Talk:Zopherus jourdani

Notable?

In its entirety, the entry reads: "Zopherus jourdani is a beetle of the Family Zopheridae."

Some years ago, when I lived in New Jersey, I had a cat named Motley. She was a very pretty cat.

Not everything that exists, like Motley the Cat and Zopherus jourdani, deserve an entry on Wikipedia. Is there something notable about Zopherus jourdani? Does it devour court records as its favorite food? Is it a source of insect poisons used in arrowheads? Did Darwin study it? Among the half-a-million or so species of beetles, do they all warrant a one-sentence entry on Wikipedia? I have a doctorate in biology and am not opposed to beetles. In fact, they are remarkable creatures. But that doesn't mean that every named beetle deserves a Wiki entry.

I just googled Zopherus jourdani and got 79 hits. Many, if not all, were references to Wikipedia or its mirror sites, plus a few taxonomic entries. Nothing notable, however...

So I added a {{notable}} tag to the article.

Timothy Perper (talk) 16:05, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

User Stemonitis just removed my non-notable tab, saying only that "all species are notable." What, exactly, is notable about this species of beetle? I also Googled it again, thinking that perhaps this beetle had been implicated in a notable event -- ecological, economic, anything -- but no, still the same pattern as on Sept 7, 2008 (above). Just Wiki refs and some taxonomy. Since I see no proof forthcoming for the Wikipedia-notability of this beetle, I reverted the edit. It was a good faith edit, but you need something notable about Zopherus jourdani -- not about "all species" -- to answer the question. Timothy Perper (talk) 19:10, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

See WP:DEFACTO. That's only an essay, of course, but I would suggest from experience that it's pretty widely agreed upon. Some things are just notable for what they are, and that includes beetle species. Certainly, it's not the most economically important species, but then economic importance is only one kind of notability. I think there's a better case to be made for merging it into a larger article for all Zopherus species, but that's a very different proposal. There are currently (equally short) articles about ten of the 16 (listed) species (under Zopherinae). I'm happy to help in compiling them into a larger article and collecting the information such an article should contain (basic description, distribution, ecology, etc.), but it's not my top priority at the moment. --Stemonitis (talk) 21:31, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Notability is not an opinion of yours, but must be proven by Wiki-reliable sources asserting notability, WP:DEFACTO notwithstanding. For a beetle, such notability might be economic (the possibility you mention without any citations); but it might be a notable wood-boring pest, a vector for certain diseases, a commensal in chicken coops, or any of a thousand other possibilities. Pull up the needed references and insert them into the article. Otherwise, there is no substance to your claim of notability.

Concerning an overview article on Zopherinae, yes, that's a good idea. If you don't do it, I suspect no one will, and Zopherus jourdani will disappear back into oblivion. No one will miss it. Is that a bad thing? Perhaps, perhaps not. But without references, we have nothing but opinion... So I'll wait a few days and then replace the non-notable tag. I do not believe that Wikipedia should collect miscellaneous factoids of no known interest or importance. I admire your idealism that all species deserve their Wikipedia article, but if not even YOU have the time or interest to write organized, coherent essays about families and subfamilies, Wikipedia becomes nothing but an old-fashioned clutter of "natural oddities" without meaning. Such a collection reminds me of the traditional museum of natural history, not a modern museum like AMNH, but 19th century amateur's collections of alleged mermaid scales, dragon claws, fossil bones, and dinosaur teeth, all piled up higgledy-piggledy. We have gone far beyond such things in the 21st century... In brief, the WP:DEFACTO essay makes a wide set of claims, but none of them correspond to how modern biological science establishes notability first by references, data, and citations, and second by people writing coherent essays that provide an organized framework for comprehending the significance and importance of an otherwise isolated phenomenon.

Timothy Perper (talk) 05:44, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Sorry -- I forgot to add a cross-reference to Wikipedia:Existence ≠ Notability. The essay WP:DEFACTO is not a canonical statement of The Truth. For an example, the category "cat" is notable, but the example "my cat Motley" is not notable (see my opening comments for who Motley is). So it's up to you, Stemonitis, to prove, using Wiki-verifiable sources, that Z. jourdani is notable merely by virtue of its existence. Timothy Perper (talk) 05:56, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

You seem to be placing a lot of responsibility on my shoulders. I have no particular connection to this series of articles, except that I've performed some cleanup on them from time to time. It is not "up to [me]" to improve the article(s); anyone can do that. Sure, they're terrible articles, that were apparently made simply as spaces for pictures which had been uploaded. But let's be clear about this: the notability of biological taxa is not in question. You may not find them interesting, but the broad consensus is that every species, every genus and every family is notable. Re-adding a {{notable}} tag to this one article is just shouting into the wind: there are hundreds, if not thousands of articles like this. I could point you to several editors who seem solely to create tiny stublets with the barest of information. That's not how I like to work, but different people contribute in different ways, and criticising it would not be constructive. I feel that a better solution would be to actually improve the articles. You're a biologist – why not write an article about Zopherus? We could certainly do with it. So far, we've got nothing about its distribution, nothing about its ecology, nothing about what makes it different from any other genus. I really think that notability isn't the issue here. --Stemonitis (talk) 07:23, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

I won't argue with you about this. If there are thousands of articles, then collapse them into single, more comprehensive articles. There are lots of different kinds of biologist, and I am not an entomologist. You seem to be the arthropod expert, which is why I suggested that you're far better equipped than I am to fill in the details about Zopherus. I know of no source in biology that says that every species is notable in the specific sense Wikipedia uses the word. The problem, it seems to me, is for us to write longer, more comprehensive essays. I tagged this back in 2008, and hey, it only took two years to make some progress. Timothy Perper (talk) 07:45, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm no entomologist either. Anyone with an interest and a little time could write an article; a trained biologist like yourself will have no difficulty, I'm sure. The person who created these Zopherus articles helpfully provided a list of his/her contributions: User:Kugamazog/created. There are plenty of articles there that could reasonably be merged, and I can find other similar lists, with enough mergers to keep an army of editors busy for a long, long time. Be bold!. --Stemonitis (talk) 08:03, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

I notice that the WP:DEFACTO essay says "it is agreed that all living things are notable", which is, quite frankly, absurd. Perhaps it means something like "all widely recognised taxa of living things are notable", but one can scarcely take very seriously a document which is so ill-thought out that it can contain such nonsense as that. Even if one interprets it as meaning "all widely recognised taxa", there are in practice severe difficulties in determining what qualifies. For example, there are many (hundreds, if I remember rightly) of North American species of Crataegus which have had descriptions published in respectable botanical sources, but which nobody today can find anywhere. What were these? Species which rapidly became extinct as the native forests were cleared for agriculture? Synonyms for existing species, the authors being unaware of prior publication? Individual specimens of known species with slight abnormalities, which the authors mistook for new species? Or what? Are all these "species" notable enough for Wikipedia articles? Assuming the answer is "no", then we have some "species" which have been recognised and published by respectable authorities but which are not notable, and so we ahve to consider the question "where do we draw the line?" The simplisitic "all species are notable" falls down. I have considered only one problem with one genus: it would be easy to illustrate the point via other problems in other parts of the living world. The classification of Rubus, for example, would be a good one: there are literally thousands of microspecies which have been recognised somewhere at some time by some botanist, but many of them are virtually impossible to distinguish from other "species", and many botanists recognise far simpler classifications of the genus. The vast majority of the microspecies which have been described could not possibly be regarded as notable by any stretch of the imagination. I know almost nothing about beetles, and have no idea how notable Zopherus jourdani is, but I do know that "all living things are notable" is in practice completely unworkable. JamesBWatson (talk) 08:23, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Apomixis lacks a workable species concept, so it's unclear what those described Crataegus and Rubus taxa are, anyway. No such problems beset outcrossing species. If you want to start a discussion on the notability of biological taxa, I think WT:TOL would be a better place. Nobody's going to read the talk page of a redirect. --Stemonitis (talk) 08:38, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

1. Is apomixis a significant factor in North American Crataegus? It doesn't seem to be in European species, so far as I know.
2. Yes indeed the problems I referred to are specific to particular sections of the living world, and do not occur eveywhere. But that doesn't in any way reduce the force of my argument: "all living things are notable" is not tenable as a total rule, so we have to consider the "where do we draw the borderline" question.
3. I certainly have no wish at all to start a discussion on the notability of biological taxa. I just thought the people who had contributed to the above discussion might be interested in one more view.
4. Clearly you at least have read the talk page of this redirect. JamesBWatson (talk) 08:57, 31 March 2010 (UTC)