Gebruiker:Wikiklaas/Lycaena

Uit Wikipedia, de vrije encyclopedie

Recently I asked for the deletion of a few articles that falsely claimed to treat a species of the butterfly genus Lycaena while in fact the name of that "species" did not exist, so there also was no species to be treated in the article, and the whole page was no more than a pack of disinformation. As a reason I mentioned that the names were "ghost names": names that do not really exist but turn up in databases, in this case in LepIndex, the Lepidoptera database of the Natural History Museum in London. The request was at first denied because no one seemed to realize how serious a problem it is when Wikipedia offers articles with fantasy names as if they are about real and accepted species. One wanted some more discussion.

I would not have interfered with the Swedish Wikipedia if not one of the consequences of having these fake articles were that corresponding Wikidata items are created, and hence Wikipedia becomes instrumental in the proliferation of fake facts. This is no longer a local problem.

On the Dutch Wikipedia, we have more or less the same problem: large amounts of articles created by bots, based on utterly unreliable databases like ITIS, Encyclopedia of Life or LepIndex. They may at some point all have had the ultimate goal of giving an overview of existing and accepted taxa, but they ended up being collections of ever published names, no matter whether they are accepted, valid, or even available names or not. The Dutch article on Lycaena was created 14 September 2014 as a collection of names of articles created by Joopwikibot on 31 March 2013, completely based on LepIndex. Out of the over 600 combinations in Lycaena listed in LepIndex, Joopwikibot took every name not listed as "unavailable", and created an article as if it were the accepted name of an existing species. Out of the 319 pages thus created, only 71 appeared to represent a real and accepted species in Lycaena; the vast majority appeared to be names of species no longer placed in Lycaena (76), names of subspecies (46), names now synonymized with other names (61), or names that had never even been published, but turned up in databases (63). In 2015 I sorted out Lycaena, but the problem of course exists in every other larger genus taken from LepIndex.

Because I already sorted out Lycaena, I gathered it would be efficient to use the outcomes and clean up the articles on Lycaena in other language versions where pages had also been created using LepIndex. First thing to do, so it seemed to me, was to delete the articles carrying non-existing names. As an example: Lycaena aegera (see the record in NHM). The name is listed in NHM as "Lycaena aegera Grose-Smith". No place and date of publication, nor anything on the status of the taxon when published. The "name" also turns up in EoL, in Animal Diversity Web and in ITIS, and in several websites that just copy their information from one of those I mentioned. And in all cases it is just the name and the author, nothing more. That's a ghost name: it pops up somewhere and gets stupidly copied from one database to another. It doesn't make any sense to create an article on a "species" if even the most basic information about it is unknown, not even if the name was ever validly published. An article on Lycaena aegera should only be created if it is with some certainty an accepted species by at least some taxonomists. If it is impossible to verify the name and status, an article bearing that name, based on nothing more than a meaningless name in a database, is disinformation. It is noice, not knowledge. It is the responsibility of the creater of articles in Wikipedia to check whether a name in a database can be reliably accepted as the name of a true taxon. Every flag set on "aegera" however, points in the direction of a non-existing name. The article should never have been created.

After the denial to delete the articles, I had a closer look at the Lycanea article in the Swedish Wikipedia, and I found the problem to be even more serious. I found it to list 608 names of species. That's about twice the amount in the original Dutch article. It turned out that the creator, Lsjbot, used every name listed as a combination in Lycaena in LepIndex, also the names listed as unavailable.

An "unavailable name" is literally what it says: it is unavailbale as the name for a species or a subspecies. Why on earth then did Lsjbot create about 300 articles in Lycaena alone, pretending they treated a species when the name was marked as unavailable and could in no way be applied to a species? There are no species bearing those scientific names! In order to be available, a name must not only be published, but it has to meet te criteria for publication as set out in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. A nomen nudum for example, is not an available name. A name published for an infrasubspecific taxon (a taxon below the rank of subspecies, for example a variety, a forma, an aberration, a morph) is not an available name, unless published as a "variety" or a "forma" before 1961 AND accepted as a name at (sub)specific rank before 1985. As an example Lycaena aestivaecaudata, published by Verity in 1943 as the name of a forma of Lycaena phlaeas, but never accepted as a name at subspecific let alone specific rank. Still, this Wikipedia offers an article pretending "Lycaena aestivaecaudata" is an accepted species of Lycaena. Bullshit! The Swedish Wikipedia is of course not the only Wikipedia containing such nonsense. My home Wikipedia is just as bad. But if someone signals the problem, and asks to delete the meaningless page, the article should promptly be removed. I hope Lsjbot will be able to at least do a botrun to find every page that was based on a name listed as "unavailable" in LepIndex, and mark it for speedy deletion.

In order to show the extent of the problem, I add here a list of all the specific names beginning with an "a" in the article Lycaena. Out of an original 75 pages, only 4 concerned accepted species in Lycaena. Two other accepted specific names starting with an "a" exist, but were missing from this list. I marked those 6 pages with a green accepted name. Of the remainder, 35 should be deleted right away because they are unavailable names or even ghost names. Those are marked spelling error, ghost name or not an available name.

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