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Latest revision as of 13:42, 5 November 2022

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. This AfD is a train wreck. I suggest that an widely advertised RfC on the notability of species happen. Until then, both the keeps and the deletes are arguing mostly past each other. Additionally, Cbl62 pointed out a number of the articles in the batch that have been expanded while this AfD was in process making the wholesale redirection much more of an editorial decision that should require more input on a case by case basis. Keeps have a vast numerical advantage (22 to 9). This is not a vote count, but that large of a skew does count for something when trying to figure out the will of the community. Guerillero 13:42, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Bothriospila

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Bothriospila (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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The following are proposed to be redirected to Bothriospilini, with categories left intact, per WP:CONTENTFORK as they duplicate the content of that article.

This would not prevent them from being split off again in the future, in line with WP:WHENSPLIT.

Chlorida (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida cincta (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida costata (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida curta (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida denticulata (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida fasciata (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida festiva (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida inexpectata (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida obliqua (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida spinosa (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chlorida transversalis (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Chrotoma (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Delemodacrys (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Gnaphalodes (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Knulliana (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Ranqueles (beetle) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Ranqueles gounellei (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Ranqueles mus (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Ranqueles steparius (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Scapanopygus (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Taygayba (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Timbaraba (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) BilledMammal (talk) 23:49, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Organisms-related deletion discussions. BilledMammal (talk) 23:49, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science and Animal related deletion discussions Hemiauchenia (talk) 18:35, 29 October 2022 (UTC))

— Note: An editor has expressed a concern that editors have been canvassed to this discussion. (diff)— Preceding unsigned comment added by BilledMammal (talk • contribs)

• Strong oppose - No consensus established for this sort of wholesale merge of taxonomic articles. Dyanega (talk) 23:54, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
• Redirect. There is absolutely consensus for redirecting microstubs that duplicate content from other pages; this is literally no different than what we do regularly for countless cricket players and footballers. Zero information is being deleted. If editors can find sufficient independent, secondary SIGCOV for a standalone they can go ahead and remake the articles individually, as they should have done in the first place. And if editors really want to have their own walled garden of database entries to add wikidata to or whatever they can go to wikispecies, which was created for this purpose. JoelleJay (talk) 01:04, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Delete or redirect The topics do not meet WP:GNG. Avilich (talk) 01:14, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Keep Species are, by definition, notable subjects. And detailed information to meet GNG can be found for every single one. Hence why every AfD nomination of a recognized taxonomic species fails, because they are notable. Anyone arguing otherwise is expressing their own ignorance of the topic as a whole. Silverseren 01:36, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

  Notability is not relevant here, WP:PAGEDECIDE is - and there is no guideline saying that every species must have a standalone article (there isn’t even one that says that species are presumed notable) BilledMammal (talk) 02:15, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

  Notability is not relevant here

Then you shouldn't have brought this to AfD. Merge discussions should happen on the talk pages or, since you're wanting to merge so many, at the relevant Wikiprojects. An RfC could have also been made for a broader decision if that's what you're going for. But AfD is meant to determine notability of subjects. Silverseren 02:48, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Comment: I am a bit confused by both of your statements: WP:PAGEDECIDE is part of WP:N. Is notability at stake here, and what is the connection of notability to a standalone article versus a merge? Is WP:MERGEREASON a subset of the considerations of WP:PAGEDECIDE? NeverRainsButPours (talk) 16:54, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

AFD is to determine whether an article should be kept, and it does this by determining that the topic is notable, that the article doesn't violate WP:NOT, and the article currently warrants a WP:STANDALONE article. If it fails to determine that any of these are true, then the article cannot be kept.

Here, the argument is that the article doesn't warrant a standalone article, and as such arguments that say "Keep, is notable" are useless and should be dismissed, just as the argument "Keep, doesn't violate WP:NOT" should be dismissed if the nomination was on the grounds that the topic was not notable. BilledMammal (talk) 05:15, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

As such, arguments that don't rebut the reason the article was nominated for deletion - such as "Keep, doesn't violate WP:NOT" when the argument is that the topic is not notable, or "Keep, is notable" when the argument is that the topic doesn't currently warrant a standalone article - are not relevant, as it doesn't matter whether what they argue is true.

• Oppose merger merger of these articles will result in an excessively long and difficult to navigate tabular article if all the information is merged into Bothriospilini. This also appears to be a misapplication of WP:CONTENTFORK as these species level articles do not, in fact, only duplicate information already found in Bothriospilini.Jahaza (talk) 02:09, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

  The information is already at Bothriospilini, and it’s only 6000 bytes. How is that “excessively long and difficult to navigate”? Further, what information is missing from Bothriospilini? BilledMammal (talk) 02:12, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

• Keep all, the topics are individually notable. Hey man im josh (talk) 03:23, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Keep (oppose merge). This is getting ridiculous. Long-held consensus is that species are independently notable and meet GNG by definition. Content fork is being completely misapplied. There is no possible reason for redirecting these stubs. Espresso Addict (talk) 03:57, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
  • "Long-held consensus is that species are independently notable and meet GNG by definition". Mind pointing out where such a consensus might be found? Avilich (talk) 19:04, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

    And how does anything "meet GNG by definition"?! By definition, nothing can "meet GNG" merely by verifiably existing. JoelleJay (talk) 21:53, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

• Keep (oppose merge). What BilledMammal has been doing is ridiculous, and I'd support sanctions. Species are notable, and mass redirecting hundreds of notable articles without discussion should not be allowed. BeanieFan11 (talk) 04:18, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Keep Every stub on a described species is expandable into at least a start class article. This is a disappointing doubling-down from an editor who seems unable to realize that they are not going to change established consensus extending to thousands of articles by creating POINTy mass AFDs. (Coming off some apparent participation at the ongoing mass creation/AFD discussion this is particularly tone-deaf.) --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 08:54, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Redirect with the possibility of future splitting. "Scapanopygus cinereus is a species of beetle in the family Cerambycidae, the only species in the genus Scapanopygus" is a simple database entry, and not a helpful article to a reader. A reader looking for information will have to go through other wikilinks to find information as it is; better to take them somewhere at least a bit more comprehensive first. If/when these are expanded into start class articles, then they would be helpful standalone articles for a reader. It would also be beneficial if there was more sourcing than a single dead link; I'm sure these are actual species, but there is not much on the articles to show this. CMD (talk) 10:01, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Comment FYI, the Scapanopygus article is no longer a single sentence; it is now 4 sentences with 3 citations. Several others in this list have also had information and sources added. Esculenta (talk) 19:20, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

• Redirect per nom Argento Surfer (talk) 14:47, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Redirect all The common outcome that species are generally kept has become circular logic without a directive in a guideline. A single published article describing the species – or a database entry – fails GNG, and this line at WP:AFDCO does not actually override that to establish an absurd concept of automatic notability! Even if people believe individual species are notable, per WP:NOPAGE notable topics can still be covered in other articles. In these cases there is not enough content for stand-alone pages so they should be merged/redirected to the genus/other article, which could still have a couple sentences describing each one to be more useful than just a bulleted list of links that fail to actually provide additional information. I do not think Misplaced Pages needs literally millions of articles to be a database of species names that are redundant duplicates of a main article. Even if they could be potentially expanded to have a few sentences, there is no need to have this sort of microstub until someone gets around to doing so. If Bothriospilini has the potential to become long, merge to genus articles instead! Reywas92 15:39, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Keep all per my comments on the Adalbus AFD and also because this is far too long a list to review properly in the lifetime of an AFD. SpinningSpark 15:50, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Keep all. Per WP:NOPAGE: "an article may be a stub even though many sources exist, but simply have not been included yet. Such a short page is better expanded than merged into a larger page". I believe this applies to all of the articles listed here. I've spent the last bit looking for sources and information for some of these articles; they're out there, one just needs to spend a bit of time and add them. Esculenta (talk) 17:10, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

  "is better expanded" So where's the expansion??? If no one's going to do this for tens of thousands of such one-line articles, they should be merged. Reywas92 15:03, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Do I really need to supply diffs? And we're not talking about "tens of thousands" of articles, just the ones listed in this Afd. Esculenta (talk) 15:08, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

• Keep per lots of arguments already. YorkshireExpat (talk) 17:41, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Redirect - Including these in a single list makes it easier for readers to find and compare species without clicking through to articles which contain no additional information. No objection to splitting out individually as articles are expanded. –dlthewave ☎ 18:17, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Redirect per CMD. Ajpolino (talk) 18:28, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
• Keep as to the genus-level articles on Chlorida and Ranqueles (beetle). Other species within the genuses could more appropriately be redirected there instead of jumping all the way upstream. Cbl62 (talk) 19:14, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

  Also keep as to Chlorida inexpectata which has now been expanded by User:Esculenta to include an acceptable level of sourcing and information to warrant a stand-alone article. Cbl62 (talk) 19:19, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

• Keep as a deletion or redirect would directly go against WP:SPECIESOUTCOMES. Species are inherently notable, and all that is needed for such an article is a reference that the species exists. Also, WP:MONOTYPICFAUNA is explicitly clear that the current state is the correct placement, and any change to the structure would have to be undone. In such a case, the ranks with identical member organisms should not be separated into different articles, and the article (if there is no common name) should go under the scientific name of lowest rank, but no lower than the monotypic genus. In short, we don't have separate pages for the species and genus, but instead they are merged at the genus level (the lowest unique rank). Going up to the tribe (Bothriospilini) would be inappropriate at best and just violate WP:NOTBURO policy. The nomination and redirect comments are just outright ignoring guidelines and aren't valid options here. KoA (talk) 20:54, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

I just realized this was a mass nomination, but the same concepts above would apply. I took a look through each species or genera, and none of those are even available for deletion or redirect. This is a very strange special case the nom seems to be trying to create. This is not the place to upend how standard taxonomy article structure is handled. I would encourage the nom and other supporters to learn how taxonomy articles are handled before shooting from the hip as this is definitely WP:SNOW and borderline disruptive. KoA (talk) 21:14, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Species are inherently notable

I don't see this supported by any policy or guideline (SPECIESOUTCOMES being an essay), and in fact it is directly contradicted by WP:N: No subject is automatically or inherently notable merely because it exists: the evidence must show the topic has gained significant independent coverage or recognition, and that this was not a mere short-term interest, nor a result of promotional activity or indiscriminate publicity, nor is the topic unsuitable for any other reason. JoelleJay (talk) 21:48, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

We do need to be careful of comments like this in terms of WP:WIKILAWYERING to avoid established community practice (and again NOTBURO policy). If someone is not familiar with how SPECIESOUTCOMES is actually used, they are welcome to look at all the species AFDs where consensus with it has been endorsed. Really the only time species articles are deleted or redirected is when there's a serious question on the sourcing or if it really exists. Either way, if someone tries to make wild claims about species being a short-term interest or somehow promotional, we do need to be careful about subject-matter competence and dismiss that outright. KoA (talk) 22:26, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Oh but it's not wikilawyering to invoke an essay in claiming community consensus for inherent notability? The exact same circular reasoning of "they're never deleted at AfD" was used to argue train stations are inherently notable--and now we have guidance at GEOLAND explicitly stating train stations must meet GNG because the community recognized AfD outcomes don't mean anything when they're always attended by a large cohort of wikiproject editors !voting keep. JoelleJay (talk) 22:43, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

JoelleJay, are there any of the articles listed above that you think actually don't meet GNG? Remember, sources not being in the article isn't an argument for deletion or an argument for not meeting GNG. Do you think any of the articles do not have proper sourcing that exists to meet GNG for them? Is that a serious belief you have? Silverseren 22:53, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

There are three issues here, GNG, PAGEDECIDE, and NOT. In my opinion being a named species does not guarantee secondary SIGCOV providing anything beyond a jargony list of attributes, most of which will be shared within the genus. We do not need separate pages on each of the one million+ insect species if they are just duplicating the tiny amount of known info on them from a dedicated professional database. That goes against NOT. For a similar reason, we don't accept sports stats databases as sources of athlete notability, even though they might include a large number of separable attributes, because the community considers inclusion in even pro sports DBs to be too indiscriminate for a general-purpose encyclopedia. A set with millions of members is hardly discriminating. JoelleJay (talk) 23:57, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

That seems to be at least a partial avoidance of my question. Do you think the only info available on these articles is biological information pertaining to the genus? And we generally don't use databases for sourcing in these either, the common databases are just used for the most general taxonomic info. Proper scholarly publications are the main avenue of reliable source coverage for species. If athletes had academic publications written about them, our coverage of sportspeople would be much more robust, I expect. Silverseren 00:10, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

It remains insanity that people treat SPECIESOUTCOMES as a policy rather than mere summary of what often happens, instead choosing circular logic of WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS of keeping other species means all must have their own articles. There's no such thing as "going against" anything on WP:AFDCO because it's not a controlling directive. "Species are inherently notable" this is FALSE and has NEVER been established a guideline, so your claim of "outright ignoring guidelines" is BS. Nothing is inherently notable, but rather presumed notable in some cases, and topics about which there is little to say are welcome to be merged even if notable. Reywas92 15:09, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

The "insanity" is a small group of editors charging in wanting to change community norms for taxonomy articles, often barreling over some of the nuances specific to the subject. It goes back to the subject-matter competence issue mentioned above, especially when editors come in hot to the subject. Some of it is also policy violating mentality for WP:NOTBURO where it essentially boils down to saying you didn't formally encode this community norm in policies and guidelines, so it must be ignored. You still need to make a major justification for a special case of going against community norms, and there's nothing particularly special in that sense on this set of articles.

Not to mention that blinders approach has also led to violating actual guidelines like WP:MONOTYPICTAXON where we go down to the lowest unique rank. That means if only one species exists in the genus, then the species is housed in the genus, or if one species in the family, then the species article is at the family level, etc. KoA (talk) 21:15, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Additional comment Just to add on to my initial comment, but based on comments by the nom (and other support comments), it's very clear WP:BEFORE wasn't engaged in at all. Notability and decisions are not determined by the amount of content or sources currently present in the article in the manner the nom is trying to do. They need to actually look at sources rather than hand-wave about there not being enough material, especially for a mass-request like this. Here's just one example for Chlorida denticulata. If you go straight to one of the sources, you already get a summary of where it is found and what host plants it has for key biological information, but also a list of sources for more information:

It even gives you the citation to the original description, so heading over there (p 623-624). There's over a page of description in just that one source, much less all the other sources mentioned in the above list. I'd seriously advise the nom to work on expanding articles with these relatively easy to find sources rather than drive-by nominations that BEFORE is supposed to prevent. You could add things like how the species looks, identifying features, what species is similar to it, etc. You could even follow the sources to plates of the species even. That's just from a small amount of searching even. There should be a massive amount of this in terms of BEFORE for such a large nomination like this. KoA (talk) 22:21, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

By WP:BEFORE, I assume you are referring to D, which says Search for additional sources, if the main concern is notability? The main concern wasn't notability. BilledMammal (talk) 22:26, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

BM, I really suggest avoiding talking past people like that or the short hot-takes quickly after decent sized comment like mine. We are at AfD, and the species/notability question is what drives their page existence. No escaping that. The additional part I was commenting on in BEFORE in C (such as WP:CONRED) was that you are expected to fix these problems through normal editing if you feel strongly, and follow up on the talk pages, related Wikiprojects, etc. that could have helped you with the sources if you were having trouble with them. None of that. Instead, you're basically demanding a bureaucratic change and demanding the someone split that content out later again without actually digging into all the relevant sources yourself (or at least showing you did). Go expand the articles if you feel strongly about it. There are many insect species articles that need expansion and only so many editors out there, and this way of going about it is just a WP:POINTY use of AfD. KoA (talk) 22:57, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Page existence doesn't just require notability; it also requires compliance with WP:NOT, and it also requires that the topic currently warrants a standalone article.

There are many inspect species articles that could be expanded, and so few editors available to do this that almost none are expanded; the articles under discussion here haven't been expanded in eight years. As such, we should get the articles in a format that is usable by readers and then when someone has time split the content out. This also matches improving the article through normal editing, with one of the normal editing practices recommended being WP:ATD-M. The rejection of the subsequent redirection of the species articles then brought us to WP:BEFORE C#4, which requires an AfD be opened. BilledMammal (talk) 23:14, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

And that is an extremely superficial dismissal of BEFORE requirements as others have pointed out below. KoA (talk) 17:11, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Per our OR policy, articles must not be based on primary sources. Most databases and research articles are primary sources (although discussion of other papers within a research article can be secondary). Regardless, the matter at hand isn't whether each of the species at AfD or 1 million total insect species could meet GNG, it's whether including standalone articles on each of them is warranted per PAGEDECIDE and NOT. JoelleJay (talk) 23:57, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

That isn't quite what OR says, and you're just repeating things that have already been debunked at the other AfD. As for databases, those are usually moreso tertiary sources as they are typically academic databases detailing species information. Some literally are taxonomic encyclopedias. How the initial description and secondary literature works here relevant to this AfD is also in my other linked AfD comment. KoA (talk) 17:11, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

• Keep/Oppose merger. In addition to the other objections noted above, there are some practical objections to up-merging existing species articles to the genus level:
  

1) While it can be relatively easy to merge articles, it is far more difficult to accurately revise the text following the split of a taxonomic article into separate articles. As a genus article develops, there are few instances of clearly identifiable sentences that pertain only to one of the species. Assessing each fact can entail having to verify the original source, not only for the presence of the fact, but also the negative of that fact for the genus as a whole before removing it. As a result, the splitting of a complicated genus article into new species articles results in more work than more creating a new genus article from scratch. However, if the genus and species articles are developed separately and in parallel, this difficulty will not appear down the road.

2) An existing species article may have many redirects from common names or other scientific names (synonyms and alternate combinations) that point to the species article title. After a merge to the genus level, and the species page converted to a redirect, these redirects will then be re-targeted by a bot within a few hours to avoid the double-redirect. After the bot has finished (12-24hrs after the page move), although the species level article could be restored, the redirects would now be lost until manually re-created.

3) A genus article is about the genus as a whole, and this deters editors from adding species information as a whole, especially as it may be impossible to add the information in an even manner. This will only serve to hinder the development of the article(s).

As well as the battleground mentality that is starting to appear, I see some opposition to stub articles, sometimes further denigrated as "sub-stub" or "micro-stub", that is based more on WP:IDONTLIKEIT than an appreciation that these are valid articles containing unique information. If we truly believe that we are creating an encyclopedia that will encompass all of this information for the future, then we should be building up the framework and not constraining ourselves by merges that would delete some of this information and organization. We need to look at our long term goals of what we want to build and what in time-frame our efforts are to take place (WP:DEADLINE). Think big. Loopy30 (talk) 21:54, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

1) What can be easily split is the elements that are clear refer only to a single species.

2) Creating a few redirects takes less than a minute.

3) Is there any evidence that editors are more likely to expand a low-traffic micro stub than they are to create a new article?

BilledMammal (talk) 22:05, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi BilledMammal,

1. Yes, it may indeed be easy to take an element that refers to the species and put it in the species article. But to complete the split, it is still necessary to review both that fact (and all the others in the genus article) to see whether it should then remain in the genus article. Determining what was true for the species is not the same as untangling what may or may not be correct for the rest of the genus.

2. In some cases there many (20+) redirects. It is often impractical (and undesirable) to list the synonyms for all of the species on the genus page. Also, when these redirects point to the species title, they also serve the purpose of alerting any future editor that an article already exists, thereby avoiding the creation of duplicate articles at different titles (yes, that has often happened).

3. Yes, several editors have noted that they are either overly intimidated or not as willing to create a new article compared to being able to add to an existing article. What I have not heard of is if there are any editors that prefer to start from scratch rather than add to an existing article (but I doubt it).

Loopy30 (talk) 23:09, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Re 3, experience shared by WikiEd and some statements by FA writers suggests that both very new and very experienced editors often prefer starting a new article or rewriting articles from scratch. This likely differs per person of course, some will as you suggest prefer working from existing text. Either way I am not sure it matters too much to this discussion, as neither outcome will affect the existence of information on an article, so there is always a place to work off it. CMD (talk) 03:09, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

• A reminder that citing SPECIESOUTCOMES as a reason to keep is as circular as citing WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES to keep (or delete) school articles. --Izno (talk) 04:52, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
• Keep/oppose merger as unhelpful in building an encyclopedia. Many good arguments already made above. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:21, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
• Keep all On procedural grounds, if the desired outcome was a many-to-one redirect, then AfD was the wrong place to raise this discussion. Second, as Spinningspark noted, this is too big a bundle to expect most !voters to evaluate on the typical timescale of an AfD. Third, it's not "circular" to argue that species articles should be kept because species articles historically have been kept; rather, that's basing a judgment upon precedent. (Precedent that a later discussion could overrule, but even so, it's a sensible starting point.) Nor is that an appeal to "other stuff exists", which is typically dismissed as a bad argument because stuff can exist without being noticed. Here, the very fact that we have a statement about the common outcome of species AfD's indicates that species AfD's have, in fact, happened. And so it's sensible to say that what was a good idea then will continue to be a good idea now. (WP:SPECIESOUTCOMES is, to my eye, roughly on a level with WP:NJOURNALS: not yet elevated to an official guideline, but a reflection of sensible community practice and generally good advice regardless.) All that aside, I share the concern of KoA that more scrutiny of each article should have been necessary before embarking upon a mass nomination like this, the concern of Jahaza that a merge would result in a disastrously unusable table, and the view of Esculenta that these short articles are easily expandable. See, for example, recent additions to Scapanopygus. I had thought the following remarks by Dyanega were on this page, but they were on another, so I'll copy them here: For the record, while I can see the reasoning behind the restructuring of genus-level articles into tabular form showing the constituent species, there are several very important things that exist on species-rank articles that would be completely lost if this approach were adopted, and among these are the following: (1) not all species in a genus fall under the same categories - they can be from different countries, different continents, different geological periods, and have been published by different authors, and in different years. There are MANY common types of categories that would be almost completely depopulated if we banned species-level articles. (2) synonymies appear in the taxoboxes of species-level articles, and those lists of synonyms would also be lost entirely. Likewise, when synonyms exist as redirects, having a species-level synonym redirecting to a genus-level page will make it impossible to determine which species that name is a synonym OF. It might look good to have a table of species, but frankly it's a terrible idea.. XOR'easter (talk) 13:27, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

  I find these species category arguments interesting, but they lie in stark in contrast to the existing and apparently widely accepted practice of quickly removing all such categories from a species article if that species is reclassified into its own genus. Arguments against tables of species are also in contrast to apparently accepted practice, as these are present on existing articles (eg. Ibis, Panthera). CMD (talk) 14:28, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

  Actually, when a species is moved into its own genus, a species redirect should remain (when done properly), with categories for classification, year described, location, named by, etc. Your argument about species tables with the two examples you give doesn't really apply here, as all of the species in those tables have their own articles. Esculenta (talk) 14:39, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

  Not following that second part. You're suggesting tables should exist when species have their own articles, but shouldn't exist when they don't? CMD (talk) 14:50, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

  The presence of a table in a genus article summarising the species within does not mean that the standalone species articles can't exist. Esculenta (talk) 14:53, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

  No it doesn't. I'm not sure how that was read into my comment which explicitly listed two examples which do have standalone species article. CMD (talk) 15:01, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Additional comment - I'm back and have a little time, so I have a number of things to point out, please bear with me. (1) BilledMammal accused me of canvassing. I originally posted to exactly one page - Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Tree of Life. Why? Because all of the merged/altered articles affected were WP:TOL pages, and because WP:TOL has, within it, space EXPRESSLY DEVOTED to such changes as proposed merges, and to which BilledMammal did not submit any such proposals. (2) Given that WP:TOL does, in fact, have space dedicated to approving/rejecting merge proposals, I think it is entirely understandable that I would be under the impression that the WikiProject does, in fact, have an established policy and legitimate claim to authority over such actions, and I acted accordingly, reacting to what I saw as a massive and unprecedented policy breach. Being accused by BilledMammal of acting in a non-neutral manner is predicated on his actions NOT being a breach of policy, and WP:TOL having no authority at all, and all the evidence I had in front of me is that it WAS a breach of policy. Others here and elsewhere have stated that WikiProject policies have no authority or enforceability at all, and I find this surprising, and apologize if I assumed too much. (3) Likewise, BilledMammal accused me of not assuming his actions were in good faith, but breaches of policy such as not getting approval for article merges, especially when they delete unique content do not appear to be good faith actions, unless an editor is acting in complete ignorance of policy. An editor acting in good faith who is bulk-deleting content, especially when all of that content is flagged as belonging to a specific WikiProject, should be consulting with that WikiProject in advance. Just because an edit is bold doesn't mean it isn't genuinely destructive, and I would argue that demonstrably destructive edits should be rolled back until they have been discussed and approved. (4) Policy and rules aside, BilledMammal admitted, directly, that they did not know what content in the articles being merged was or was not valuable, as well as admitting, directly, that they did not look at each such article to assess whether there WAS any unique content that would be lost. That sort of bulk editing, when you don't understand what you're causing to be lost, is not just bold, it's reckless. If there's a fire, you don't adopt a neutral stance and wait to see if it will go out on its own; you call the fire department. (5) When it was pointed out what deleted content was valuable, and what was unique, BilledMammal dismissed the point, saying that once he was made aware of the problem, some of it could be salvaged, and the rest, like taxonbars with Wikidata links, was not worth salvaging. Again, the time to learn what content needs to be maintained is BEFORE one removes that content, not after. Second, despite attempts to dismiss things like Wikidata links as not worth salvaging, I would argue that for many of these articles the Wikidata links are the single most important and unique source of information in the article, and - most importantly - ONLY Misplaced Pages species-level articles contain and make use of the full cross-referencing capacity of Wikidata. (6) Consider just one of the articles BilledMammal has proposed deleting; Knulliana, containing only a single species. The taxonbar was added by an editor after the article was created, and via Wikidata it links this record to Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, BioLib, BugGuide, CoL, EoL, EPPO, GBIF, iNaturalist, IRMNG, ITIS, and NCBI. Not a single one of those linked sources crossreferences to the others. For that matter, Wikidata records themselves do not cross-reference to other Wikidata records; you cannot look at a species entry in Wikidata and determine from that how many species are in the same genus, or what family it is in. ONLY Misplaced Pages species articles serve to provide a reader with all of the information available for a species, and the information available through the Wikidata crossreferences is VAST - it includes not just the taxonomic information, but the geographic distributions, phenologies, host associations, biological notes, photographs, and records of actual physical specimens and their data. Just go to that Knulliana article and click on those Wikidata links to see how much information is contained there - all of it lost if the article is deleted. It is precisely this information that BilledMammal has specifically stated is not worth including in Misplaced Pages, at the same time complaining about how these stubs contain nothing useful or unique. Misplaced Pages species articles that contain a Wikidata linked taxonbar do NOT simply "duplicate the content" of a genus-level article (because the genus-level articles do not contain those Wikidata links), and they contain far more than just what is immediately visible in the text of the article. Despite comments I've seen some people post, species-level articles do NOT simply duplicate or mirror what is found in Wikispecies, they do MUCH more, because they contain a Wikidata link, while Wikispecies cross-references to almost nothing, not to Wikidata, and not even to Misplaced Pages. (7) As others have noted, deleting or merging articles not only does nothing to improve them, but it makes it harder for anyone else to improve them, just like deleting the brackets from a redlink makes it harder for anyone to know that an article needs to be created. All existing redirects pointing to species articles will no longer have a proper target, because you can't target individual entries in a table. (8) Designing a table format that can accommodate for all the possible permutations is not practical; BilledMammal's initial attempt had only three fields - species name, "first described", and range. If you wanted to have an actual table that could accommodate existing species article stub content, it would contain (a) present species name, (b) past names/spelling variants/synonyms (of which there can be be 50 or more), (c) authorships and years for all these names, (d) the geographic distributions, (e) host associations, (f) existence of subspecies, (g) images, (h) descriptive notes, and (i) references, at a bare minimum (i.e., without having to omit existing content of merged/deleted stubs). Even for a small genus, nine columns, and the possible amount of content in some of them (especially considering how many would have to be left blank) would be unwieldy enough, but for groups like beetles, there are some genera with over 3000 valid species! Those genus articles are bad enough as just lists, they will become impossible to use if they are converted into tables, and the unfortunate truth is that all but a literal handful of the species articles for those enormous genera are stubs. We are MUCH better off with 3000 individual articles than a gargantuan table. (9) Something else that is overlooked is HOW DO MOST USERS ARRIVE AT WIKIPEDIA? To continue the example above, if you google "Knulliana" the #1 Google hit is the Misplaced Pages article - the same article that BilledMammal has just proposed to delete. Call me crazy, but you shouldn't go around deleting the #1 source of information on an organism on the entire internet just because you assert that species stubs are wasteful and inefficient. (10) For me, the bottom line is this: once a species article referring to an actual valid taxonomic entity has been created and crossreferenced, it should not be subject to arbitrary decisions to merge or delete it. If the name is synonymized, then it should immediately be changed into a redirect to the valid taxon name, but that's about the only way a species article should ever be made to disappear. BilledMammal has not engaged with the relevant Wikiproject, and has dismissed the concerns about the effort of editors who have helped to improve a page, as being irrelevant to whether a page should be maintained. Well, Misplaced Pages is a community effort, for one thing, and the community should have a say in the matter. The other side of this is that an editor who does not understand what the content is that they're removing should not be making such a decision unilaterally, especially when there are editors who DO understand what the content is, and how valuable it is. (11) I will echo the calls by others to establish, once and for all, an explicit AND OBJECTIVE policy regarding species articles, however high up it needs to go in the WP administrative hierarchy to make it enforceable. It is hard enough to keep the existing articles organized and curated without some existential threat that if an article does not have some arbitrary amount of arbitrarily-defined improvement by some arbitrary deadline, it can be wiped away by anyone who feels so inclined, without discussing the matter in advance. That's a recipe for disaster, and I don't regret categorizing it as such. Dyanega (talk) 22:29, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

• Redirect per nominator, JoelleJay, and Avilich. Species are notable enough to have a redirect, but not necessarily a whole page, and especially when that page is a stub. --Spekkios (talk) 07:46, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
• Keep For many reasons previously articulated. It is not up for us to decide how readers might prefer to find information in this project. Some readers may want a list, some may want more specific information which can be found on a dedicated page. I do believe that species by definition are notable. --Enos733 (talk) 20:14, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

  See WP:USEFUL. In addition, I'm not proposing redirecting any pages which contain more specific information than exists in the list. BilledMammal (talk) 21:05, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

The information linked to by the taxonbars is not being carried over to the redirect target because you are deleting the species-specific taxonbars. That includes, as noted, geographic distribution data, host associations, photographs, phenology data, specimen records in museums, all linked to individual species and accessible on the pages you are converting to redirects. That is a LOT of very specific information being lost. Dyanega (talk) 21:10, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Per WP:LINKFARM and WP:NOTDATABASE, articles don't exist to provide a location for a database of external links. BilledMammal (talk) 21:13, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Please read those policies before you try to assert that they apply here. They very clearly do NOT apply in this context. Dyanega (talk) 21:19, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

More to the point, visit Template:Taxonbar for a tutorial on what a taxonbar is, and what it is intended to do. You are, effectively, claiming that taxonbars violate those two policies. They do not. Dyanega (talk) 21:23, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Taxonbars don't. Taxonbars as the sole reason for an article to exist do because such articles are simply repositories of external links, which is forbidden by WP:LINKFARM and WP:NOTDATABASE. BilledMammal (talk) 21:27, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Your argument is inane. A linkfarm is an indiscriminate collection of links. The links in taxonbars are to specific pieces of information, a practice explicitly allowed in LINKFARM There is nothing wrong with adding one or more useful content-relevant links. The taxonbar is not the sole reason for a stub article to exist. The article exists as a platform for further expansion. If all that ever could exist was the taxonbar then you would have a case for NOTDATABASE. But further information does exist as has been proved repeatedly on species articles. SpinningSpark 22:07, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

And when an editor adds that information the article can be restored. Until then, when we dismiss the argument that we need to keep it because of the taxonbar, WP:CONTENTFORK doesn't permit us to keep the article. BilledMammal (talk) 22:09, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Creating stubs is a practice long established on Misplaced Pages. We don't delete stubs just because they are stubs. We delete them when a WP:BEFORE search shows that expansion is unlikely/impossible. CONTENTFORK is a ridiculous rationale when you have to dismiss something from the article (with an equally ridiculous rationale of LINKFARM) before you can apply it. SpinningSpark 22:30, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

The proposal here is redirection, to avoid duplicating the content, not deletion. And the ridiculous argument here is that using an article as a directory to external resources is sufficient argument for its existence. In addition to the two aspects of WP:NOT that I have already cited, that also violates WP:NOTDIRECTORY. BilledMammal (talk) 22:38, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Redirection deletes content, and you are the person duplicating it. Despite your repeated invocation of WP:CONTENTFORK, you again seem to be applying a policy out-of-context. Forking is what happens when two articles overlap so much that any edits to one would also be appropriate for the other article, at which point they are better off merged. That is not the case for species articles versus genus articles UNLESS the genus contains only one species - and in that case, WP policy does explicitly state that they should be a single article, but that is the ONLY case in which merging genus and species articles is indicated by policy. The article you should be referring to instead (and yes, I know it isn't an official policy, but please refrain from attacking it on that basis) is semi-duplicate, which goes over the issue at hand here. Allow me to quote from it: "...if there was a significant amount of information about apples in the Orange (fruit) article the correct thing would be to move the content about apples into the Apple article rather than merge Orange (fruit) to Apple. On the other hand there may be separate articles for a settlement and low level municipality - even though the separate article for the municipality does not duplicate much content in the settlement article, for example, it would still be a semi-duplicate. Generally per WP:BEFORE C1 if there are problems with content forking they should be dealt with through normal editing rather than merging the articles. Similarly, just because the articles don't have content forking problems due to good editing doesn't mean the articles should be kept separate, similar to Misplaced Pages:No amount of editing can overcome a lack of notability. However, semi-duplicates have a higher risk of content forking though the article may be less likely to be merged if distinct content has been added that may justify an exception." (some punctuation added) I will emphasize that this article not only suggests that merging is not the preferred course of action, but that the movement of content is to the article for which it is most appropriate; that is, if a genus article existed and had a table of species data, then the correct procedure would be to remove detailed species data from the genus article, and move it to the species articles, thereby removing the forking problem. You are advocating exactly the opposite, and you are in fact taking steps that create a tautological argument: you are moving content INTO the genus articles, and after you have duplicated the content, then you are claiming that there is a content fork that can only be resolved by merging the articles. The fact is, until you attempted to move that content into the genus article, there was no fork at all; you are the person who has created the problem you claim to be trying to solve. Second, taxonbars ARE "distinct content", whether you are willing to accept it or not. Taxonbars are a fundamental feature of Misplaced Pages, and they appear on over 400,000 articles - you can't just dismiss them as irrelevant and not deserving of protection from being deleted. Dyanega (talk) 22:47, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

You have misunderstood WP:CONTENTFORK. It discusses situations where the content is redundant, and states that such situations are to be avoided in favour of a single source of truth; it doesn't make any distinction between articles that won't be redundant in the future and articles that will be.

It also includes an exception that demonstrates your misunderstanding; rather than saying that content that won't be redundant in the future should be split off immediately, it says it should only be split off when the article becomes too large to include all of the content - in other words, when it stops being redundant.

As for Taxonbars, would an article consisting only of external links be a valid article or would it be speedy-deleted under WP:A3? BilledMammal (talk) 23:01, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Invoking WP:CONTENTFORK as a rationale for your proposed merger was (and still is) incorrect as the information was not duplicated between the source species/genera articles and your intended destination article (Bothriospilini). Having little experience in editing taxonomic articles, you may have just been unaware of the distinct information that would be deleted. As this unique information has now been pointed out (assuming you missed it on previous discussion pages), it is unwise to keep claiming that WP:CONTENTFORK applies here. Loopy30 (talk) 23:05, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Can you specify what information is missing? BilledMammal (talk) 23:07, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

The burden of proof is on YOU to show redundancy, not on us to prove otherwise. Take a look at the Knulliana article, in the version immediately prior to your attempted merge: . Now, take a look at the Bothriospilini article, the version immediately prior to your attempted merge: . Anyone, ANYONE, who looks at those two articles will immediately see that there is almost nothing in those two articles that is duplicated or redundant. There was no justification for the merge. I will say it again, since you seem to still refuse to acknowledge it: these articles were perfectly fine before you tried to merge them. There was never a fork problem until you created a fork problem. Dyanega (talk) 23:55, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

And what information is missing from the version after my expansion? If you can't answer that then your objections on the ground that information would be lost seem rather baseless; this isn't a vote, and you need to present evidence for the closer to consider your opinion. BilledMammal (talk) 20:59, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

• Strongly oppose merger.. If the page is deleted and moved to a tribe table, not only will existing information be lost, but most of the incentive for others to add content is lost as well. Bob Webster (talk) 02:27, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

  What information will be lost? In addition, WP:HALFDONE suggests that creating stubs and sub-stubs doesn't add an incentive for editors to improve them and may have the opposite effect. BilledMammal (talk) 20:59, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

• Just a note that the nominator rather disruptively recently changed the target to an old non-consensus diff rather than the actual target page content. Editors at the target page Talk:Bothriospilini were already complaining about the confusion this and the edit warring at the article caused, so just making sure that remains fixed. To quote Plantdrew there, the AfD was predicated on CONTENTFORK, where the content forking was performed by the AfD nominator shortly before opening the AfD, and changing to a diff was just continuing that issue. Editors commenting before this comment should be aware of this misdirection in case they were looking at the edit-warred version that didn't have consensus and based comments on that. Apologies for not catching this sooner, there's been a bit of cleanup to try to keep up on. KoA (talk) 14:22, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
• Keep Seems to be disruptive apart from being policy violations of notability compounded by a refusal to follow TOL guidelines for the structuring of knowledge, assuming that the nominator does not get taxonomy, an analogy with geographically nested entities could be considered but unable to see enough intent in trying to reason or be reasonable. Elsewhere claims that this is "... to increase the utility of these articles for average readers", not every entry and every part of an article anywhere is for the "average reader". Shyamal (talk) 05:55, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
• Redirect, without prejudice to re-expansion of individual articles per Spekkios et al. and, indeed, every entry and every part of an article anywhere is for the average reader (there's a reason we have a {{technical}} template). I've previously said the same about fish species and individual articles about dams: the reader is better served by having basic information about list entries (species, dams, whatever) grouped on one page in order to provide context, rather than separating this basic info onto standalone pages. It's not a question of notability, it's a WP:PAGEDECIDE issue. The species "sub-stubs" can easily be merged into a table (by genus, or tribe, although there are some issues with tribe stability), including pictures of each species and synonyms and everything else on the "sub stub" pages. Individual species articles can still be expanded by anyone who wants to add more information to them than what would fit onto a row of a table. Redirects from species names and synonyms can still function by being targeted at a specific row of the genus table. No information would be lost by merging sub-stubs; instead, the reader will gain context. Levivich (talk) 16:16, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

  If you want to redirect/merge by genus than you're actually opposed to this AFD, not in favor of it? Jahaza (talk) 17:41, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

  I support merging ...by genus, or tribe.... Levivich (talk) 18:13, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

• Keep all per Silverseren. Scorpions13256 (talk) 17:40, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
• Keep all/Oppose merge Really this has no business at AfD. (Sorry for earlier tone. Trying again) A suggestion of this sort should be discussed somewhere other than AfD. What is being proposed here is a sweeping change in how species-level articles are generally handled. (Yes, I'm aware that it isn't official policy). Joyous! | Talk 00:59, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
• Keep - this isn't the right forum for such a large-scale policy change. Also, I don't understand why submitting an AFD but wanting to merge instead of delete. It's not like this was a procedural outcome of a different discussion. Thirdly, before User:BilledMammal made this nomination, they were alerted to a discussion at WT:WikiProject Tree of Life#Species article merges, and failed to participate. Finally - the nomination appears to be WP:POINTY an has been made in bad faith, as there was already an ongoing discussion at WP:ANI (Undiscussed mass article merging and redirection by BilledMammal) about the nominators mass merges in this area. Nfitz (talk) 02:00, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
• Keep, Oppose redirecting This is a WP:TRAINWRECK; Knulliana had more significantly more information when the AfD was initiated than any other nominated article. I think it could stand alone as a stub (not a sub-stub) in it's state at the time of the AfD nomination. It has since been expanded, along with other articles nominated in this AfD. The genus article Knulliana gets more page views than the tribe article Bothriospilini (12/day long term vs. 1/day) Tribes are taxonomic minutiae; they are rarely mentioned in sources with SIGCOV of a species. Families are regularly mentioned. Genera are inherently mentioned as the first word in the binomial name of a species. Readers might reasonably expect to find Wikipedias most detailed coverage of a species in a genus article. As a test case, this AfD seems to seek to set a precedent that Wikipedias most detailed coverage of a species could be found whereever it "fits" (by article size). Species might be covered in detail in an article for genus/tribe/subfamily/family. This isn't an outcome that would help readers at all. I'm much less opposed to merging species sub-stubs to genus articles than merging species to an arbitrary higher taxon. Plantdrew (talk) 02:03, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.