User talk:Jacky62
Edits to articles involving snake venoms
[edit]Greetings new user! I saw today that you seem to be interested in venomous snakes. That's good; I've always been fascinated with venomous snakes myself. However, the edits you made did not include any references, which is not so good. I guess that didn't make too much of a difference in the first couple of articles you visited, since they're hardly referenced anyway (who will notice the difference?), but the Bitis arietans article is well researched and completely referenced; you can't just change anything there or add anything to it that you want. I don't know where you get your information from, but everything currently in that article -- every paragraph, sometimes every sentence -- is quoted from a leading publication. If you don't agree with what is said there, you can't just change that. On the other hand, if you have found an opposing view, you can add it separately... with a reference!! The reference is all-important, since it allows readers to make up their own minds up about how seriously to regard the information you added and subsequently which opinion should be given more weight. --Jwinius 12:35, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
- (replying to your reply on my talk page)
- I used to keep lots of snakes too back in the 1980's. I was interested in vipers first, but being young and stupid at the time, I was soon bitten by a juvenile Trimeresurus albolabris in 1984, turned out to be "sensitive" to the venom (probably allergic afterwards), and spent a night in the hospital (good thing it wasn't a juvenile B. arietans!). I decided to stick with Lampropeltis and Heterodon after that, but ended up selling the lot (some 70 specimens) in 1990 after feeling like I had become too much of a farmer, never going on vacation and married to my collection of mice and snakes. Still, vipers have always remained a source of fascination for me. And now thanks to Wikipedia, I can have fun with all of my favorite snakes without having to take care of them! :-)
- That puff adder article didn't happen overnight, though. I didn't really start writing for Wikipedia until about late March of this year. The Viperinae articles looked terrible, like they were begging me to rewrite and organize them correctly. Many had pathetic common names for titles instead of proper scientific names. Unfortunately, it's still Wikipedia's official policy to use common names for articles titles, but I've chosen to ignore that (I'm hardly alone in this. Some day, we hope to change this policy, but we need more support first).
- So far, it's been quite an experience. I spent the first three months writing and correcting however I felt was best, but then ran into a news article in late June about an interview with Jimmy Wales (the guy who invented Wikipedia). Wales was saying how he still receives at least ten emails a day from unhappy students claiming that they had quoted Wikipedia one their essays or whatever, but that Wikipedia had turned out to be wrong. Well, duh! But then I thought, who can tell the difference between those "wrong" articles and the ones that I've written? The only thing that can possibly make any article at Wikipedia more trustworthy is if it sticks to the facts and has references for everything.
- As a result, I spent the next three months rewriting everything I had written previously. I'm not joking! It was a lot of work, but I learned a lot in the process too. For example, every bit of information in the Bitis arietans article comes from some book that I own. I've quoted only from those books (without plagiarizing) and added references for them at the end of every sentence or paragraph (those little superscript numbers... they correspond to the numbers in the Cited references section lower down in the article). In this article, the books I used most heavy are Mallow at al. (2003) and Spawls & Branch (1995). This method of writing may seem slow, but it isn't really. Whenever I start using a new book, I add its description to a little text file I always use and then just copy & paste the tag into an article I'm working on whenever I quote from that book. There are also two huge advantages when you write like this: #1, later on, you can always tell where you got your information from, and #2, other Wikipedia editors tend not to "argue" with you as much.
- It has also taught me the value of being brutally honest when writing articles like this. It means that whatever is in there is the truth... according to one authority or another. But not according to me -- I didn't make any of it up! They may be my words, and I may have selected the information, but my opinions are reflected nowhere in those articles. That's the way it should be everywhere in Wikipedia; it's called science. :-) On the down side, it also means that I've had to remove some pretty cool stuff that I put in there earlier, but just couldn't find any references for. A high price to pay? Perhaps. But then on the other hand, maybe I just made it up in the first place (it wouldn't be the first time). It's for this same reason that I don't appreciate other people just adding or changing anything in these articles that they feel like either-- it has to be done properly (always with one or more references!), or else it degrades the entire article. Incidentally, despite being a little different, Bitis arietans and Bitis gabonica were recently given GA status: probably the first snake articles to make it this far.
- Regarding the issue of B. arietans being responsible for more deaths than any other African snake, that's the way it is according to Mallow at al. (2003). Spawls et al. (2004) describes it as Africa's most dangerous snake. A bite from Naja haje or Echis may be more likely to result in a fatality, but B. arietans is much more widespread and many more people are bitten by it every year. Also, more people would die from B. arietans bites were it not for the fact that the venom is slow-acting and that so many are given antivenin in time. As for its venom being one of the most toxic of any viper, well, that may be debateable (I got rid of a similar statement in the Daboia article a while back). But, then again, there aren't many that are worse... and Mallow said it, not me! :-)
- Anyway, now that you're here and you seem to be interested, perhaps I can encourage you to join the WikiProject for Amphibians and Reptiles. Just add your name to that list and add the page to your watchlist. There's still so much more to be done, and I could use some help with the Crotalinae section. Would you happen to have any good snake books?
- PS -- Here's how to sign your name on talk pages. --Jwinius 22:34, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
- (replying to your reply on my talk page)
- Have you figured out the watchlist thing yet? If so, you can put my user(talk)page on your watchlist and I won't have to keep answering you on your own talk page for you to notice (you can check your watchlist). By they way, I think every page at Wikipedia has a talk page associated with it -- there are talk pages for Bitis arietans and Bitis gabonica, for example.
- Elapids, right. I started some work on those pages. Take a look at the Elapidae page: the history shows that I did some work on it up until early May this year. I stopped soon after that because some problems developed with the EMBL database -- my only taxonomic and geographic source for most of this family. After that I focused almost exclusively on the Viperinae pages, but while I was working on the Elapidae article, I did merge the Elapinae and the Hydrophiinae species lists into it. This is because many experts can't yet agree on how split up this family, so most taxonomies currently have all the species lumped together in this one family.
- It's also typical for Wikipedia, the way so little work had been put into Elapidae before. The average editor will only create a few shoddy articles for some famous species, like King Cobra and Black Mamba, and then move on. They usually don't make articles for the higher taxa (like Dendroaspis and Elapidae, and if they do, they're just lists of species that don't follow any particular taxonomy. I hate that, but that's what you get when all these articles are created using only common names: no attention is paid to the big picture. Actually, the people who create those pages are supposed to create redirects for the scientific names, but often they don't even bother, even filling in the taxobox all wrong.
- Right now, only a little over half of the articles in Category:Elapids have scientific names: you can try renaming (moving) the pages to the correct scientific names, but that doesn't always work if a redirect for the scientific name already exists. A Wikipedia administrator would be able to fix (move/rename) it, but in this case they probably wouldn't help if you asked. An alternative is to just take the redirect page and start working on that, with the intent to later merge the current article into it, but I wouldn't advise doing that until much later. Do the rest first: start with the Elapidae page and work from the top down (to the species and subspecies level).
- For now, my last bit of advice is for you to use ITIS as your main taxonomic reference. I use it together with McDiarmid's 1999 "Snake Species of the World: A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference, vol. 1" (currently the most authoritative checklist for snakes) for all the Viperidae articles, but unfortunately vol. 1 doesn't cover the Elapidae (hopefully, they will be covered in vol. 2). In the mean time, perhaps you could use ITIS together with Golay's 1993 checklist instead. That will likely be a pretty expensive book, though. --Jwinius 02:48, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
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