disambiguation page to avoid any potential confusion to the reader. However, this practice should be limited only to those species that are actually referred to by an abbreviated name (such as T. rex, E. coli, and C. elegans) in external sources.

Unless a source does not actually first spell out the full genus name or complete binomial before referring to the species, then we should not be the first to do so. Let us not forget that the only reason to abbreviate the genus name at all was to save time for the manual typesetters, an archaic practice rendered moot by modern word processing and printing technologies. Loopy30 (talk) 13:40, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata has abbreviations for most (all?) species. If somebody wants to do some kind of data-mining (as opposed to reading an encyclopedia article), they can go to Wikidata.

Aside from T. rex, E. coli and C. elegans, which do often appear in written works without ever being written out in full, I can imagine situations where somebody might encounter an abbreviated without the full genus. Maybe they have a single page torn out of a physical book, or have a limited view of pages in an digital book (as is often the case with Google Books). But if their context is limited, are they even going to be able to figure out which species on a disambiguation page is the one they are looking for? Maybe their source mentions that C. elegans is a copepod; there are 7 C. elegans copepods on the dab page, and they'll need to know the order as well to find a particular one (and if the source says "small crustacean" instead of "copepod", they're never going to find it). Disambiguation pages are supposed to be navigational aids, helping readers of an encyclopedia find the topic they are interested. I think there is very little demand for navigating from species abbreviation to species article, and whatever demand there might be is poorly served by this set of disambiguation pages. I don't think it is really possible to better serve people looking for the full name of a species if they have limited context; what context they have could be any number of things: family/order/class, marine/freshwater/terrestrial, parasitic/free-living, a continent where it occurs, etc. And we're not going to list all of that possible context for every species on a dab page. We can't even be sure that the species somebody is searching for has a Wikipedia article at all. Now, the pages don't have to be dab pages; they could be "list of species that can be abbreviated as C. elegans", but I don't think such a list would be encyclopedic.

However, the problem isn't really the species abbreviation dab pages. I dislike them, but I've made a couple myself by converting redirects to an obscure species to dabs that list less-obscure species with the same abbreviation. The species abbreviation redirects are the real problem. They were created haphazardly, with no concern for whether other species shared an abbreviation, nor whether the abbreviation redirect pointed to the least-obscure species (i.e., the "primary topic" in dab-speak).

Category:Redirects from scientific abbreviations has 957 members. I would guess that most of the pages in that category are in it because I put them there myself, and that most of them are ambiguous for multiple species (although maybe not for multiple species with Wikipedia article). Most of them were created by User:Caftaric/User:Nono64/User:NotWith (a single person), with User:Neelix maybe also having contributed a substantial number. I have not systematically gone through redirects created by Caftaric, but I would guess there are thousands more that aren't in the "Redirects from scientific abbreviations" category.

If somebody does think species abbreviation dab pages are worthwhile and wants to make more of them, you can start with User:Certes/Reports/Species redirects which lists ambiguous species abbreviation redirects. Plantdrew (talk) 00:51, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Not sure how general this is, but looking at the Wikidata items for the first few items on User:Certes/Reports/Species redirects, they are bot created and only exist as Wikimedia disambiguation pages because of the pages on English Wikipedia.  —  Jts1882 | talk  06:59, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

The first three entries in Certes list were converted from redirects into disambiguation pages a couple of days ago (perhap Kevmin noticed that and it led to this thread starting). Most of the entries on Certes list are still redirects and aren't in the "Redirects form scientific abbreviations" category. When I mentioned Wikidata, I was referring to short name (P1813); most species have this property populated with the abbreviation. 15:19, 25 October 2024 (UTC) Plantdrew (talk) 15:19, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Since I see Caftaric/Nono64/NotWith and the C. elegans (disambiguation) page was mentioned here, believe I should make some comments of my own on this subject since it seems tangentially related to this discussion (also wow, I had no idea there were so many more of these disambiguation pages) and I don't think Caftaric's C. elegans-related editing has ever been significantly discussed on-wiki before if at all.

C. elegans (disambiguation) in particular seems to have been some sort of personal project of Caftaric's, as not only had they been building up this list from 2010 all the way up until they were blocked in 2018 (before 2010, C. elegans was simply a redirect to Caenorhabditis elegans), but they also created possibly most of the C. elegans species articles in the list. I'm also aware that Caftaric sometimes created pages for any higher taxa to house these C. elegans species articles, if they were missing. Unfortunately from what I've seen of them since Caftaric was blocked, many of these C. elegans articles are or were stubs, low quality, have incomplete references, are badly researched, and so on. Caftaric also apparently created articles for invalid "C. elegans" species names, as some of these were later deleted from the list (judging by the revision history). They also arbitrarily added a list of C. elegans uses to the Cicindela article in 2017 (diff link) which was still there until I removed it about two years ago now. There may be other instances of these kinds of "C. elegans notes" on other articles, though I have not extensively searched for them.

To my knowledge, they also underwent this same C. elegans project on fr.wiki as well as on Wikispecies.

Monster Iestyn (talk) 22:20, 29 October 2024 (UTC)