Talk:Flowering plant

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Flowering plant article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1

Flowering plant has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: July 31, 2023. (Reviewed version).

Horticulture and Gardening High‑importance

	Gardening portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Horticulture and Gardening, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to Horticulture and Gardening on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Horticulture and GardeningWikipedia:WikiProject Horticulture and GardeningTemplate:WikiProject Horticulture and GardeningHorticulture and gardening articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Plants Top‑importance

	Plants portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Plants, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of plants and botany on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PlantsWikipedia:WikiProject PlantsTemplate:WikiProject Plantsplant articles
Top	This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale.

Food and drink Mid‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Food and drink, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of food and drink related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Food and drinkWikipedia:WikiProject Food and drinkTemplate:WikiProject Food and drinkFood and drink articles

Mid

This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Food and Drink task list:

To edit this page, select here

Here are some tasks you can do for WikiProject Food and drink:

Help bring these Top Importance articles currently B Status or below up to GA status: Agaricus bisporus (i.e. mushroom), Beef, Bread, Curry, Drink, Food, Ham and eggs, Soy sauce, Sushi, Yogurt
Bring these Top Importance articles currently at GA status up to FA status: Beer, French cuisine, Sugar
Bring these High Importance articles currently at GA status up to FA status: Apple, Burger King, Fish
Participate in project-related deletion discussions.
Delete unrelated trivia sections found in articles. Please review WP:Trivia and WP:Handling trivia to learn how to do this.
Add the {{WikiProject Food and drink}} project banner to food and drink related articles and content to help bring them to the attention of members. For a complete list of banners for WikiProject Food and drink and its child projects, select here.
Provide photographs and images for Category:Wikipedia requested images of food
Consider joining this project's Assessment task force. List any project ideas in this section

Note: These lists are transcluded from the project's tasks pages.

Archives

Archive 1

Conservation is certainly an 'interaction with humans'

An editor has seen fit to split out the conservation sub-section, with the rubric "I am lifting this up to main level heading and added "threats". I think otherwise it is too hidden under the euphemistic "interactions with humans". Also some of the threats could be from other things. e.g. climate change is caused by humans but the effects of climate change are not really "interactions with humans". If needed, could discuss on talk page?)". A bold move. Well, we are obliged by the WP:NPOV policy – not just a guideline – to be scrupulously neutral, in headings as well as in text, no "euphemistic" about it. It's far from "hidden", it's a boldfaced section heading, right there in the Table of Contents and in the text too. Conservation is 100% human activity; the threats it deals with are both caused by humans, whether directly by spraying pesticides or hunting, or (slightly) indirectly by destroying habitat and trashing the climate, resulting in human-caused damage to plants and their environment. Further, the article is about 'Flowering plant', which is a taxon; that involves describing the taxon's biology, i.e. its features, diversity, and evolution; and on the side, non-taxon detail, the ways that humans have made use of these plants, or done harm to them. The article recently passed formal review with this simple, clear, and logical structure, including this plainly subsidiary section. I'll put it back now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:42, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, there is always two sides of each argument, so here is mine: I think "threats" ought to appear in a section heading (currently it isn't, only "conservation" is) and also threats should be a main level heading. Threats often come from human actions of course but can also be non-human, e.g. certain diseases which are not due to humans. See e.g. the article Decline in amphibian populations which says "Research from 2007 and 2018 indicated that the reemergence of varieties of chytrid fungi may account for a substantial fraction of the overall decline.". Same for koalas which get a certain disease which is not caused by humans (chlamydia). So if the info on "threats" is inside of "interactions with humans" this limits the content that can be put there. Therefore I think it's better to have "threats and conservation" in one section but not below "human interactions". Or otherwise separate out "threats" from "conservation" in two different sections, and putting "threats" outside of the "human interactions" section. NB: I made the same change also to the bird article last week. I came to these pages from the article biodiversity loss which I am linking with relevant life form articles. Pinging User:InformationToKnowledge. EMsmile (talk) 08:59, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

For transparency purposes: I've just initiated a similar discussion at koala. It might be that a section on "threats" is more relevant for wild animals than for plants, I am not sure. For comparison, the article on dolphin does have a section on "threats" but not one on "conservation". EMsmile (talk) 10:26, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging User:InformationToKnowledge, do you have an opinion on this? EMsmile (talk) 09:24, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ahem, we should not be soliciting input on that sort of topic in this way: this page is not a forum for discussing Koalas and Dolphins — the discussion on those should be on a WikiProject page, not here, and everybody on that project should be invited to join in equally. I do feel that emphasising "threats" in each and every taxon article would be grossly unbalanced; Wikipedia works by separating topics into discrete articles, and cross-referencing those articles (taxa, threats, culture, economics, ...) with embedded, "further", or "main" links. From the point of view of a taxon article, all human-related stuff is a subtopic, and it should remain so, per WP:COATRACK if nothing else; it can also be called WP:UNDUE and described as infringing WP:Balance. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:49, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding your first sentence, I have replied to that on my talk page. (this is not WP:CAN if this is what you were referring to). I can see your point but I also think this creates "silos" and makes it harder for readers to see the bigger picture. Good idea about discussing this in a central place on a WikiProject page. Which WikiProject would be the most suitable one? It should be one about wildlife in general, i.e. for plants and animals? Do you have one in mind? EMsmile (talk) 10:35, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No, I have named three policies involved, but canvassing isn't one of the three. In a way it comes close because, as I also just said, it isn't appropriate to discuss a project policy on one or more taxon pages, forming a semi-private discussion group on a project-wide issue. More than one project may be involved here, clearly. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:39, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

So which project page do you want me to post to then? EMsmile (talk) 10:51, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As it covers animals,plants and other groups, WP:Tree of Life seems apppropriate. — Jts1882 | talk 11:25, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for finding the right WikiProject for me, much appreciated. I have just posted there and copied some of these talk page posts across so that we don't have to repeat what we've already said. Hope everyone is OK with this. Looking forward to a fruitful, friendly and positive discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life#Proposal_about_%22threats%22_in_the_standard_outline EMsmile (talk) 10:30, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the discussion at WikiProject Tree of Life fissled out and didn't reach much of a conclusion. Basically what was said there is: anything is possible, there are no hard and fast rules. And it's all article specific. Therefore let's get back to this discussion here. I still think that lumping everything together into "interaction with humans" is not suitable and makes it harder for people to find what they are looking for. - So I still think the edit that I made here and which was reverted would have actually been a good improvement. - But I won't, and will just wait and see if over time perhaps others might also prefer that structure to the current one. EMsmile (talk) 18:57, 19 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]