Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Dinosaurs/Archive 26

I was considering making a bot request to automatically add Category: Fossil taxa described in 2014 (or whatever year) to all of our relevant articles based on the years listed under the genus authority heading of the article infoboxes. Do you support this initiative? Abyssal (talk) 14:16, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Sounds nice. FunkMonk (talk) 14:53, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Today I renominated the Paleozoic Portal for featured portal status. The last nomination failed because no one, apparently, could be arsed to comment on it. :( Your comments and criticism are welcome at the new nomination page. Abyssal (talk) 03:07, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

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For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to: Project leaflets Adikhajuria (talk) 16:22, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi, I want to share here this photos that have been taken for a user from the es:Wiki, Gastón Cuello, who lives in Argentina. These are from the Egidio Feruglio Museum in Trelew, and includes photos from the recently discovered giant titanosaur from Patagonia. So, here is the images of Tyrannotitan:

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  Teeth of Tyrannotitan found in the same site that the unnamed giant titanosaur

And the titanosaur fossils:

I hope that some of these will be useful. --Rextron (talk) 20:50, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Nice, I'll add some of it! He has other interesting images too, many of them uncategorised, not sure what this is: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Egidio_Feruglio_010.JPG FunkMonk (talk) 20:54, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

I added the teeth of Tyrannotitan, these are from the same site of the titanosaur. I'll ask him about the identity of this sauropod.--Rextron (talk) 21:18, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

The mounted skeleton of the sauropod is Epachthosaurus.--Rextron (talk) 23:18, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Our current categorization scheme for articles on dinosaur genera (and prehistoric animals generally) is difficult to use and profoundly misleading. Apart from taxonomic categories, we tend to categorize taxa by their continental landmass of origin and their age to the period level. However, this categorization scheme lumps taxa with little in common together in overpopulated categories that are hard to navigate and serve little purpose. Categorizing dinosaurs by continent (example) is not especially useful because the dinosaurs in question may have lived hundreds of miles from each other and be separated by millions of years in time. Also, there are so many taxa in these categories that no one can be expected to read them all, so from a reader's perspective the category is useless. Categorizing taxa by time period (example) has similar problems. Since a period is tens of millions of years long, most of the animals that lived during a given period would not be contemporaries. This makes categorizing them together misleading as many readers probably don't understand the full scale of a geologic period and will come away thinking they lived side-by-side.

I think we can capture the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of the broad geographic and chronological categories by categorizing taxa by the formations in which they are found (eg creating categories like "Morrison Formation", "Yixian Formation", etc). This system would group chronologically contemporary or nearly contemporary taxa with taxa of similar geographic ranges in categories that are manageable in size for the reader. I'm okay with us keeping the geographic and chronological categories in addition to stratigraphic categories, but if we do so I really think they need to be much more specific, like categorizing taxa by country or age instead of continent and period. Abyssal (talk) 18:39, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good, at least initially as an additional category. Though this would be slightly redundant with "Paleobiota of..." articles. Dinoguy2 (talk) 11:22, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Yesterday, I got Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi and this book is AWESOME!!:) There is not much text in this baby, but the pictures are just stellar!! Julius Csotonyi is one of the world greatest paleoartist, whose skill is rivalled by very few. We have some of his images on wikipedia, namely his Linhenykus and Dinosaur Park Formation fauna. If anyone who does not own this would like to see his glory, I can email them some scans of the images, once I get to scanning them. Some articles, such as Guanlong, Spinops, Ornithomimus and Utahraptor, are given an overview in it, and are illustrated amazingly. A recommendation to all dinosaur lovers who just love to see them restored to their fullest, Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi is just irreplaceable. IJReid (talk) 04:18, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

• "Dinosaur Art" was pretty good. I kind of prefer Raul Martin, I'm not too fond of the photoshopped plant photographs and that stuff... FunkMonk (talk) 19:21, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

I see on commons we have a large number of the inaccurate restorations category filled up by models. I was wondering if someone with more template experience than I could create a new template, or just a new parameter for inaccurate models, that categorizes them in a category for inaccurate models. The new category would be images that are almost impossible to correct, unless the inaccuracies can be cropped out. This would greatly clear up the inaccurate restorations cat, which would make it quicker and easier to find and correct errors in illustrations. IJReid (talk) 23:37, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

I don't think any of the regulars can do it, try to ask the creator of the template. FunkMonk (talk) 23:42, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Just a question: Inaccurate according to whom? Do restorations change often over time? What about, hypothetically, species for which there is modern debate about "accurate restorations" The template in question: Template:Inaccurate paleoart, would be improved if there was a requirement to justify the claim of inaccuracy (e.g. "Inaccurate as per Smith, 2005, Journal of Paleontology". Otherwise, this could be construed as original research (e.g. some wikipedian thinks this is inaccurate but doesn't explain why.) It might be better just to clearly specify the date the restoration was created or published, and include relevant alternate restorations in any articles (e.g. "restoration1 from 1905." "Restoration 2 from 2005"). --Animalparty-- (talk) 00:06, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

There is already a parameter for outdated/historical restorations. As for citations, yes, some of them already have them, would be nice if they all did. But in some cases with newer restorations, with for example unfeathered maniraptorans or pronated hands, there is really no discussion at this point. And some Commons images are also just so badly drawn as to be unusable. FunkMonk (talk) 00:11, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

I have requested to User:Calliopejen1, the creator, that both a references and a model parameter be added to the template, so we'll see what happens. IJReid (talk) 00:30, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

References can already be cited with links or just text referneces, not sure what parameter you would add. For a list of dinosaurs restoration guidelines with sources, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Dinosaurs/Image_review/To_Do_List#Guidelines_for_dinosaur_restorations FunkMonk (talk) 00:58, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

I think that the "reason=" parameter is fine as it is -- references can be added within that parameter. I guess I'm not sure what you mean by a "model" category -- do you mean 3D models? Calliopejen1 (talk) 01:54, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Calliopejen1 By that I mean a category that contains inaccurate dinosaur models, such as images in commons:Category:Dinosaur models, so yes, 3D models. IJReid (talk) 01:59, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

I put here this message that I left in the talk page of Saltasaurus:

As far I know, the fossils from Saltasaurus coming from the Allen Formation, that is younger compared with the Anacleto Formation, where is located the Auca Mahuevo site. So, why are related here in the article? really exists remains that match with Saltasaurus in Auca Mahuevo?--Rextron (talk) 03:27, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

I've noted that this user has uploaded some interesting dinosaur images in Commons, but I'm afraid that they have copyright... --Rextron (talk) 15:50, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Considering the uploader's talk page, they were likely lifted from and , unfortunately. I'll nominate all three for deletion. jonkerz ♠talk 15:58, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, stuff like that is regularly updated, I have a suspicion that it is done by some kids who don't understand copyright. FunkMonk (talk) 21:48, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Someone just created an article for Datanglong, but it's pretty obviously a machine translation of the NL:WP version. I don't have time to fix it right now, but someone ought to take a look. J. Spencer (talk) 02:35, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I've fixed some words and added the taxobox and references, but still needs work in the grammar. By the way, I couldn't link the Dutch version with Wikidata.--Rextron (talk) 18:45, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! A "big roofsauriër" just didn't seem to cut it in WP:EN. J. Spencer (talk) 18:38, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Currently trying to make the taxobox look better, myself; currently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Taxonomy/Datanglong is what I've got for the phylogeny. Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 15:55, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Apologies if I'm jumping the gun here but Bringosaurus seems suspect. The image is appropriated from DinoArt.com and I find no evidence on line, although there is an unnamed specimen with a similar locale described here. --Animalparty-- (talk) 04:57, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Most certainly a hoax. The image is of Coelophysis, which is apparently a relative, but the image itself obviously does not depict Bringosaurus. The author of the page is not a very common editor here (will look into that more). Nowadays, new dinosaur discoveries are given much publicity, but googling Bringosaurus only comes up with three results, at least two of which are wikipedia. It might be that the paper is in the process of being published, but even then I find no evidence of it, and the name Bringosaurus is a nomen nudum until the paper is published. Basically, once I check through the contributions of the author, I will come back here with what I think we should do. IJReid (talk) 14:14, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Yeh, all the users contributions revolve around "Bringosaurus", and he has only edited two articles. He modified Colalura Sandstone to add the genus, but that article is basically a stockpiling of WP:OR. Personally, I suspect that the user is just creating a page on a non-existent taxon, and stating that he is the author responsible for it. One correction to my above comment, turns out that "Bringosaurus" is actually a coelurosaurian, not even related to Coelophysis, and the image was completely OR. IJReid (talk) 14:23, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Make it extinct! FunkMonk (talk) 14:56, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Oh, joy, it's almost certainly User:Yewtharaptor by another name. Yewtharaptor is also back. Devote full scrutiny to this editor's additions; most of them are wishful thinking. J. Spencer (talk) 02:28, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Yewtharaptor has also just gifted the world with an incompetent machine translation of an article on the actual dinosaur Panguraptor, which I redirected to the genera list out of shame, and a half-dozen completely unreliable articles on Australian formations which cannot be speedily deleted because they are actual formations. J. Spencer (talk) 02:48, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

What if those Australian formation stubs were simply merged into a list?--Animalparty-- (talk)

It's not a bad idea, but rewriting Panguraptor should probably be the higher priority at the moment, based on what people will be looking for. J. Spencer (talk) 00:31, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Well, this "Bringosaurus" has been deleted. About Panguraptor, I'm almost sure that he used the Spanish version, which in turn is based in the Dutch article. I suggest not to use the Spanish version since that it have mistakes of translation too.--Rextron (talk) 06:03, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

This is a notice about Category:Dinosaurs articles needing expert attention, which might be of interest to your WikiProject. It will take a while before the category is populated. Iceblock (talk) 23:11, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Might be worth a look-through. Newly accepted draft passed a very basic check for copyright violations, etc., but has not seen expert review. --j⚛e decker^talk 05:13, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

I'm trying to see if I can rectify this myself, but the Hot Articles section appears to have broken a bit. Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 17:54, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Aaaand repairs complete! The cause was a misplaced template part, by the way. Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 18:04, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

I've started an article on Fosterovenator that could use some help. If anybody wants to, any help would be appreciated. Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 18:03, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

First step would be to add a citation. FunkMonk (talk) 18:18, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Oh, you'd better watch out, you'd better not cry, you'd better not pout, I'm telling you why Christmas Velociraptor is coming to town He sees you when you sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for your life's sake Oh, you'd better watch out, you'd better not cry, you'd better not pout, I'm telling you why Christmas Velociraptor is coming to town Merry Christmas, and watch out for the Christmas Velociraptor, IJReid (talk) 25 December 2014

• And happy new year! FunkMonk (talk) 19:47, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Megapnosaurus (previously a redirect to Coelophysis) was recently restored as an article. You may want to take a look at it. jonkerz ♠talk 19:01, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

And now I've returned it to being a redirect; C.rhodesiensis and C.kayentakatae both have articles of their own, there's no need for a reduntant article for the synonymous name. "Megapnosaurus" is not relevant anymore, at least until someone publishes anything evidencing that it is separate from Coelophysis. It's not like "Brontosaurus", where the synonym is culturally significant; nobody really knows "Megapnosaurus" aside from the people who watched When Dinosaurs Roamed America. Perhaps a new vote may be in order, but I highly doubt it. Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 13:13, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

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Harej (talk) 16:57, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

1. I think the information on Primary references over-emphasizes primary sources and downplays the importance of scholarly secondary sources such as review articles and books that are often necessary to give balance and context and avoid undue weight, especially when primary sources (individual studies) conflict. Secondary sources and tertiary sources are actually preferred per WP:SECONDARY, even if for no other reason than to help decide which primary papers to cite and how often.
2. I think it is a bit misleading to state on the Project Page that Dinosaur Mailing List archives is a non-primary source: regardless of whether experts or general public contribute, it often contain primary information in the broadest sense (e.g. experts discussing things that are unpublished, offering their own speculation, and directly communicating to each other), even more primary than a published article, and hence may fall under user-generated sources. While the disclaimer about "not always be(ing) complete, current, and/or accurate" is laudable, it might also be stressed that DML should almost never be cited as a reliable source, since there is no peer-review on e-mail exchanges, with nods to WP:PRIMARY. --Animalparty-- (talk) 19:36, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

I think using the DML as source is similar to using blogs written by scientists as source, and that is permitted. Though I must admit, after having been on the list for some years, that much of it is utter garbage, with grown scientists acting like children every now and then. FunkMonk (talk) 20:06, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Permitted is different than encouraged. The fact that a single expert posts something or responds to something can easily be misrepresented, given undue weight, or be simply wrong (surely experts aren't above hasty or incomplete posts), and it seems questionable editorial practice to cite something like "Joe Scientist, 5th email response to "Thread about raptors" posted at 3 am", which could be cherry picked or taken out of context. Note WP:USERG states "Self-published material may sometimes be acceptable" (emphasis added), and this is where common sense and the caveats at WP:PRIMARY kick in. DML should be relatively far down on the list of sources to cite and conventionally-published sources should be preferred, even if they state the exact same thing.--Animalparty-- (talk) 20:42, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure DML would not be accepted as a reliable source at FAC. FunkMonk (talk) 19:57, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Just in case anyone missed it, many moons ago we made a chart - see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Dinosaurs/Dinosaur_collaboration#Chart - to give us an idea of what taxa we were covering etc. I think it might be missing some taxa though...? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:36, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Ouch, yeah, I've been updating this other list for FA/TFA continuously, so that should be ok, not GA and DYK though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Dinosaurs/Achievements FunkMonk (talk) 20:00, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Recently a certain user has been expanding the descriptions on that page. While I appreciate their effort, the descriptions are way too long. Many of them have full paragraphs and unnecessary detail. Quilmesaurus's description lists all of its diagnostic features! This is not the place for that. Perhaps one of you could take a look at this? Shuvuuia (talk) 23:15, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

The article List of dinosaur specimens seems problematic in that its implied scope arguably includes every specimen ever described. It was previously List of notable dinosaur specimens, which introduced POV issues, but even the current title seems a subjective exercise in pointing to arbitrary interesting fossils, contrary to the objective list selection criteria. Most of the specimens in the list are redirects, not stand-alone articles, and the list as a whole suffers from biases of geography and single source. My question is should we even have this list, or is it too subjective and unrealistic to maintain? Expansion, merging, converting to category, and deletion are some possibilities. --Animalparty-- (talk) 18:08, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Maybe we could rename it to List of notable fossil specimens, which would allow us to introduce stuff like Australopithecus, Tiktaalik and the like? Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 19:07, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Having Notable in the title is discouraged per WP:LISTNAME, and begs the question: notable to whom? To the paleontologist who discovers a specimen, or perhaps avid paleontology aficionados, every specimen is arguably important (e.g. "the first specimen of Foosaurus discovered in Fooistan from the Foosticene era", etc.), and true, subsequent primary literature may discuss individual specimens, but notability is something different, and I think it is questionable practice to have such massively open-ended lists; a specimen number redirect can weasel its way into any conceivable taxonomic article to justify its existence, as all species are presumed notable, as opposed to say, individual people. Tiktaalik and Australopithecus are already well included in several lists and articles, which obviates inclusion on a subjective notability list. Note we already have a Category:Specific fossil specimens. --Animalparty-- (talk) 23:48, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I think this is better off as a category rather than a~list. FunkMonk (talk) 05:31, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

I have nominated the list for deletion. Please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of dinosaur specimens to comment further. --Animalparty-- (talk) 05:11, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

The result of the discussion was keep. A salient conclusion by the closing administrator was "Those in support of keeping it are now tasked with developing this into a policy-compliant article." All the best! --Animalparty-- (talk) 04:19, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Other projects have a MOS for how to structure their articles, and though the dinosaurs FAs are broadly similar in structure, a guideline could perhaps be nice. For example, a Palaeoecology section should probably be essential for a dinosaur FA, but a popular site like Triceratops doesn't even have one. Any thoughts? Inspired by this discussion, which didn't really fo anywhere: FunkMonk (talk) 17:50, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

I kind of like the idea, but I'm too preoccupied with other concerns to help draft one. Also, community activity is so low now for whatever reason that it will probably be difficult to get the input of most users such a manual of style would likely affect. I would be against making one official without a consensus of many contributors, but would be totally supportive if you want to begin a draft. Abyssal (talk) 18:15, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

For a start, we could just compile a list of sections commonly found in dino FAs, and the order they appear in. Though there seems to be quite some inconsistency in that. And yeah, not sure why activity is so low. Well, Dinoguy is probably busy writing books... FunkMonk (talk) 18:17, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Agree it's a good idea - it's been a long time since I took a dino article to FA but I do alot of stuff on bio articles. Funkmonk if you want to start a discussion somewhere I'll chip in but my time is pretty patchy... Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:56, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Alright, it'll probably just continue here. And something I've thought about for a while, which I'll just write down here to remember it, is the various types of illustrations that would be good to have in an article: A photo of a mounted skeleton/cast. A life restoration. A size comparison. A skeletal diagram. Photos of non-restored fossils. Photos/diagrams of individual skeletal elements. Photo of excavation area. Map showing location of fossil finds. Some of these can be hard to obtain, but for example Nigersaurus contains all of the above, as we were fortunate enough that it had a Plos paper devoted to it. Could be nice with reconstructions of habitat as well, but such are almost impossible to obtain. FunkMonk (talk) 15:59, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

Hey guys, sounds like a good idea. Maybe we should simply copy the heading structure from a good FA into a template article and start from there? (Also I'm thinking paleoecology, paleobiology, paleodescription, paleoreferences, etc. are a bit technical and also redundant.. we know it's paleo because it's prehistoric, why not just say "Ecology" etc., which is more accessible?). It seems like we already have a pretty standard order, with description coming first (containing size/diagrams, basic distinguishing features, major anatomy, and life appearance/soft tissue anatomy) followed by more inference-based stuff like biology and ecology, followed by history of study. Dinoguy2 (talk) 14:36, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Should we also codify style for higher taxon articles? For example, we (somewhere) recently agreed to use two taxobox images of specifiers or close-to-specifiers for node-based clades and basal members for stem-based clades. We would also likely need different variety of sections, but so far higher clades don't really have much of a standardized layout. Dinoguy2 (talk) 14:47, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

I think a standard layout would be good for any articles. At least so we use the same words in the headers, so they are comparable across articles. FunkMonk (talk) 15:02, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

To start out, here are the most commonly used headers and their order (subheaders not listed):

• Description (sometimes "anatomy and "morphology" in non FAs)
• Classification (sometimes also "taxonomy" or "systematics")
• History of discovery (sometimes also "naming" and "identification", or just "discovery" or "history")
• palaeobiology
• Palaeoecology (sometimes "provenance")

So would it perhaps be good to standardise the names of the headings also? FunkMonk (talk) 22:34, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

Sounds good to me to standardize - happy with the defaults above. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:21, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Any thoughts on order? What I've listed above seems to be the standard, though there is some variation. I've wondered why similar sections are called classification here, but taxonomy in bird articles? Also, these sections are placed first in extant animals, whereas they are far down in dinosaur article,s any reason for that? FunkMonk (talk) 19:50, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Should we also have standardized baselines for reconstructions that we use in articles, as well? Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

You mean pose and angle? That would be impossible to enforce, many of our restorations are provided by drive-by uploaders who have no contact with other editors or this project. Not sure what we would gain from it either... FunkMonk (talk) 16:02, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

No, not pose and angle; those are all personal taste. I mean stuff like how sauropod forefeet are lumps with a claw, or the way wings are on maniraptorans that have them; things that are common knowledge to us dedicated students of the field, but may not be to the Joe that makes what he thinks is accurate palaeoart, but is not actually accurate and is either outdated or horribly inaccurate. The entire purpose of the system would be to make sure palaeoart that is submitted to an article is kept as accurate as possible. Emphasising the Image Review page would be a nice first step in that direction, simply because it's an excellent start to the idea. I mean, we already have basic guidelines like "X should not be potrayed with Y", but making a more specific, clade-by-clade guideline should be an option we can consider. Basically, stuff that can be standardized without making illustrations feel "same-y" (like posing, colouration for the dinosaurs who don't have known colourations, that sort of thing) is what I want to see get some standardization.

As an example, let me use dromaeosaurids as a baseline. The standardized Dromaeosauridae guidelines could be:

• Pennaceous feathers were present on most of the body, but not visibly like plumaceous feathers were. They formed a visibly textureless integument en masse.
• Wings go all the way down the arm, attaching to digit II (the middle finger) of the hand and terminating at the ungual claw of digit II. Digit III is generally hidden behind the primary feathers in profile view, and would likely not have the same range of movement as digits I and II due to this.
• Only half of the pedal digits touched the ground; the dewclaw is vestigial and on the ankle and the largest toe was raised off the ground to protect the enlarged pedal claw from dulling.
• Exposed flesh that once bore feathers is generally wrinkly and scaleless.
• Openings in the skull bore muscle tissue in life, and as such they were not visible on the living animal.
• Pupil and iris of the eye were most likely rounded, like a bird's.

Things that ensure accuracy, but maintain the ability to be dynamic with images is what I'm going for with the idea. Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 19:03, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Ok. Wouldn't it just be an expansion of this? We can expand that page as much as we want, it isn't used for its original purpose anymore (listing artists). Also, a sI mentioned below, a Wikipedia article called "dinosaur life appearance" or some such would be nice,it is certainly a notable subject these days. Plenty of sources for it as well. FunkMonk (talk) 05:50, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

• Will get back to this soon... FunkMonk (talk) 17:40, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

It was once proposed and re-proposed that we should create an article on dinosaur mummies that could include sections discussing dinosaur specimens with skin, such as Trachodon mummy. I believe that this is an excellent idea, and would comment on the most recent discussion of this if it had not been archived. One modification to what was proposed at the above link, I think that the article should be title Dinosaur specimens preserving integument, as few sources actually call specimens with skin "mummies". Thoughts? IJReid ^discuss 00:41, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

The problem with the last (as was discussed before) would be that it would hugely expand the scope. But yeah, it may be interesting to have an article about integument. On the other hand, we could even have an article called "dinosaur life appearance" or some such, which would go into every aspect of this (integument, movement, posture, biomechanics, colour, eye placement, historical viws, etc.), similar to the restoration guidance list we have, just with more prose. Could be a blast to write. I can make a draft of such an article if people are interested. We already have aricle ssuch as Dinosaur physiology and Dinosaur intelligence, and I'd say their life appearance is just as notable a subject, but people just take it for granted, and probably wouldn't expect an article devoted to it. The article should first make clear that information inferred for one taxon would probably true for related taxa with less material known, go into phylogenetic bracketing, could be illustrated by stuff like this video, and so on. FunkMonk (talk) 05:30, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

• I'm working on a rough draft of a proposed Dinosaur life appearance article in my sandbox if anyone wants to have a look and chime in (feel free to modify and expand). I'm not sure whether there should be sections about internal appearance as well... And I just remembered I made a suggestion for a similar text back in 2009: FunkMonk (talk) 07:07, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• The life appearance article could also link to larger discussions, such as the sauropod neck posture article started by IJReid. FunkMonk (talk) 17:41, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

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This story is being widely reported, and is worth discussing. Should this result in any changes on Wikipedia? Currently Brontosaurus redirects to Apatosaurus --Harizotoh9 (talk) 12:52, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

It has always been considered a distinct species, it is just the old genus name that has been revived. The issue is being dealt with on the page. FunkMonk (talk) 12:57, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Now that feathers are known to have been extremely widespread within Dinosauria feathered dinosaurs are no longer "special" enough to justify treating them separately. Consequently, I think that the the general contents of this article would be more appropriate as part of a broader article on dinosaur integument and maybe some of the more specific discussions of early feathers as part of an article on the evolution of feathers. Abyssal (talk) 19:56, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Whether or not they're merged, an article about integument could be interesting. Also similar to a page about dinosaur life appearance I had in mind, but which grew too gargantuan in scope for me to finish: FunkMonk (talk) 20:36, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Your sandbox draft is really really really fucking cool. Abyssal (talk) 21:13, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Feel free to add to/change it if you want, I probably won't work on it until I've gotten Columbian mammoth to FA... I used this as a template: FunkMonk (talk) 21:23, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Can we finally split the dinosaurs by period categories into different epochs? Category:Cretaceous dinosaurs has almost 800 articles in it FFS. Abyssal (talk) 16:03, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Is that going far enough? The Cretaceous has only two epochs... We'd have a category for Late Cretaceous with about ~600 articles ;) Dinoguy2 (talk) 18:29, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Probably not, but it would be a start. :P Abyssal (talk) 18:50, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Sure, sounds good to me to help teach readers. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:09, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Maybe one of you can have a look at the contributions of Maddencarnotaurusramhead (talk · contribs) to see if they're up to no good or not. I blocked them for being incommunicado and they haven't responded, suggesting it was just trolling. Muchas gracias, Drmies (talk) 17:29, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Someone has recently added Regaliceratops, Titanoboa, Indomimus and Diabolus. I've removed Titanoboa. Should Indomimus and Diabolus also go. Lavateraguy (talk) 12:43, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Yes, but Regaliceratops is real. FunkMonk (talk) 03:33, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Elsewhere on Wikipedia (example: Talk:Apatosaurus), the topic has recently come up regarding using genre or species as the titles of articles. In WP:DINO, we've traditionally always gone by the genus name. However, this can cause the complication that when species are lumped or split or moved between genera, at least two articles need to be teased apart and partially re-written. IN the Brontosaurus example, if we had had a separate article on Apatosaurus excelsus to begin with, it would have saved an awful lot of time and effort, simply changing one article's name instead of trying to pull one article apart bit by bit to create a new article. Additionally, articles going down to species level makes intuitive sense as species are "real" entities while genre, families, orders, etc. are simply categories and containers for species. As far as I can tell, almost all articles in other areas of zoology go down to species level. One argument for keeping WP:DINO to genus level is that genera are often used as shorthand for species when talking about dinosaurs (though this often causes its own problems), so genera almost function as "common names" for species. I'm not sure if this reason alone is strong enough to balance out the points I outlined above. In practice, there are so many monotypic dinosaur genera that this switch would require very little change to existing articles other than their title, and the few multi-species genera could be split apart on a case by case basis (see Edmontosaurus, Edmontosaurus annectens, and Edmontosaurus regalis for an example of how this could look). What does everything think? Status quo, or a change to bring our project more in line with the rest of the biology section? Dinoguy2 (talk) 15:18, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm open minded to your proposal but I have qualms. Let's say we have a well developed article on Exemplosaurus. This genus is known almost exclusively from the species Exemplosaurus typus. However, three other dubious and inconsequential species have been referred to it, E. minor, E. stultus, and E. tertius. So we create an article on E. typus that is almost exactly the same as the article on the genus itself, minus 6-9 sentences about the referred species. Then we create three tiny perma-stubs each about 2-3 sentences long. But then we need an article summarizing the genus as a whole since there are multiple species to talk about, so we keep the original article the same. What have we really gained? The benefit to effort ratio seems very low to me. The only real benefit that I see in that situation is that reader who specifically search for a minor species won't have to skim the whole article on the genus to find what they want. It's unlikely that any of the nearly forgotten dubious species will ever be at risk of reclassification for easy renaming to be a potential perk.

And many genera will be like this. Think about Triceratops for a real example. Only one, maybe two "real" species, over a dozen dubious probable synonyms no one cares about. It wouldn't make sense not to have an article on the genus overall, but if we did, how many readers would bother to visit T. horridus, and if they did would they learn anything they didn't at the article on the genus itself given that the two are functionally if not actually synonymous? Another related hypothetical example: Exemplosaurus is known only from the species E. typus. We have an article titled Exemplosaurus typus. Then paleontologists describe E. secundus. We create an article on that species, but now since we have multiple species we need an article on Exemplosaurus overall. Readers now arrive at the article on the genus since that's all the average one is familiar with and traffic to the articles on the species immediately slows to a trickle.Those that do visit them don't actually learn anything new because the article on the genus covered all the bases fairly well.

Completely irrelevant tangent: you keep referring to "genera" as "genre", is that how you pronounce it in your head? That's how I pronounced it until I got to college and heard a professor pronounce it literally like it was spelled. I would be elated to know that I wasn't the only one doing that. Abyssal (talk) 01:57, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

I think we'd need to make an exception for nomina dubia, and keep those restricted to the genus-level article, though I don't necessarily see why making them "perm stubs" is a problem per se. This is true for plenty of genera in the current system ("genre" above is due to my persistently unscientific auto-correct ;) ). Dinoguy2 (talk) 10:45, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

When it comes to title, I don't see why monotypic genera cold not use the full binomial, and we could avoid the "Gastonia (dinosaur)"-type titles. But as I mentioned elsewhere about what to do with genera with multiple species, I think this should be taken on a case by case basis, with the default being to merge species into genus, and split being for when enough can/has been written about a species to split it off (as the genus article grows too long and unwieldy, eg. Edmontosaurus). As Abyssal says, I think the species sub articles (like Triceratops prorsus or Stegosaurus ungulatus) will just be little-visited orphans that will give us all extra work to maintain and keep track of (and we seem to be rather undermanned as is). Most readers visit the genus articles anyway (regular readers will only know the binomial of T. rex, which is in a monotypic genus anyway), so there is little benefit from the extra work (though I can understand the personal satisfaction of completists when having everything represented, but Wikipedia is not for a specialist audience). Every time something new is discovered about some species, we would have to add it to both the species article and in summarised form on the genus article... Then imagine when some feature is found to apply to all species in a genus... Don't know who here would have the time to do that. In short, in a perfect world I'd be all for species articles, but I don't think it will be realistic for us to maintain them and keep the general quality up, unless the project membership grows substantially. FunkMonk (talk) 16:16, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree with most of this, though i'd mention that we kind of already have tons of duplicate material. This is a bit of a more general issue - every sauropod article, for example, mentions that such and such species is a quadrupedal herbivore, a description that applies to the entirety of Sauropoda. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but then we also have articles that go into detail about their locomotion and biomechanics seemingly just to mine potential FA material that should really be discussed in depth at either every single species it applies to (massive duplication) or restricted to the most inclusive clade article it applies to (making it difficult to find without using a "Main article: x") template header. Dinoguy2 (talk) 16:59, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Yeah me too - keep at genus. Duplicate material is an issue everywhere and is about adding enough to to give context yet not too much to be overly repetitive..... Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:58, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm somewhat more of a lumper than a splitter, and think that in most cases the existing scheme works just fine for paleo articles: a genus article to provide complete context for the one or more species within it. I think for especially speciose taxa, a concise list such as Species of Psittacosaurus is appropriate, again to allow the commonalities and differences of all species to more easily be appreciated without clicking between a dozen different articles. I also think it would preemptively stem the splitting and sub-splitting of subjects lest we end up with a glut of individual specimen articles like ZT 299 (Lufengpithecus). Truth be told there are hundreds of living species stubs I'd like to merge into decent genus articles, but that would probably cause more drama than its worth. One scenario I might argue a binomial title would be preferable to a genus title would be in the cases of monotypic genera where a homonym exists at the genus name: thus Anzu wyliei might be preferable to Anzu (dinosaur). Yes we have WP:MONOTYPICFAUNA, but we also have WP:NATDAB, and Natural disambiguation might be stylistically preferable than parenthetical in these handful of cases. --Animalparty-- (talk) 22:52, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Unless there are objections to moving monospecific "genus (dinosaur)" pages to "binomial", I will begin moving some. IJReid ^discuss 14:48, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

I think it's a bit premature, most who commented here talked about the genus issue, we should probably discuss titles separately first. FunkMonk (talk) 15:37, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree, a separate discussion should be held on this before changing titles. I qualified my comments above with might, and there is no consensus yet. I decline to open this discussion for the time being. --Animalparty-- (talk) 17:54, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

One overlooked problem is that it is not just the X (dinosaur) articles that should be moved, but those of every single monotypic dinosaur genus (which are in the hundreds, not counting prehistoric non-dinosaurs), otherwise it would just be inconsistent. And if that was done, some people might want to ask why for example Triceratops does not use a full binomial in the title, then we'd have to explain that it's because it isn't monotypic, and it would still look less standardised than it does now. So I'm actually a bit unsure... FunkMonk (talk) 18:24, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't think inconsistency is that big of a deal if we decide to go through with this. Wikipedia has limitations intrinsic to its nature and one of those is a shortage of manpower and difficulty making big changes instantaneously. We should think long term and make decisions based on quality. The real question is, would this proposal make Wikipedia a better information source? My tentative answer would be "a little". So the idea of a gradual transition doesn't bother me as long as it's agreed that the changes are beneficial in the first place. Abyssal (talk) 03:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

I think it'd look far more pleasing to have bionomals than disambigs, if only because it both makes linking a bit easier and that it means articles don't get bogged down by the omnipresent "(dinosaur)" or "(pterosaur)" disambigs. So instead of seeing, say, "Dilong (dinosaur)", we'd see "Dilong paradoxus". That'd work much better, IMO. For genera that are polyspecific, something like "Triceratops (genus)" would work decently. Raptormimus456 (talk) 13:21, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

What is the point of a title Like "Triceratops (genus)"? FunkMonk (talk) 17:40, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

It's more a specific example than anything. :p If we do go with that system, I suppose it would depend on the genus in question. Stuff like Dilong, Balaur and the like would be the ones getting the bionomal disambig. Raptormimus456 (talk) 17:55, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

But there is no competition for just "Triceratops". There is no need to disambiguate. FunkMonk (talk) 21:57, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

WP:FLORA now recommends using the binomial for natural disambiguation when a monotypic genus is ambiguous, and several of us plant editors have been moving these articles to binomial. Yes, consistency takes a hit, but naturalness is improved. My impression from some archived talk is that the preference for using genus rather than binomial as the title for monotypic taxa (as expressed at WP:TOL and WP:NCFAUNA) was driven in a large part by folks work on palaeontological taxa (where there was already a preference for covering species in the genus article in many cases). I have no strong opinion about how to handle dinosaurs, but if you do decide to use the binomial for disambiguation, you won't be the first organismal project to do so.Plantdrew (talk) 19:58, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

BTW, here is a search for all dinosaur articles that have "(dinosaur)" as a parenthetical disambiguator. Plantdrew (talk) 20:16, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I'll give it a shot with Dilong and see how it goes on from there. I'm expecting the move to be reverted, but I figure it's best to actually see what this would look like for these articles rather than debating without any evidence of what such a thing would look like. If the consensus is to keep the disambigs, I'm fine with the page being reverted to the disambig title. For now, let's just see how this looks. Raptormimus456 (talk) 12:40, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

And here's the result. Does this look better or worse than the disambig title? Raptormimus456 (talk) 12:44, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

I definitely prefer the binomial over a parenthetical disambiguator. Abyssal (talk) 19:49, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Also, I've moved Balaur from "Balaur (dinosaur)" to "Balaur bondoc", as well. Raptormimus456 20:55, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

A new copy-paste detection bot is now in general use on English Wikipedia. Come check it out at the EranBot reporting page. This bot utilizes the Turnitin software (ithenticate), unlike User:CorenSearchBot that relies on a web search API from Yahoo. It checks individual edits rather than just new articles. Please take 15 seconds to visit the EranBot reporting page and check a few of the flagged concerns. Comments welcome regarding potential improvements. These likely copyright violations can be searched by WikiProject categories. Use "control-f" to jump to your area of interest.--Lucas559 (talk) 22:47, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

I just made a new section on the dinosaur front page, inspired by one they have at the bird project, where articles currently under or considered for various kinds of review are listed to notify project members: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Dinosaurs#Articles_for_review FunkMonk (talk) 09:56, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Seems fine. Maybe we should add Apatosaurus on there, or not yet. IJReid ^discuss 15:03, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

If plans are for it to be nominated again soon, why not, you can describe the situation in parenthesis or after a dash line. FunkMonk (talk) 15:07, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

I took the liberty of signing WikiProject Dinosaurs and WikiProject Palaeontology up for the automated Article Alerts report which track articles under review. Reports will be at Wikipedia:WikiProject Dinosaurs/Article alerts and Wikipedia:WikiProject Palaeontology/Article alerts; note that these will be redlinks for the next 24 hours or so until the bot makes its next run (and they may be blue links to a blank page for some days if no articles are under review). I'll see about transcluding the results of the report on the project page once the first report is generated (and you can watchlist the report to keep abreast of its results). For an example of the Article Alert report in action, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Article alerts. Plantdrew (talk) 16:59, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Nice! Should definitely be on the front page as well. FunkMonk (talk) 17:07, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

I've added it to the front page. I wasn't quite sure where to put it; it's below your Article for review section for now, but feel free to put it somewhere else. Plantdrew (talk) 16:46, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, moved it a bit up. Such a section should probably be listed on all project pages... Is there one at the bird project? FunkMonk (talk) 16:57, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

Hi all! We could use some expert Dino help with this newly created article: Wendiceratops. Any help you can offer is appreciated! Thanks, Garchy (talk) 19:17, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Seems it mainly needs a taxobox now. Can't figure out those automatic ones, though... FunkMonk (talk) 19:36, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your help! Looks much better. Garchy (talk) 19:58, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

With all the drama about JW being inaccurate in many respects, I think moviegoers would go to Wikipedia to double check the various animals featured in the movie. So I was thinking we should maybe have a push to improve/expand articles about the animals featured in the movie, so they are as up to date and give as accurate a picture of the animals as possible? After all, it will probably be the most influential media presence of dinosaurs within the next couple of years, shaping the public perception of them to a large extend, so it will be our main venue for "damage control". Many of the animals feastured already have FA or GA level articles, but could be good to update the rest as well, not necessarily to the FA level, of course.

Animals with adequate articles already:

• Tyrannosaurus (FA, depicted very differently here than in the movies)
• Triceratops (FA, not too different in the films)
• Velociraptor (FA, unfeathered in the films)
• Stegosaurus (FA, not too different in the films, apart from size and tail spikes)
• Pteranodon (GA, teeth and naked skin in movies)
• Apatosaurus (on its way to GA)
• Edmontosaurus (FA, not seen yet)

Animals with articles that could need improvement:

• Ankylosaurus (not too bad in the films it seems)
• Gallimimus (lacks feathers)
• Pachycephalosaurus (too small in the films)
• Mosasaurus (gigantic in the movie)
• Dimorphodon (too large, carries people, lacks pycnofibres)
• Baryonyx (not seen yet)
• Microceratus (not seen yet)
• Metriacanthosaurus (not seen yet)

Any thoughts? FunkMonk (talk) 17:46, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

(Courtesy link to Jurassic_World#Scientific_inaccuracies) No problem in double checking and clearly citing pertinent descriptions (with high quality sources), with the reminder to not perform any original synthesis in comparison between movie representations and current thinking, whether in the taxon's article or the film's, or any list of creatures. We can present the facts but cannot say a film representation is wrong or debated unless reliable sources explicitly say so. --Animalparty-- (talk) 20:23, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I wasn't thinking of referencing the movies specifically in the listed articles, just that the articles should be as up to date as possible. We used to have an entire article about scientific inaccuracies in Jurassic Park, but it was deleted, I think because there was too much original synthesis... FunkMonk (talk) 20:27, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

This could also serve as a reminder of the importance writing with a comprehensive, holistic, historic view of dinosaur research, rather than solely from the most recent or cutting edge perspective. 20 or 30 years ago, the scientific consensus would not have portrayed all theropods as feathered, but that doesn't mean all sources or perspectives from that time are wrong or poor to include. The reasons for previously portraying dinosaurs as sluggish, featherless, whatever, are real and historic, and downplaying or ignoring such history could falsely perpetuate the idea, especially for younger readers, that theropods have always been thought to be feathered. A good article would explain "Foosaurus was long considered to be like this, however discoveries in the early 21st century supported it was actually like this. --Animalparty-- (talk) 20:47, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, that's right. And many of our articles do this, though to a varying extent. Tyrannosaurus is quite good in this respect, as it goes into detail about both posture and feathering. On the other hand, some features shown in the movies are completely made up, and was never historically theorised, such as the frill and venom of Dilophosaurus. The teeth in Pteranodon are also hard to understand, since the name meand toothless wing... FunkMonk (talk) 21:05, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

I think I'll try to get Baryonyx to GA/FA next (after I'm done with Columbian mammoth), everyone is free to edit along, of course. FunkMonk (talk) 04:39, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

"The teeth in Pteranodon are also hard to understand, since the name meand toothless wing..." Unless we remember that the aviary scene in the novel used Cearadactylus, which did have teeth, and not Pteranodon (which was probably swapped in because of it's popularity). The Pteranodon figures in both of the Kenner lines for Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park lacked teeth like the actual animal, as did the Pteranodon seen at the end of the second movie. It's only in the third movie (which took the other novel scenes) that the JP Pteranodon had teeth. :p Dromaeosaurus is best dinosaur (talk) 13:54, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Pteranodon seems to be in the new movie as well... With teeth, I'd imagine. FunkMonk (talk) 14:17, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

• Didn't get as far with this as planned (though Apatosaurus and Ankylosaurus are almost there, and I'll do Baryonyx next), but it made me think (with no regard to JP)that we should maybe focus on improving a representative/well-known genus from each major group , to act as future template for other genera. Until now, for example, we had no featured ankylosaurs, and I think oviratorosaurs, pachycephalosaurs, therizinosaurs, heterodontosaurs, and non-hadrosaur ornithopods could need some representatives at FAC as well. FunkMonk (talk) 07:38, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Yah, might be a good idea. But which taxon to choose? I would be in for any thing if someone else wants to. IJReid ^discuss 21:40, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Having a bit of writing fatigue myself at the moment, but how are things going for Apatosaurus? After Baryonyx, I was thinking of maybe Oviraptor itself... FunkMonk (talk) 21:51, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Well, not much else is addable until more papers come baring info with the updated phylogeny. Anyway, I have to wait for LittleJerry to finish with the ankylosaurus FA before proceeding with apatosaurus. IJReid ^discuss 22:13, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

I would be interested to help out as well. What about starting a new official Dinosaur collaboration? I mean, that would be fun! As for Oviraptorosauria, I feel that Oviraptor itself might be difficult to get to FA as it is very poorly known. Much better known is the related Citipati. But that one is not that famous … --Jens Lallensack (talk) 22:29, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

I'm all for reviving the collab. For oviraptorosauria why not work on Caudipteryx, probably the second best known member in pop culture and pretty well known scientifically. Btw Opisthocoelicaudia is now nominated for GA. IJReid ^discuss 23:21, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Unrelated, but some members might want to get there hands of a Taylor & Francis account, available through Wikipedia:Taylor & Francis. IJReid ^discuss 01:02, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

I think collaboration is a good idea, but now it is mainly done by two editors planning on their talk pages, could also be nice with some more centralised planning on the Wikiproject collaboration page. I've made a section on the collab talk page, perhaps we should continue there: I made a list of potential FACs once (where I see both of you commented): As for FAC articles about animals that are little known, it can be done, see for example Dromaeosauroides. It is actually more important that much has been published on the specimen (coverage), than how much/how many of the specimens are known, if little has been published about them. Citipati has the problem of the "Zamyn Khondt specimen", which may be split off to a distinct genus, so we would have to be careful when writing that it will be an easy split once it happens. FunkMonk (talk) 06:20, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, I see you are right, and today's featured article on the main page is actually very short. So I could even try getting Vulcanodon in shape for FA, as it already contains everything that exists. That's nice! --Jens Lallensack (talk) 18:28, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Yup, as long as the article is "stable", and the literature is comprehensively covered, length is not an issue. FunkMonk (talk) 09:14, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi all, does somebody have the book "The Scientific American Book of Dinoaurs" edited by Greg Paul, and can verify this passage which was inserted by a IP into the Amargasaurus article some time ago based on p. 94 in the book?

"Gregory Paul argued that parallel neck sails would have reduced neck flexion. Instead, he proposed that, with their circular rather than flat cross-sections, these spines were more likely covered with a horny sheath. He even suggests that they could have been clattered together for a sound display."

Paul, Gregory S. (2000) The Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs, p 94. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312262264.

As Greg Paul is only the editor of the book, we need to know the author and title of the chapter to cite it correctly. Any additional information on Amargasaurus that might be inside there could be valuable as well. Thanks a lot, --Jens Lallensack (talk) 08:32, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Yep, here's what he says (chapter is "Restoring the Life Appearance of Dinosaurs", written by Paul) if you want to rewrite: "The spectacularly long double spines of the neck and anterior trunk vertebrae of Amargasaurus have been restored as supporting dorsal fins, but parallel skin sails would have interfered with flexion of the neck, and the spines are not flattened from side to side. The circular cross-sectioned, sharp-tipped spines were probably spikes lengthened by horn coverings. These could have been used for display, to protect the neck and for combat by curling the neck ventrally and pointing the front spikes forward. Amargasaurus may have generated a sound display by clattering the spikes against one another!" FunkMonk (talk) 08:44, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Great, thank you FunkMonk! --Jens Lallensack (talk) 08:59, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

...is looking good. Are the main GA-improvers gonna chuck it in the snake pit now? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:59, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

I think Jens Lallensack is waiting for a book to arrive first... Perhaps we can find it for him? FunkMonk (talk) 01:12, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

I don't know. I was co-nominator for GA, but Jens has mentioned that he wanted to nominate it for FA himself, so I'm not sure what we can do but wait. IJReid ^discuss 04:44, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

You can have co-noms at FAC, and it is good as it allows a person to have more than one nomination up at a time. Also makes process alot easier as the two (or more) of you can address concerns alot more quickly. If he's waiting for a book, see what is next nearest to buff..... Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:58, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Ah see, this is where a collaboration is good - figuring out who wants to work on what.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:04, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

I've made a significant proposal relevant to this Wikiproject at the WP:Paleo talk page. Abyssal (talk) 01:44, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

The Zhenyuanlong article was given a C-class rating by User:Maias while the article was in the process of being improved. Since then, I've added pretty much every nugget of information that exists on this dinosaur in reputable sources, have added two custom illustrations, have formatted a phylogenetic tree, and so on. I maintain that this article is pretty strong for the limited information on the taxon that exists at this point, so I think a quality reassessment is in order. Many thanks. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 23:05, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

I think you can go ahead and change it, those assessments are done pretty arbitrarily by whoever drops by and feels like it (unlike "peer reviewed" FA and GA articles). And great work, by the way! FunkMonk (talk) 23:51, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Do you have any sense of how much more work would theoretically need to be done to this article to get it up to GA? (Is GA even possible for an article with this little primary resource behind it?) -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 00:05, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

I think the main problem would be coverage, yes. But maybe you can find some more articles that cover the circumstances around this find (I see there are already some there), which are not just press releases that repeat each other? I do think this could circumvent problems at GA, but at FA, more secondary scientific coverage would be needed. As probably the most experienced (with promotion processes) member of this project, Casliber may have something to say. Oh, and by the way, the main citation should be consistent with the others in how you name the authors (last names first, no "and"). FunkMonk (talk) 00:52, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll change that. It would be nice to get the article up to GA, but in the meantime, I don't think it would be good etiquette for me to assign it a new rating, given that I'm the one who wrote most of the article and am asking for reassessment. ;) -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 01:37, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Right, have listed it as a morale-boosting B class article. I think you should nominate it at WP:GAN. Consider that once there, that acts as a "stable version" of sorts to compare against in case of future vandalism etc. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:37, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Many thanks for the reassessment--I'll bring it to WP:GAN soon. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 19:38, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi all, in the Opisthocoelicaudia FAC it was pointed out that the IPA of that article is wrong. I was unable to fix it, as I do not know much about IPA. Any help would be appreciated! Here is what it should sound like: . Thanks, --Jens Lallensack (talk) 05:48, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

• Kwamikagami often fixes IPA, or used to do, perhaps he has something to say. And by the way, a good copyedit would probably fix most of the problems the first reviewer has brought up, they often note redundancies and such (I rarely nominate without a copyedit)... FunkMonk (talk) 14:28, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

The 2nd pronunciation at the link is an odd mix of faux Latin (to be consistent with the "cow-dia", the coeli in the middle would be "coily" rather than "silly"), but the 1st is exactly what I'd expect for a Latinate word in English. So I transcribed that and added it as a ref. YouTube doesn't qualify as a ref, but it's really there for readers who don't know IPA. — kwami (talk) 17:54, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, kwami, for the quick help! @FunkMonk: You are right, next time I'll request a copy edit first. Now it is a bit of work, but I should be able to fix everything soon. Do you prefer listing articles in the Peer Review or in the Guild of copy editors? --Jens Lallensack (talk) 18:42, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, thanks for the quick response, Kwamikagami. I never list for peer review, GA is sufficient for that I think, but copyedit is good, because even if one writes perfect English, it can always be improved in a more "literary" way. I write pretty good for a non-native, for example, but my writing is a bit "dry". Copyditors often add a bit of flavour that makes the flow better and more pleasant to read. FunkMonk (talk) 23:21, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

This is important, of course. As a group, I feel I should ask this question so that we can have consensus on how to work with genera that have synonymous articles on this site. In those instances, I've seen the use of the paranthetical disambig which, while a decent solution, doesn't flow very well. I've been bold and tested my idea for disambigs, and the response has, so far, been positive.

It is thus why I am making this proposal of switching our disambig policy to such, with potential additions as we debate untill consensus is reached;

• In the case where the name a genus has already has an article/articles on Wikipedia, full bionomals may be used in place of paranthetical disambiguations, with parantheticals as redirects. This not only makes it easier to link to these pages, but also makes the page title look more proffessional.
  • EX: Balaur bondoc instead of "Balaur (dinosaur)", which is a redirect, and Dilong paradoxus instead of "Dilong (dinosaur)", which is a redirect.

• In the case where a genus is not monospecific, the article retains it's paranthetical unless voted upon by the majority for the paranthetical to be changed, similarly to a move dispute. This is so that consensus is maintained and thus reducing any potential edit warring over page titles.

What do you guys think of this? Are there any additions you'd like to make, any changes, or is it fine as is? Raptormimus456 (talk) 15:07, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

I think it is fine as is. IJReid ^discuss 01:58, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

• MWAk brought up a problem with the binomial titles during a similar discussion, for example, there is apparently a "Balaur sp.", therefore B. bondoc is not the only species in the genus. Which makes the scope of the current article name too narrow. The (dinosaur) titles circumvent such problems. You never know when another species is added to a genus, and we would have to rename such articles every time it happens. Furthermore, the parenthesis disambiguation titles are standard across all other types of Wikipedia animal articles that use scientific names, for example Megalodon (genus). It also just looks weird that some articles about mono-specific genera use binomials while others don't. It is a wider problem that does not just affect dinosaur articles, so we would need a consensus at a higher level, probably tree of life project. It is arbitrary to have different standards just for dinosaurs. FunkMonk (talk) 03:51, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Something like half a dozen articles on sauropod genera (and few related articles) mention the lithostrotian "group" (clade?) of titanosaur sauropods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=lithostrotian&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go

I'm unfamiliar with this term. Can somebody either make a stub article defining it, or add some text explaining it within Titanosaur (or wherever else might be more appropriate), and we'll make lithostrotian direct there?

(Okay. In the article Titanosaur I now see Lithostrotia listed as a family (?) under Eutitanosauria. Do we want to work from that?)

(Heck. Lithostrotia currently directs to Titanosaur, but the term "lithostrotia" isn't defined within Titanosaur. A quick definition somewhere, please?)

Thanks -- 179.218.140.100 (talk) 03:15, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Bam, done. This probably could be done for other macronarian clades (Titanosauriformes, Somphospondyli) that have redirects. IJReid ^discuss 22:13, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm probably in the minority opinion among this project, but I don't think an article for every clade/node is always warranted, and regardless should be defined in context within larger articles whenever possible. e.g. Somphospondyli has only marginally more information specific to Somphospondyli than does Macronaria. A good clear paragraph or section defining a named clade within a larger article, including possible controversies (e.g. genus X is placed in clade B by some researchers), would probably serve the interests of readers and editors in the long run, as taxonomic changes or revisions in the literature wouldn't require as many Wiki articles to update. Lists and cladograms alone do not a good article make.--Animalparty! (talk) 23:30, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't know, I think it's a good idea, since there generally is quite a bit to say for such a clade. History of research (including current acceptance), systematics (internal and external), definition, synapomorphies. See for example the de:Lithostrotia article in the German Wikipedia. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 19:26, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps we should have a discussion about what kind of articles warrant being tagged as part of the dino project... As is, it seems to extend to cultural works as well (for example Velosaurus (sculpture)), and even to animals that are not thought to be dinosaurs anymore (Teratosaurus). Perhaps it should be more restricted? In any case, our tagging doesn't seem to follow the stated scope: FunkMonk (talk) 19:43, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Maybe more inclusive than exclusive, though can go either way on Teratosaurus (leaning no but not fussed really) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:08, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

As we have it now, it seems to be that anything once thought to be dinosaurian falls under the project's view, but following that kind of causes a slippery slope, because then we could be having people saying that we should cover Smilodon and Mammut, since they get called dinosaurs a lot. That's why I have the scope as "anything currently classified somewhere in Dinosauria", because it cuts off some problematic things. It'll be good to have a thorough discussion, though. Raptormimus456 (talk) 19:36, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

I have nominated Psittacosaurus for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. DrKay (talk) 16:37, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

"Given such a long history of public affection for the name "Brontosaurus", it is perhaps no surprise that the more vociferous denunciations of the usage have elicited sharply defensive statements from those who would not wish to see the name be struck from official usage.[58] Nor is it unexpected that Tschopp's study,[3] which has seemingly "vindicated" the popular usage has generated a very high number of responses from many, often opposed, groups - of editorial,[61] news staff,[4][62] and personal blog nature (both related[63][64] and not[65]), from both[66] sides[6] of the debate, from related[67][68][69][70] and unrelated[71][72][73] contexts, and from all over the world.[74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87]"

Alright, there's absolutely no reason we need to have that many cites in one section. I suggest we cull the "In popular culture" section on the Brontosaurus article to remove most of the entirely redundant cites. Raptormimus456 (talk) 18:15, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I've responded on the the Talk page. --Animalparty! (talk) 23:59, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I have proposed merging the otherwise popular article Thagomizer, as well as some other short articles. My comment there is as follows: "I know this will probably be an unpopular proposal, but this anatomical feature is only found in Stegosauria, so the short text here should simply be part of that article. Same with short articles about other anatomical features only found in specific groups of dinosaurs, such as Epoccipital and Rostral bone (should be merged into Ceratopsidae), and Predentary (should be merged into Ornithischia). ". FunkMonk (talk) 02:36, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I have to say that I agree with you, it makes no sense for something that specific to have its own article, although we should really check to make sure (eg. silesaurids might share a predentary, ceratopsians might share epoccipital). I am certain the rostral bone is found from Yinlong to Ceratopsidae, so merge with Ceratopsia? IJReid ^discuss 20:45, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, merging seems obvious, but since thagomizer gets so many views, I fear there'll be a backlash if it isn't discussed thoroughly... FunkMonk (talk) 08:49, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

In the case of thagomizer, we could simply add the entire article in under its own subsection (e.g. Description > Thagomizer). IJReid ^discuss 14:11, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Ok, I'll give people some time to respond about thagomizer, but I think the other three can be merged without drama. I merged two with Ceratopsia, but predentary may be more iffy? FunkMonk (talk) 21:33, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, this can get slippery the more common or widespread a trait is. Sjould we merge skull with Craniata...? Dinoguy2 (talk) 16:08, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

The difference between these features and skull, is that these are not present in any living animals, unlike the skull. IJReid ^discuss 18:49, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, the features in question are found in very specific, extinct groups, and the articles (apart form thagomizer) are very short stubs. FunkMonk (talk) 23:46, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

That sounds like a good dividing line then. However, predentary is a bit tricky because it's found in both ornithischians and non-avian Euornithes. Obviously these are not homologous but the term "predentary" is commonly used for both. Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:17, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

A somewhat related discussion (or at least it made me think of this), seems we have a Sail (anatomy) article, which only covers neural spine sails of extinct reptiles, though it has been correctly pointed out at the talk page that fins and such back structures have also been called "sails". As for predentary, seems the article is then incorrect... FunkMonk (talk) 02:36, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#Redundancies in the taxoboxes for a discussion about the format of taxoboxes for species and below. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:16, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I come baring bad news today, someone is selling our our art on products without permission: http://www.zazzle.com/thecrucible/dinosaur?qs=dinosaur&pg=7 I don't know what, if anything, we can do about this but I thought I'd bring it to everyone's attention. Tomopteryx (talk) 22:21, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is a problem. As far as I know, all art on the commons has to be released on a license that permits commercial usage anyway. I guess it might suck that they aren't attributing to the artists, but its hard to do that in a visible way on a Tshirt without compromising the design. I say we ignore it. Abyssal (talk) 00:45, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Legally, they are forced to attribute the art to the artist. They do not. The art is claimed to be designed by "The Crucible", and does not give any mention to the actual artists. I have to see what I can do to try and get the art properly attributed, or I may have to report them somehow. On the item description it states "Artwork designed by The Crucible". IJReid ^discuss 04:50, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, CC licenses they have to attribute to the original artists, but not public domain images. And stuff like this has been going on for years, I saw some guys selling posters outside a Walking With Dinosaurs show some years ago, where all the images were Wikipedia art (including my own). FunkMonk (talk) 10:39, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

The other aspect is those images with the Share-alike part to the licence. That means that their designs based on Share-Alike images have to be realesed under the same or similar licence. So I think that means theoretically we could sell their designs and they couldn't do anything about it so long as we attribute and release them under same or similar licence.......I think. Steveoc 86 (talk) 17:20, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, exactly that. But two key things are that the shirts are not attributed, and are not distributed under the same license (if shirts can be CC licensed). IJReid ^discuss 02:48, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

By the way, since the link is now dead, here's that bootleg WWD poster (it had WWD images on the other side) from 2010: Several of those Wikipedia images now look much different... The nephew of my girlfriend at the time bought it after a show, and she recognised the Segnosaurus image... Which, oddly enough, has also been used in a Polish museum. FunkMonk (talk) 22:50, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

This is definitely not as severe as the situation with Ulansky, but Sadiq Malian has got quite a bit of uncovered names. I mean, since 2003 he has over 108 publications, and quite a few detail new/redescribed dinosaurs from Pakistan . There's Gspsaurus, Maojandino, Nicksaurus, and many others. The situation with his papers isn't near as great as we could hope, with most papers formatted as if describing a new genus, yet referencing a previous paper for the original description of names. His most recent dinosaur-themed publication (linked above), contains the 3 names I mention above, as well as Pakisaurus, Brohisaurus, Sulaimanisaurus, Balochisaurus, Khetranisaurus, Marisaurus, Vitakridrinda, and Saraikimasoom, among other non-dinosaurs. The situation with family names are also very unsatisfactory. In all but the currently linked article by him I have seen, he refers to clades like "Pakisaurids/Titanosaurids", or "Balochisaurids/Saltasaurids", which makes it seems quite like he considers the two families synonymous. What shall we do? IJReid ^discuss 01:26, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I only know his taxa because of this viral video (the guy looks up the Wikipedia page for Pakisaurus at 1:46)... Any discussion of Malkani in the Dinosaur Mailing List archives? And what the heck, he named a species after himself?! FunkMonk (talk) 02:47, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Naming species after yourself violates the ICZN code (I know because a young me was curious and checked). Also, I saw the video, but I first found out about all the dinosaurs after doing a bit of work on the Vitakridrinda. I saw on one DML post that the 2006 description link to a 2004 reference that was "in prep", and thus are Nomen nudum's, but the names themselves are diagnosed, described, and the only thing that doesn't happen is them being claimed as new names. IJReid ^discuss 04:16, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Really, I think it's best to just continue treating them as a group of nomen nudum until we get better descriptions. We'll need better coverage before assuming anything about these genera, especially with how many times people make new names for things just to name them. Raptormimus456 (talk) 12:59, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi all

I'm designing a tool for Visual Editor to make it easy for people to add open license text from other sources, there are a huge number of open license sources compatible with Wikipedia including around 9000 journals. I can see a very large opportunity to easily create a high volume of good quality articles quickly. I have done a small project with open license text from UNESCO as a proof of concept, any thoughts, feedback or endorsements (on the Meta page) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 14:40, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

I've noticed a bit of inconsistency in the inclusion/exclusion of dubious and otherwise invalid taxa in articles for geologic formations. It started with Hell Creek, but it's happened in the Dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation article as well, where I've continuously un-done it. But it keeps happening, so I figured it'd be better to ask here on the consensus. Traditionally, as well as on pretty much every other formation article, they are included; additionally, it's clearly indicated they're invalid, so there's no downside; and it's useful information not easily found elsewhere. Lusotitan (talk) 20:50, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

I've always included them. Abyssal (talk) 16:13, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Maybe they could be included in a separate section, not alphabetically in with the valid taxa? Doing the latter can create a false impression of taxon diversity for people who aren't looking at the color code. Dinoguy2 (talk) 19:13, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

This article has for a long time been accepted as Galveosaurus over Galvesaurus, for the reasons proposed in Sanchez-Hernandez in the 2006 reference on the page. However, I have gone through the literature about the taxon and it appears that that proposal was rejected by the authors of Galvesaurus. There paper was published July 1st, while Galveosaurus was published August 11th. This gives Galvesaurus priority. Anyone disagree that we should have Galvesaurus as the article, and Galveosaurus as the redirect? IJReid ^discuss 21:00, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

This situation doesn't seem so clear cut. The date in the Galvesaurus paper is listed as July-December 2005. Sanchez argues the paper was actually published December 18th. Barco and Canudo claim the paper was actually published July 1st, but only cite their original paper as evidence. Nobody seems to have attempted to refute Sanchez's date of December 18th, merely saying she is wrong, and that their claimed date is within the range of their paper's date. I personally don't understand why, if the Barco paper hit print in July, the print date is written July-December. How could a volume published in July contain any material published after July? It looks like a standard case of papers accumulated during that period being compiled and printed at the end of that period, which is why ICZN 21.6 even exists. Barco claims there is no reason to seek external evidence because the July 1 date is within the Jul-Dec range, but Sanchez presented evidence to the contrary in her paper, which should be enough to invoke the ICZN rule. So I side with Sanchez on the date issue unless Barco et al. publish some actual evidence that they put out a journal with the range July-December in July for some reason, and can explain why the print date on the journal as a whole is December 18th. The ethical issue is a different story, and Barco et al. seem to have a good case that Sanchez got the name from the plaque at the museum (that they allowed an unpublished name onto public display in the first place, was probably a bad idea...). But just because a name was coined unethically does not make it a junior synonym. Dinoguy2 (talk) 11:18, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

I know it is not very clear cut. However, even if the date was wrong, wouldn't this be a similar situation to Kulindapteryx vs Kulindadromeus. The whole reason Sanchez was able to change the date was because the date of July 1st wasn't within the range according to her, although it really is because she misread an issue number, Nº 15, as the date July 15th. If the date is within the range, then according to Article 21.2, the provided date should be accepted as correct, since there is no evidence to the contrary. IJReid ^discuss 14:40, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

"since there is no evidence to the contrary" This is the key issue. Sanchez claims there IS evidence to the contrary, which is what her 2006 paper was about. The 2012 paper seems not to have addressed that evidence, merely refuting her misinterpretation of 15 July vs. 1 July which really has no bearing on the issue either way. If Sanchez' claimed print date of December 18th can be refuted, it should be. If it can't, her name (unfortunately) stands. Kulindapteryx is somewhat similar but in that case the extra issue of online vs. print publication comes into play (it's not clear if Kulindapteryx was published in print before Kulindadromeus, though it was online before, and the online paper did not meet ICZN requirements. If Kulindapteryx was in print before Kulindadromeus, it is the correct name, stolen specimen or not). Dinoguy2 (talk) 19:18, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

I would be curious to see if other papers in this journal issue of Naturaleza Aragonesa have the same date, or if they range between July - December on the individual papers. If they all say July 1 this is evidence it was actually printed on that date. If not, that's evidence the volume came out later and was a compilation of papers completed during that entire date range. Unfortunately, I can't find any kind of archives for Naturaleza Aragon's online nor any other papers published in volume 15. If this was the only paper in that volume then the July 1 date should probably stand. Dinoguy2 (talk) 19:31, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

On the front page, I'm having trouble using the links. It takes a long time to load and when it finally does it says "Error 502: Bad Gateway". Anyone else have this problem?   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  18:24, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I've been having the same problem for the last 40 hours or so. Plantdrew (talk) 18:54, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

• Not entirely related, but I just took a look at the ratings as they appear on the "popular pages". To me, it seems preposterous that the Disney Dinosaur movie is rated "mid importance" to the dino project, when it has little to no significance to the subject of dinosaurs, while well-known dinosaurs with a vast literature such as Plateosaurus and Tarbosaurus are supposedly of "low importance". I think all well-known dinosaurs with a vast literature should be of at least mid importance, and that most of the pop culture fluff should be of low importance. FunkMonk (talk) 03:24, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I've devoted a great deal of time working to flesh out the Specimens of Archaeopteryx article, which was last assessed at C-class quite a long time ago. Requesting a quality reassessment at this stage. (Cross-posting this request to its other Wikiprojects, just fyi.) Thanks! -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 03:20, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Stegoceras is now nominated for featured article candidate, any commons are welcome. FunkMonk (talk) 19:12, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

The invalid-color taxoboxes need to show invalid-color header as:    Taxon    , so I am planning to shift the link for invalid taxobox-color category from {{taxobox_colour}} into {{Taxobox/core}} and {{Taxonomy_key}}, to link "Category:Taxoboxes with an invalid color" and thereby fix the error in taxobox column headers (which showed: colspan=2 style="text-align: center; background-color: transparent; text-align:center; border: 1px solid red"). An infobox column style format cannot contain a wikilinked page or category, as of September 2016. Discuss at:
Template talk:Taxobox#Invalid color category, for details. -Wikid77 (talk) 21:21, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

The recently created (or recreated article) Komlosaurus could use some expert eyes. From my perusing of sources, it appears to be an ichnotaxon, not a genuine dinosaur genus, and may be associated with/synonymous with the ichnogenus Grallator. Cheers, --Animalparty! (talk) 22:43, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Pinging Abyssal, who has started many ichno-articles. Mistakenly pinged Ashorocetus before, because my brain somehow associated ichnotaxa with ootaxa... FunkMonk (talk) 22:56, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Well, even though I am better with eggs, I reckon I could tackle this one. But I've been fairly busy lately. If Abyssal doesn't show interest in the next few weeks I can take a look. Ashorocetus (talk | contribs) 04:22, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

There has been some discussion about whether user-made palaeoart restorations used in featured articles should have references on their description pages, see here: It appears they should, so perhaps we should encourage this practice? The FA criteria have become much stricter since most of the dino FAs were nominated. FunkMonk (talk) 10:10, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

I have been doing this for a while and think that for the most part it's a good idea. The downside is it could give the impression a piece of palaeoart is more accurate then it is.

What I like to do is simply bullet point in the description and state where the proportions come from, what's known of the animal (so like if you have a fragmentary animal you can state proportions based on some other related animal), areas of uncertainty like colour. I usually like to try and state my reasoning for certain details like skin which for a lot of dinosaurs there is the possibility of feathers, scales or both. I try to make the uncertainties clear in the description. The issue with this is it does boarder the line of original research.

The other issue is how 'conservative' do we go with restorations? I agree a lot with the 'All Yesterdays' movement but the downside is it could give the impression an animal has a certain special feature for which there is no evidence for. I, for the most part, try and stay to the more conservative side, especially on Wikipedia. Steveoc 86 (talk) 11:56, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I think your approach is exemplary. No matter what, some features will always be "original research", but it seems the editors at the FA talk page are fine with that, as long as there is some sort of citation so the image can be verified. The problem is we have a giant backlog of images (many of which are in FAs) drawn by people who are not active anymore, but the FA folks have greenlit that we can add references to those if we for example check and see they match some published skeletal reconstructions, though we don't know what exact references that were used by the artists... FunkMonk (talk) 13:09, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

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See #Update – the examples of excessive expansion depth below are out-of-date.

In some articles, such as Abavornis and Enantiornithes, the automated taxoboxes (whether Speciesbox or Automatic taxobox) do not display correctly. This shows up at the corresponding "Template:Taxonomy/..." templates, i.e. Template:Taxonomy/Abavornis and Template:Taxonomy/Enantiornithes. If you move up the taxonomic hierarchy, e.g. to Ornithothoraces and Template:Taxonomy/Ornithothoraces, then all is well.

The underlying reason is that there is a limit on the depth of expansion of templates allowed in Wikipedia pages. Various fixes have been implemented to get round this limit in the automated taxobox system (see the comments by the expert editor Wikid77 at User talk:Peter coxhead#Automated taxonomy system errors) but in the end if editors keep adding intermediate levels to the taxonomic hierarchy stored in the "Template:Taxonomy/..." templates, the problem re-appears.

The real solution, in my view, is to cut out levels in the taxonomic hierarchy, since the technical people that run the Wikimedia software aren't going to allow more template expansion depth. If you look at Template:Taxonomy/Ornithothoraces there simply can't be almost 40 levels before you reach Dinosauria. I would urge that 5–10 levels be cut out. The levels mostly seem to concern dinosaurs, which is why I've posted here. I'm no expert in this area, so I have no idea of the best levels to remove.

The alternative is that articles about "deep" levels will have to use manual taxoboxes. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:54, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

The number of levels is of course getting out of control. As you say, there is no prospect of the software coping with 50 or more levels any time soon. It is also not convenient for taxoboxes to be loaded with so much information. Effectively all the surplus levels are either unranked groupings, or clades which have not been adopted as traditional ranks (Phyla, Classes, etc). The obvious suggestion would be to leave all such clades out of the hierarchy. This would leave dinosaurs with the hierarchy

Animalia/Eumetazoa/Deuterostomia /Chordata/Vertebrata/Gnathostomata /Tetrapoda/Reptilia

which ought really to be enough detail. Cladograms within articles can give more detail as appropriate. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:20, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a huge fan of that system, very hard to find the broken chains etc., and even to just add a taxobox to a new article... But well, guess we have to live with it. Maybe some levels could be commented out or something, if that even works, because it may be relevant to show different higher levels in different articles, etc. FunkMonk (talk) 14:43, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Different higher levels can be (and indeed are) shown in different articles, typically via |display_parents=. Unfortunately, even if the intermediate levels aren't shown (by default only "major ranks" are), the system still has to check each level, if only to find the next one. Hence so as long as the taxonomy templates are present in the taxonomic hierarchy, there's a problem. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:46, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

But why is there even a limit? As I said earlier, I don't think it is a good idea to simply remove some ranks, as some might be relevant to show in some articles, and some in others. FunkMonk (talk) 17:03, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

The limit seems to be a purely practical one - the amount of processing which is required, or maybe the stack depth (let's guess there's some recursion in there...); but from the point of view of an article, it's awful having an enormous long taxobox. I've taken a look at the hierarchy, and editing it would be, ah, interesting. We could (if agreed) easily short-circuit some of the levels (by pointing from one to whatever is several levels above it), but the intermediate levels would still be there, and could be used by other taxa. So it's already possible for some articles to show one thing, some another, even using the auto-taxobox mechanism. Actually slimming down the hierarchy would, it seems, involve AfD-ing a whole lot of taxo-pages - presumably, quite a "challenge". That doesn't mean that cutting it down isn't desirable or possible. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:08, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

@FunkMonk and Chiswick Chap: there's a limit because it's built into the software which runs Wikipedia and other wikis. Recursion is actually forbidden in the template language, but there's still a depth limit: one template can call a different one which then calls another and so on (necessary to move up the taxonomic hierarchy), but this can only happen 40 times and then it just stops.

@Chiswick Chap: It's not necessary to actually delete the taxonomy templates. Suppose there was a taxonomic hierarchy like the following (shown sideways for convenience):

A ← B ← C ← D ← E ← F ← G ← H ← I

and we decided that only those in bold should be able to be shown for levels below I. Then the upwards links (|parent= in the "Template:Taxonomy/..." templates) could be changed to produce hierarchies like this:

A ← D ← G ← I

A ← B ← C

D ← E ← F

G ← H

All that's happened is that the links upwards from the "bold" levels are changed to go to another "bold" level. The rest are left alone. Then an article about B, C, E, F or H, or about a taxon whose parent is one of these, can still use the automated taxobox system. It's just that all the five "non-bold" levels will be skipped once a "bold" level is reached.

This is the approach that I personally favour, but as I noted above, it's not for me to say for dinosaurs which levels should be treated as the "bold" ones in my example. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:37, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

That short-circuiting is exactly what I suggested above. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:39, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Um, yes, but you said that AfD'ing would be needed, and my point above is that it isn't. All that's needed is to change the values of |parent= in some templates. Consensus here will be enough for that, if there are more participants. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:44, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

No I didn't, I said it would be needed if we wanted actually to clean up the mess. We agree we can short out the long lists, and that it would be enough for our immediate purposes, but it isn't great leaving heaps of shorted-out trash behind, is it? Even if some do wish to use it in other places - they'll only want to put it back again if it's all still lying about, and AfDing would be needed to prevent that. Still, we can try what you suggest first, and see what happens. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:56, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

What does the "mess" refer to, errors? Some errors also seem to simply be due to vandalism on a specific taxon template, which then gets inherited all the way down the hierarchy... Perhaps they should all be protected from IP address edits... Though I think this would never be done, due to the "everyone cna edit" policy. FunkMonk (talk) 20:47, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps, but more likely simply over-enthusiasm for putting in every suggestion of a clade from anyone's cladistic analysis supported by goodness knows what evidence; even if they're correct, we don't necessarily want them all here. And once someone has put in Peter's B, C, E, F, and H clades, it's remarkably difficult to get them all out again. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:00, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Personally I think we have too many dinosaur clade articles as well (every three or four genera seem to have their own clade name), but it is kind of impossible to know where to draw "the line" for inclusion. Same for these taxobox hierarchies. FunkMonk (talk) 21:21, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

I think we all agree that this needs fixing, and I think the best thing to do would be what Peter coxhead described above, with different levels that collapse when a major clade is found. I also agree with FunkMonk that we probably have too many clades at this momment, but I do think finding a fix takes priority over making sure every article has the hierarchy it specifically needs. If all the people involved in this discussion agree, then I think we should start a project-wide discussion on which clades become "bold", and which we are okay with being not shown in taxoboxes. IJReid ^discuss 23:37, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

• Need new parameter majorparent=xxx: Although the recent {taxobox_colour} template-depth errors have been fixed, for now, by listing intermediate taxon levels in {{Taxonomy/Dinosauromorpha}}, a long-term solution is needed to hide the minor clades. Because the numerous clades are cluttering the overall table of taxon levels, there should be a new optional parameter "majorparent=xxx" to skip higher above the current "parent=yyy" and avoid the template nesting limit in some pages. Previously, the {taxobox} templates have been re-structured to allow 54 taxon levels, but now need to handle 70 or more taxon levels with class Reptilia, which might be possible by further re-structuring this month. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:51, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

I'm against allowing more taxon levels (as it seems are the other editors that have commented here). The |majorparent= solution seems better to me. How would the system determine when to skip, given that it works upwards and so doesn't know how many levels are above? Or would it always skip to the major parent? Peter coxhead (talk) 11:08, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

If possible, I would recommend that the taxon box shows the immediate parent of a taxon, and then the lowest majorparent. As such, if we had a genus, eg. Tyrannosaurus, it would display the parent Tyrannosaurinae, and then the next majorparent, which will probably be agreed to be Tyrannosauridae. Then we can work our way up the tree skipping the unimportant clades but displaying every subsequent majorparent. IJReid ^discuss 17:13, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

The |display_parents= parameter should continue to be obeyed; normally it defaults to 1, achieving the effect IJReid points out. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:27, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

Taxoboxes with an invalid color

Quick facts Enantiornitheans, Scientific classification ...

Enantiornitheans
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Reptilia
Clade:	Dinosauria
Clade:	Saurischia
Clade:	Theropoda
Clade:	Avialae
Clade:	Ornithothoraces
Clade:	†Enantiornithes

Close

Quick facts Enantiornitheans, Scientific classification ...

Enantiornitheans
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Reptilia
Clade:	Dinosauria
Clade:	Saurischia
Clade:	Theropoda
Clade:	Avialae
Clade:	Ornithothoraces
Clade:	†Enantiornithes

Close

The reported examples Abavornis and Enantiornithes are currently not in Category:Pages where expansion depth is exceeded. They show exposed table formatting code in the infoboxes, so the error must be something other than expansion depth. I investigated Enantiornithes after Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Error in Enantiornithes template(s). There appears to be two issues. 1) It produces Category:Taxoboxes with an invalid color. 2) The category code is produced in a place which breaks the table formatting.

{{Automatic taxobox|name = Enantiornitheans|taxon = Enantiornithes}} produces the first infobox to the right. It currently displays this twice: colspan=2 style="text-align: center; background-color: transparent; text-align:center; border: 1px solid red; |. It's possible to remove the category from the output by using {{Replace}} to replace it with emtpy. I did that in the second infobox. It currently displays no code but has a red border and no background color for "Enantiornitheans" and "Scientific classification".

Special:ExpandTemplates shows that {{taxobox colour|taxon=Enantiornithes}} produces: transparent; text-align:center; border: 1px solid red;[[Category:Taxoboxes with an invalid color]]. For comparison with working code in Tyrannosaurus, {{taxobox colour|taxon=Tyrannosaurus}} produces: rgb(235,235,210). PrimeHunter (talk) 11:43, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Whether or not it gets into Category:Pages where expansion depth is exceeded, the problem is caused by the excessive depth of the taxonomic hierarchy. You can easily see that if you look at these pages:

• Template:Taxonomy/Abavornis
• Template:Taxonomy/Euenantiornithes
• Template:Taxonomy/Enantiornithes

The first two fail to show the full taxonomic hierarchy in the table to the right; the last does, because the hierarchy is one shorter. If you temporarily cut out a level, e.g. set |parent=Ornithothoraces in Template:Taxonomy/Euenantiornithes and then preview, you'll see the problem disappear. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:51, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Now that I have finished re-coding the "traversal" part of the automated taxobox system in Lua (a few very small parts need a bit more work), skip taxonomy templates introduced solely to reduce the depth of the taxonomic hierarchy can be removed, and I've started cautiously removing them. Thus Template:Taxonomy/Tyrannosaurus now has no skips and the article Tyrannosaurus has an expansion depth of only 24 compared to the maximum allowed of 40.

Important: this only applies to skip taxonomy templates previously used to reduce depth. Skip templates are still needed in the taxonomic hierarchies for taxa like Mammalia or Aves because editors in wikiprojects concerned with those taxa want to treat them as Linnaean classes, which is not compatible with treating the clade Reptilia as a class. All skip taxa used to avoid incorrect ordering of Linnaean ranks must be retained. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:02, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

I have now removed more skip templates in the "dinosaur" part of the taxonomic hierarchy; see e.g. Template:Taxonomy/Ornithurae which now has 61 levels, impossible to process correctly before. I can't see any problems which this caused, but please let me know if you spot any. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:33, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds#Inconsistent taxonomies; many bird and bird-related taxoboxes still show inconsistent ranks, and this needs fixing. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:00, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

I've noticed that our project doesn't follow Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna). More specifically, here, we use the IMO ugly format of "genus name (dinosaur)" where the genus name is in use elsewhere, instead of the "binomial name" for our taxa. However, this is the exact opposite of what we should be doing if we follow Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna)#Monotypic taxa, where it says to have the binomial as the article name and the other format redirecting to that name. I do think that format should be used here because is looks better, and with monotypic taxa, does not have nearly any impact on the article otherwise. IJReid ^discuss 19:06, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm, I wonder whether it has changed at some point. I think it's a bit weird that we should be so inconsistent. Maybe this discussion should be kept at the paleo project, where it is already begun, to centralise comments. And because we shouldn't do anything different here than in other taxon articles. Or perhaps this should even be discussed at the Tree of Life project. FunkMonk (talk) 22:56, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Looks as though this rule was added in February. Firsfron of Ronchester 07:40, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I was confused too, because above that, it says "should go under the scientific name of lowest rank, but no lower than the monotypic genus", which would appear to be contradictory. Seems there was no discussion of this change. Maybe Peter coxhead has some insight? FunkMonk (talk) 12:08, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

It's important to read the part that is quoted above in context: it's in a section about monotypic taxa and it says, correctly, that policy is, and has been for a long time, that articles on monotypic taxa should be at the lowest level but not lower than genus. In context I don't think it's at all contradictory, although it has the one exception. See WP:MONOTYPICFLORA, which may be clearer.

The bit I added about monotypic genera that need disambiguation was already clearly stated at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life#Article titles: in the event that the name of a monotypic genus is shared with another topic, it is usually more appropriate to use a binomial as a natural disambiguation rather than creating an article with a parenthetical disambiguating term for the genus (and indeed was already clearly stated at WP:NCFLORA). It is based on long-standing practice derived from WP:NCDAB, namely that natural disambiguation should be considered before parenthetical. For a monotypic genus the natural disambiguation is the species name. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:24, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, PC. You state above that these are long-standing policies, but they are actually guidelines, and it's not clear to me that they are long-standing at all. WP:NCDAB gives the example of using mechanical fan over fan (mechanical) because these would be the natural search terms. It doesn't say anything about disambiguating taxa names. You cite Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life#Article titles, but this was added in March 2016. And as I already observed, you added the content in WP:NCFAUNA in February 2016. WP:NCFLORA doesn't pertain to this project. It seems as though the guideline was added in contravention to actual editing practice. Firsfron of Ronchester 18:51, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

@Firsfron: you wouldn't expect WP:NCDAB to cover every kind of article; I cited it to show that parenthesized disambiguation is recommended only when natural disambiguation fails. Are you saying that the species name for a monotypic genus is less natural than "genus_name (disambiguator)"? See also WP:NATURALDIS: parenthetical disambiguation... Wikipedia's standard disambiguation technique when none of the other solutions lead to an optimal article title; here the solution of using the species name clearly leads to a better, if not optimal, title.

Let me be clear that I have no particular axe to grind. Like Plantdrew, I'm sure, I was just trying to clarify what is apparently the main practice in regard to monotypic genera in most groups, fauna or flora. Look through Category:Monotypic animal genera and see how many entries of the form "genus_name (disambiguator)" are articles and how many are redirects, either to English names or species. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:13, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

(As an aside, Category:Monotypic fish genera shows up a different issue – the genus redirect should be categorized as being monotypic, not the species article. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:13, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Peter, I didn't think you had an axe to grind; didn't even enter my mind. No worries there. Yes, I am saying the species name for a monotypic dinosaur genus is less natural than "genus_name (disambiguator)". This is because dinosaurs and some other prehistoric reptiles are not known by their specific names; can you even identify the specific names for the (currently monotypic) Styracosaurus, Hadrosaurus, or Brachiosaurus without looking them up? Outside of T. rex, I can't think of a single dinosaur known to the general public by its binomial. A one size fits all approach won't work across all Tree of Life projects. I ask you to consider the reader. It's been long known on this project that the majority of readers of dinosaur articles are children. I pity the child asked by his or her teacher to do a report on Saturnalia and getting the wrong article because s/he doesn't know whether to go to Saturnalia tupiniquim, Saturnalia (Macrobius), or Saturnalia Fossa. You know, because you have edited articles; but we're writing for readers. Saturnalia (dinosaur) is certainly more natural to the end user than forcing that end user to try to guess what the specific name is.

@Firsfrons: of course readers should never have to guess what the specific name is, nor whether to look for "Saturnalia" or "Saturnalia (dinosaur)", and they won't have to. There will always be redirects and hatnotes to make sure that the correct article is easily found. It's a mistake to think that the article title is the key for searching. It's there to provide a consistent and unambiguous identifier for an article. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:49, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Peter, redirects and hatnotes don't show up in the search bar. The reader would be confronted with the following options: Saturnalia tupiniquim, Saturnalia (Macrobius), or Saturnalia Fossa. That's not helpful for the end user, and that's only one example. You are asking the reader to guess what the specific name is, and many prehistoric animals simply are not known to the general public by their binomial names. That's one reason this project (and some others) have used disambiguators like Saturnalia (dinosaur). It's a naming convention that was worked well, and which has been followed since at least 2004 (maybe earlier): see the editing histories at Gastonia (plant) Gastonia (dinosaur), Saturnalia (dinosaur), etc. The edit you made in 2016, without discussion, and then reverted to when it was removed by @FunkMonk:, goes against long-standing editing practice. Will you revert your addition until this can be properly discussed, either here or at another venue? Firsfron of Ronchester 19:51, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't understand your argument. If I type "Saturnalia" in the search bar, I get to Saturnalia, whose hatnote leads me to Saturnalia (disambiguation) and hence Saturnalia (dinosaur). If it's clear that the dinosaur sense of "Saturnalia" is a very common search, it can be included directly in the hatnote. You are of course free to revert any of my edits. This one simply reflects actual majority practice across fauna articles. I've suggested a revision below which could apply to extinct taxa. It would be useful to discuss that, but my edit and Plantdrew's are correct for extant taxa. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:21, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Finally, I don't know what to make of the assertions, made repeatedly and now by multiple users, and still uncorrected, that WP:NCDAB is a "long-standing policy". Firsfron of Ronchester 23:39, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

@Firsfron: my use of the word "policy" was not intended to make any point about "policy" vs. "guidelines". Template:Wikipedia policies and guidelines puts WP:Disambiguation under "guidelines". I'm never sure about (and not very interested in) some of the distinctions between "policy" and "guidelines", so I asked SMcCandlish to comment, since he's been much more involved in these issues. Regardless of its status, WP:Disambiguation is clear that parenthetical disambiguation is not the first choice. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:42, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I added some text to Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life#Article titles relatively recently. But some monotypic genera with ambiguous names have been placed at the naturally disambiguated binomial title at least as far back as 2010. And this issue has come up multiple times at WP:TOL; e.g. here, here and here. There's a lot more discussion than that, and I'm too lazy to dig for the threads where the decision for having monotypic taxa at the lowest rank (but no lower than genus!!!) was hashed out in the first place (I'll look for them if anybody insists though). My impression of those threads is that stopping at genus was heavily influenced by paleontology focused editors, and I agree that it makes a great deal of sense not to create articles for paleontological species in most cases. My impression of the most recent discussion about using binomials to disambiguate ambiguous dinosaur genera (here) is that people who were opposed to doing so were concerned about conflict with NCFAUNA and TOL article title advice. If you look through Category:Monotypic animal genera as Peter suggested, using the binomial to disambiguate ambiguous monotypic genera is not a fringe solution, although it's far from universal. Plants are mostly standardized to the binomial in this situation. Arthropods have a strong lean to the binomial. Birds and mammals are at common names, so the issue comes up less. Fishes usually have monotypic genera at the binomial, contrary to practice with other organisms.

If dinosaur folks agree that it's best to consistently have everything at genus (with parenthetical disambiguators when needed), I have no objection. But I don't think that's necessarily the best solution for non-paleontological genera, nor do I think that the words of TOL and NCFAUNA were handed down from on high in 2007 and can't be modified to reflect practices that have developed more recently. Plantdrew (talk) 04:08, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Agreed that consistency is needed between the NCFAUNA and NCFLORA guidelines, and WP:DINO's "Dinosaur taxa naming conventions" wikiproject advice. The last time there was a PoV-fork between some of these guidelines (and some project pages) it lead to a whole lot of drama. Also agree that the NCDAB policy (yes, a policy, not a guideline) favors natural disambiguation over parenthetic. Also agreed that forking the discussion onto multiple pages isn't helpful. I would suggest an RfC at WT:NCFAUNA proposing a clarification, and notices at all the above-mentioned places, including ToL, and perhaps also WP:VPPOL, just to be on the safe side (even projects you may not be thinking of like WP:FELIDS may care, since they also cover extinct taxa). Whatever the result is, it should be worked into MOS:ORGANISMS, too. Finally, who added what, when, is really of no consequence; everything on WP was added by someone, at some point. "You added this yourself, so it can't be right" isn't valid reasoning. If it's been around a while it probably resolves to some level of consensus or it would have been reverted. The issue before us is to reconcile conflicts between local consensuses and each other, and more importantly between them and the site-wide guidelines and policies. NCFAUNA appears to not have evolved (pun kinda intended) with extinct taxa very clearly in mind, and can probably be adjusted easily, if there's agreement between wikiprojects who most often deal with extinct taxa.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:46, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

I agree entirely with the need for consistency. If the choice for monotypic genera needing disambiguation is between

1. using the binomial in all cases
2. using the disambiguated genus name in all cases
3. using the binomial in all cases except extinct dinosaurs (and perhaps some other extinct animals)

then the worst option is surely (3). I actually have a slight personal preference for (2) over (1), but this would go against established practice and require hundreds (if not more) moves to produce consistency.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Peter coxhead (talk • contribs) 09:56, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

PS: I don't even mean that there should be total titling consistency (after all, we are mostly using binomials for plants, but not for animals), but rather that the guidelines and other documentation should not be in conflict, whatever the desired naming convention turns out to be. I agree that there probably isn't a good rationale to treat dinosaurs differently. I could see there being an argument to treat extinct life forms a particular way, and monotypic genera a particular way, and for these to be in conflict, so I would hope that we'd come up with a solution that avoided such conflict.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:07, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes, to clarify I mean consistency in the guidelines (as far as is sensible) so that editors working in more than one area of of the tree of life don't have to remember to switch conventions, and readers can learn what to expect.

Proposal The disagreement only seems to be over a very small subset of cases, namely extinct monotypic genera needing disambiguation. It would be possible to write a guideline allowing a choice in such cases, e.g. that the binomial should be used when it would be appropriate to have an article on the species, otherwise the disambiguated genus should be used. This is consistent with the treatment of extinct organisms, where separate species articles rarely make sense because of the lack of information. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:29, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Since there is already major inconsistency in whether common names are used in titles of living taxa or not (reptiles, fungi, plants seem to use binomials), it appears there is some room for flexibility. FunkMonk (talk) 14:39, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm all for flexibility, so long as its purpose is to serve readers, and not just to meet the preferences of different groups of editors. I don't think the mixture of English and scientific names is a good comparison. There will always be a mixture, except perhaps in small, very well known groups, since most taxa don't have English names, and where they do exist, they are frequently ambiguous, being used for different taxa, particularly in different countries. By contrast, we don't have to have a mixture of disambiguated genus names and binomials for monotypic genera needing disambiguation. We have a real choice to make. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:39, 31 December 2016 (UTC)