My activity
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Michаel Frаnkis commented on "EOL Curators":
@Jennifer Hammock: The obvious option here is for Flickr contributors not to add pics to the EOL Flickr Group until the photo has been identified to their satisfaction. Flickr has various ID groups where unidentified organisms can be posted for identification; pics of uncertain ID could be added to those, and then added to the EOL Group later once identified.
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Michаel Frаnkis commented on "Image of Columba livia":
Albino; impossible to exclude albinos of related species
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Michаel Frаnkis commented on "Pygoscelis adelia - Adelie penguins on Adelaide Island":
@Bob Corrigan: Sorry to disagree, but it isn't a fabulous photo - it's only thumbnail size, and only 18 KB, which means it has bad jpeg compression errors, and minimal detail visible. There are many far better of this species on EOL, including some of megabyte size.
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Michаel Frаnkis commented on "EOL Curators":
@Arthur Chapman: I'd disagree strongly on the Livistona nitida example; in English, hyphens are not followed by capital letters. So "Carnavon Gorge Cabbage Palm" or "Carnavon Gorge Cabbage-palm", but not "Carnavon Gorge Cabbage-Palm", which looks plain ghastly. This follows standard usage everywhere except among US ornithologists heavily influenced by the ideas of one or two ivory tower scientists who know much about birds, but nothing about English grammar. This idea has been rejected by ornithologists everywhere else; see e.g. the introduction in Vol. 1 of Handbook of the Birds of the World.
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Michаel Frаnkis commented on "EOL Curators":
@Katja Schulz: Can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but the official standard list of English names for European plants can be found on the BSBI website here (excel file).
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Michаel Frаnkis commented on Michаel Frаnkis's newsfeed:
"We are not in a position to legislate common usage" — no, but we are very much (as an educational organisation) in a position to advise and recommend common name usage, e.g. to trust only accurate and appropriate names; I see this as one of the most useful contributions we can make on EOL.
"I would argue that most people would write "The forester came over and cut down 3 big oak trees in my woods." If they wanted to be specific they would write "The forester came over and cut down 3 big White Oaks in my woods." And if they were really fussy they would write "The forester came over and cut down 3 big White Oaks (Quercus alba) in my woods"." — agree; and also, more importantly, 'white oak' can refer to any species in the section Quercus sect. Quercus, whereas 'White Oak' refers specifically to Quercus alba.
"(this is entirely unpalatable for some reason - Cape is a proper noun and cannot be lower case)" — the interesting point here that these people don't seem to realise, it is often extremely difficult, or even impossible, to know if a particular word is a proper name or not. Example: by their rules, Bishop Pine Pinus muricata (named after the town of San Luis Obispo, not senior clergymen) should be capitalised, while Brazilwood Caesalpinia echinata should not (the country is named after the tree, not the tree after the country - how many people know that??). Or what about Yoshino Cherry Prunus × yedoensis, would that take a capital or not, under their rules? Or Pohutukawa Metrosideros excelsa? Anyone good on Maori language etymology?!? Seems to me that the only reason for these proper name capitalisation rules is so that those 'in the know' can sneer at those who aren't. -
Michаel Frаnkis commented on "EOL Curators":
@Katja Schulz: "Accommodating the rules of all the languages we aim to support is a work in progress . . . . So providing us with information in a particular language and explaining the rules, as you are doing, is the best way to help us prioritize development efforts to support that language"
For English, there are no definitive rules, but the strong modern trend is for all formal species names to have the first letter of each separate word capitalised (i.e., after spaces, but not after hyphens):
European Golden Plover
Common Honey-buzzard
Purple Hairstreak
Honey Bee
Stag's-horn Clubmoss
Rough-leaved Globe-thistle
There are still some reactionaries who insist that everything must be decapitalised, unless the name is derived from a proper noun, but they never say how one determines whether a word is so derived or not (nor why one should have to do so), nor have any answer to the ugliness of having lists with mixed 'superior' Capital Species and 'inferior' lower-case species. -
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Michаel Frаnkis commented on "PIC_Cooper00768":
Not Cirsium arvense; probably (but not definitely) C. vulgare.
