Talk:Dendrosenecio battiscombei

Afro-alpine zone

I added the habitat name, as mentioned in the reference cited, but linked it to the relevant part of theMount Kenya article. If there is a better location that discusses the Afro-alpine zone please change the link. Mehmet Karatay (talk) 17:27, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

As I collected information and expanded the articles for the Dendrosenecio, I came to not appreciate the word 'alpine' being used to describe the zone. I think it is a word that was imported for use in the 1600s or 1700s or 1800s when they first started to write about visiting there (I am not going to research this for this talk page) -- and it probably is a good word if you are European and have seen the Alps. I haven't seen the Alps nor these East African mountains and I have an author bias which should be somewhat consistent across all of the articles. And worse, an author inconsistency for bias as I am more comfortable with the idea of '3 feet' than I am with '84.2 centimeters' which would be the standardization of the length of a persons arm vs vibrations of a atom (but really, somedays appears like simply dividing an inch by an easy to remember number). There were several times that I questioned my competency to write these articles -- growing up in the United States where the media put a mountain in Austria and almost everyone knows that song; there have been on occasion times when I wanted to save articles that I was kind of certain would expose wikipedians who had put false information online elsewhere. Such is the depth and the breadth of my bias. I should mention that I might have done the same thing, not upload falsified information as fact to sites where facts should be, but verbally use locations that I knew to describe new (to me) environments. "Like the gravel pit" is one that I might have used. Meanwhile, it is interesting where these plants grow and what conditions they grow in. I made a table for the Ruwenzori Range, I don't know that it belongs there. Meanwhile, I have been working with Senecio which are found in most of the world that are not chunks of ice and tried to repair my problems with distribution of things at the commons with maps that are starting to be easy for me to use. The Afrotropic is kind of nice in this respect, as is the Neartic for some good reasons, in the Palearctic politically, Luxenberg and Russia are the same, but the area of land just isn't. That project was a morphing of "World Geographical Scheme for recording plant distributions" (http://www.tdwg.org/TDWG_geo2.pdf ) with the Ecozones -- some countries became divided which is different than the TDWG document.

A long while ago, I made something beautiful and useful 'with' other people. In the years that followed, other people have made things 'at' me instead of with me. Jokes I made seemed to have come alive and I perceive them hurting me and other people. It goes against human nature to not want to make something that is beautiful and useful -- or at least against my nature and I am human. So, there is another author bias here; a really big bias that I cannot find a name for but that explains the reason that I started to ask questions a few times at Mehmet Karatay talk and didn't. Yesterday, late in my day, I was attempting to expand Swertia which is listed at the African Flowering Plant Database and was very bothersome since the word itself expands easily phonetically into "Swear to you" which is a somewhat common phrase here in the United States (or was when I was living there -- they say I am there now but it is not the country they made me learn about) and in the list of synonyms there was a name 'Kingdon' something which is a wikiuser name for a person in the plant project. Then the browser crashed, which is very suspicious as well. In the last month, both the NRCS sites and ARS started to leave cookies; this happened after I asked for help collecting line drawings of images at the commons and that user (an op) within a few hours or days added "Simple counter" to his list of accomplishments. These are recent examples of the perception I have of people working 'at' me and not 'with' me.

In summary, I did not like the use of the word 'Alpine' (even if I understand it) and had problems with distribution maps as o/~I climbed all of these mountains and looked at those forged seas....o/~ If you want to add urls or wikilinks, you live there (I think I read this), I will not stand in your way, nor will I follow every rainbow.... -- carol (talk) 19:43, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

This is a reply to your final paragraph. The word Alpine is used in most of the literature so I believe it should be used in this context as well, whether we agree with it or not. We're not here to do original research. If some sources say not to call it Alpine then the most we can do in an article is cite those sources and explain that some people do not agree with the word alpine, but that lots of people do use it.

As for location, Edinburgh is the answer... as it says on the user page.

Mehmet Karatay (talk) 22:54, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Darn, it would have been nice to have a person in Kenya. I am going to add "seeing what I want to see" to the list of my bias problems. You are obviously correct about the word Alpine, all of those words were somewhat about the build up of my personal bias, and it is just that. -- carol (talk) 23:17, 16 May 2008 (UTC)