User:Jaap Winius
Born May 30, 1963, in the United States, I've lived in the Netherlands since 1976. I'm an IT consultant (systems administration) with a passion for Linux and Open Source, but my contributions will not be in that area.
I am a serious amateur herpetologist with a keen interest in viperid snakes. I used to collect and breed snakes, but that was a long time ago. Now I just like writing about them and continue to acquire many books on the subject for reference material.
That was from the "CV" with which I applied for a Citizendium account, and it's true. I figure I'm responsible for creating/writing several hundred articles at Wikipedia, all on the subject of viperid snakes. Most of these are in Viperinae, but I'm now working on Crotalinae as well. A few examples would be Atheris, Bitis, Bitis arietans, Bitis gabonica and Daboia. There are many more in various states of completion.
Since I started writing these articles, certain issues have become very important to me:
- Never assume anything. Don't just write what you want because it's probably correct, but quote (without plagiarizing) from a reputable source.
- Cite your references. At least one reference should be cited (using the footnote system) for every bit of information in the article. Readers should be able to tell where the information came from, or else why should anyone trust it? If there are no references it also decreases an article's research value. Obviously, this means no original research, or else you can't cite any references.
- Follow a single taxonomy. If you don't, you'll eventually run into conflicts and your synonymy won't work either. For vipers and other snakes, I use McDiarmid, Campbell and Toure's 1999 checklist together with the ITIS online database. This is widely considered the most authoritative checklist.
Scientific names vs. Common names
In the time that I've been busy at Wikipedia, I managed to get myself into many arguments on the issue of whether scientific or common names should be used for article titles. Wikipedia's official policy is to use common names for this purpose whenever available -- preferably the "most popular" common name -- purely for reasons of presentation. However, IMHO there are way too many problems with this approach:
- Articles names at Wikipedia have to be unique anyway, so why not use the only ones that are always unambiguous?
- It avoids conflicts; do you have any idea how many different black snakes, green snakes, diamondbacks, sand vipers, lanceheads, adders and asps there are? If you use common names for article tiles, then one gets the "good" name and the others have to be, um, different. Why is that such a good solution? Presentation?
- Why should we have to make a choice when two or more common names can apply -- just because one shows up more often in Google? That is arbitrary and unscientific.
- Selecting one common name for a species over all the others gives people the impression that it's more importance of more official than the others, even though that's the case. An exception might be the AOU where they've tried to make certain common names for birds "official", but that's only for American species and even Wikipedia aren't following their lead.
- Using scientific names avoids petty conflicts between editors: no more fights about Siberian Tiger vs. Amur Tiger or Puma vs. Cougar.
- Common name tiles make category overviews pretty useless: just compare Category:True vipers with Category:Sharks and you'll see what I mean.
- Using scientific names for article titles can teach readers more about how organisms are related: "These names are weird, but look how the first names are all the same... maybe they're all related!"
- Using scientific names for article titles can also help editors to be more aware of how species are related: notice how Burmese Python is mentioned nowhere in Indian Python even though the former is a subspecies of the latter? That's bound to happen more often when scientific names and taxonomy are treated as an afterthought.
- Scientific names are universal while common names are not; people in one (English speaking) country may not be familiar with the common names in another.
- Using scientific names for article titles promotes better continuity when linking with other articles inside and outside of Wikipedia.
- When common names are used for article titles, people tend to spend a less time wondering whether the corresponding scientific name is correct or not and often don't even bother making a redirect for it.
Unfortunately, is a minority position at Wikipedia, but I feel very strongly about it. As you can image, I'm very much hoping that the folks here at Citizendium, in all their wisdom, will do the right thing here before it's too late.