Talk:List of goat breeds

Naming convention

What is the general naming convention for goats, if anyone knows, and where is it specified? On List of goat breeds, it appears to be random. To me, x goat makes simple sense as a naming convention, but there seemed to be some contrasting thought in the review to try to move, Oberhasli (goat) to Oberhasli goat. (one of this page's current redirects) Apparently that was the wrong venue for that proposal anyway, as it was speedily closed as 'wrong forum,' but the responses received there seem to indicate that there is already a naming convention in place for goats. Comments? duff 10:12, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

See similar discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Dogs/Dog breeds task force#Capitalisation of breed names, Talk:Cardigan Welsh Corgi#Decapitalization and Talk:Pit Bull#Capitalization of dog breed. My view is that all formal breed names are generally capitalised, but I can find no convention or consensus on this. Richard New Forest (talk) 19:28, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Chèvre des Fossés "Ditch goat..."

Is there a naming convention for foreign names if they have no English official translation? I would like to create a page about a rare goat breed of Brittany and Normandy the "Chèvre des fossés". Articles in English on internet call it by its French name, sometimes with unsatisfactory translations ("Ditch goat", "Goat of the ditches" etc).Patris22 (talk) 11:26, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Merger with individual goat breed articles

Many goat breeds are sufficiently independently notable to justify their own articles, but not all are. As such, the following articles should be merged here: Daera Din Panah, Red Mediterranean, Red boer goat, Xinjiang Goat, Qinshan Goat, Zhiwulin Black, Yemen Mountain Goat, Xuhai, Poitou Goat, Nigora goat, Nachi Goat, Messinese Goat, Loashan, La Mancha goat, Hyrcus, Huaitoutala, Hongtong Goat, Haimen goat, Hailun Goat, Guddi (goat), Göingeget, Finnish Landrace Goat, Erzgebirge Goat, Danish Landrace Goat, Damani, Chué, Chappar, Chamois Colored, Canary Island Goat, Brown Shorthair Goat, Booted Goat, Bionda dell'Adamello, Bhuj goat, Benadir goat, Auckland Island Goat, Argentata of Etna, Anatolian Black Goat, and Hasi Goat. Neelix (talk) 14:49, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Some of these articles are already interesting, and include pictures of the breed, etc. They should be maintained? The problem with other articles is that they are still not documented enough. With one or two pictures, and more explanations, they would be useful too. There's lots of articles about sheep breeds on Wiki, why not goats? Patris22 (talk) 23:29, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

The problem with all of these articles is that they have not received significant coverage in reliable, secondary sources. Images and interesting-but-unsourced information do not justify an independent article for a subject. If there are articles about non-notable sheep breeds, those articles should be deleted or merged to List of sheep breeds. Unless more sources can be found for the above articles, they should be merged here. Neelix (talk) 01:56, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

There is no such thing as a non-notable breed of animal. There are sometimes articles started about "breeds" that are not yet true breeds, but are simply crosses by one farmer. But any animal that will breed true is of similar notability to a species: it's inherently notable, and there are plenty of sources if you do even a cursory search of the web and Google Books. Steven Walling • talk 23:35, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

I've undone most of these redirects for now, except where they either had no sources (like Red Boer goat) or where I could find no reliable sources other than the one already provided in the article (like Göingeget and Hasi goat). Steven Walling • talk 00:41, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Is there a guideline that supports your statement that all animal breeds are notable? Taking the first breed mentioned as an example (Daera Din Panah), I do not see enough coverage in reliable, secondary sources to justify an independent article when I do a Google Books search, and a Google News search provides no potential sources at all. Neelix (talk) 20:14, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

There is no guideline or policy about the notability of species, genuses, cultivars, breeds, or any other form of taxonomy. That's because where sources prove that they exist, the generally described forms of life are notable. There's a reason we only have specific notability guidelines for things where there numerous cases of marginal notability, like musicians and companies. I've seen this test several times at AFD. Except where A) there are no sources whatsoever B) it's an individual animal and so on, rather than a taxonomic category, the articles pass muster. All the articles I un-redirected had a source attached to them, and I'm willing to commit to going through them and trying to add more, as well as clean them up generally. But you deleted these articles by fiat basically, by redirecting them and not actually merging the contents. That's not cool. Steven Walling • talk 08:04, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

I merged all the sourced content; all the unsourced content, I did not merge. Most of the articles you unmerged contain a link to a source but contain no sourced content. This content should be removed until such time that it is sourced. I think we agree on what the end result for these articles should be (ie. development and fully sourced content); what is in question is what should happen until such development occurs. I believe that the articles should redirect to the main list until there is sufficient amount of sourced material on a given breed to justify a split. What do you think? Neelix (talk) 14:24, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Hardly all of the stubs were just paraphrases of the original source. Look at examples like Messinese Goat and Nigora goat. It doesn't seem to me that you followed any clear criteria for what to redirect, considering you left many other stubs untouched and merged some other articles that were crappy but larger. I don't agree that a one sentence stub can't be left alone until we have time to go through them and expand -- or fail to do so after looking, in which case I agree they should be merged. The sourcing for international animal breeds is not something where you can just do a one page search in Google Books or News and call it good. You usually have to try a few searches, including tricks like selecting precisely for the name or a variation of the name in books, to find the relevant material in the sea of junk or books about place names and so on. In any case, being short is not necessarily the same thing as needing a merge. There is nothing wrong with a short article if there's a source and a reasonable chance it can be expanded. Steven Walling • talk 17:34, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

I used very consistent criteria in the merger: if 1) there is no sourced content, such as in Messinese goat and Nigora goat, the two breeds you mention, and 2) there is an insufficient amount of significant coverage in reliable, secondary sources after a thorough search on Google Books and News (including archives), the articles were merged. Consider our guidelines on avoiding unnecessary splits: "editors are encouraged to work on further developing the main article first... If a concept can be cleanly trimmed, removed, or merged elsewhere on Wikipedia, these steps should be undertaken first before some new article is created." I take no issue with keeping the articles separate if you can demonstrate that there is significant coverage for each in reliable, secondary sources. What I object to most strongly is articles such as Daera Din Panah that contain no sourced information at all; such articles should redirect to the main list until sufficient sourced content is generated. Neelix (talk) 18:41, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

You're confusing the term sourced with inline citations. They're not the same thing. These articles all have at least one source in a reference section, and such the content is verified by sources. It's not cited inline, which makes the sourcing less clear and isn't as good. But it's not unverified. Steven Walling • talk 18:00, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the articles include a source, but that does not mean that the content is verified by sources; I would not be comfortable merging content from such an article into another article and then assuming that all of that content was verified by the source in question, primarily because much of the information is likely to not be. The only source that is included on most of the articles is the website of the Oklahoma State University Department of Animal Science, which is already included on the main list. At present, we have a plethora of standalone stubs on subjects that have not been demonstrated to be notable and that contain no content that is demonstrated to be sourced. I object to leaving these stubs as standalone articles until such time (which may never come) that sufficient sourcing is found for them. Neelix (talk) 13:19, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

How about this: you give me through the end of the month to go through these stubs and work on them. I'll agree up front that for any that I can't find additional sources to cite and expand the content with by August 1, we'll merge to this list. Normally in these situations I would post to the WikiProject Agriculture talk page or otherwise ask for a third opinion, but frankly I think I'm the only one who has time and will to actually do the work to fix these stubs right now. I might as well go ahead and try to prove what I'm saying about how they can be made better. I don't think they're hurting anybody, but in the long run we shouldn't keep any that can't be verified with more than one source. How's that sound? Steven Walling • talk 05:08, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

That sounds great. Thank you for offering to undertake such a task. See you in a month. Neelix (talk) 14:27, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

@Neelix: Quick update. I've gathered the list of articles under discussion at my sandbox. I've only done a few so far (some of which I left as redirects), and please do add to it if I missed any articles. I basically just copied the list from this page, and what I could find in my contribs. Thanks, Steven Walling • talk 23:25, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Great job with those six stub expansions. It is August 1; shall we merge the 32 unexpanded goat breed articles into this list? I would have no objections to resplitting off any of these articles if sufficient sourcing is found and implemented. Neelix (talk) 15:53, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I've just found this discussion, after writing a short article on the Messinese, and then discovering that a perfectly competent stub, with references, had been turned into a redirect at Messinese goat. I'm at a loss to understand why anyone would want to do that. As Steven Walling says above, almost all domestic animal breeds are likely to be notable - if they aren't notable, they may not be "breeds". To take the single example from above of the Daera Din Panah from Pakistan, 10 seconds spent searching finds this paper from 2009. Unless Neelix or others have some strong objection, I propose to revert forthwith all those redirects where at least one reliable source can be found to the previous article content, and then either tag or delete any content that is not referenced. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 14:33, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

I strongly object to resplitting off all these stubs without first adding additional sources to demonstrate notability. I am not convinced that all goat breeds are notable; as the conversation above makes clear, there is no guideline that says that all domestic animal breeds are notable, and I see no other reason to believe that such is the case. There is no benefit to resplitting off these stubs only to leave them as they were. I have no objection to splitting off articles on breeds for which notability has been demonstrated through the finding of sufficient sources, but a single source is not enough to demonstrate notability. Neelix (talk) 16:11, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Neelix, you write: "a single source is not enough to demonstrate notability". You are on very shaky ground there, as notability is demonstrated by extent of the coverage of a topic in independent reliable sources, not by the number of sources in the article itself. However, since the two-person consensus you reached with Steven Walling above was that "we shouldn't keep any that can't be verified with more than one source", let's accept for a moment that that is what was agreed. Would you like, therefore, to explain why you have redirected Zhiwulin Black, which has more than one reliable reference, citing this consensus as your reason? Two, when I was at school, was regarded as being indubitably more than one; as far as I know, consensus on that has not changed perceptibly in the intervening half-century or so. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:58, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Notability is not the sole issue here. Please consider our guidelines on avoiding unnecessary splits, which I have already cited in this discussion. I no longer object to the Zhiwulin Black article existing separately from the list as it now contains more information about that breed than should be included on the list. Please maintain civility; we are all trying to improve the project here. Neelix (talk) 22:21, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Would you then now like to explain why you redirected an article with two reliable references when the agreement reached on this page was that those with more than one would not be redirected, and how exactly you think that redirection was an improvement to the project? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 00:01, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

The agreement reached on this page was that entries on Steven Walling's sandbox without checkmarks would be redirected to the main list. I moved the two reliable references to the list itself considering that they did not source anything more than was already in the list. Following summary style improves the project, partially because having stubs that only serve to duplicate a portion of what is already on a longer article wastes our users' time. Unless an article contains information that doesn't and shouldn't exist on its parent article, there is no reason for that article to be separate from the parent article. Neelix (talk) 15:28, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, that is a reasonable explanation, though I disagree with the reasoning. And why exactly, based on that reasoning, did you redirect Messinese goat, which had substantial text, two references and four images?

Please take it from now on that there is no consensus on this page on this topic; I disagree with your proposal just as Steven Walling did, and for all the good reasons he gave. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 19:04, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Images are irrelevant to split/merger discussions. There was no sourced content on the Messinese article when I redirected it; there were only two external links that sourced no content. Consensus was established on these mergers a long time ago; if you disagree with any of them, the most respectful course of action would be to note the articles you wish to unmerge here rather than doing so secretively. Neelix (talk) 16:27, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Standardize on Function descriptions?

Some of these say "fiber", some say "wool", etc. It would be nice to standardize on a single set of terms.