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Sus barbatus, the level of detail you provide for a species description is way beyond what is appropriate for a Wikipedia article, on two counts. First, it is loaded with technical terms that are completely opaque to the general reader. This is an encyclopedia, not a textbook; our readership is the general reader, not the expert. We provide a topic overview that is as technical as it needs to be, but no more. Hence the "normal" language description sections you will see in every well-developed taxon article. Second, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. We don't aim to collect every single thing that is available about a topic, but rather provide a summary and a reference to more detailed sources. The reader is supposed to get a broad idea in our article and then consult the given sources for the details - we don't mirror it all. - These two considerations preclude the presence of dense sections describing "tentacular cirri without subdistal inflated region" and similar delights :) (Last but not least, this reads as if it was copied wholesale from some publication, which very likely would be a violation of copyright unless correctly licensed. But even if entirely reformulated, it would be too detailed.)
I'm sure my rough condensation into a summary description is inadequate and probably misses all the important features, and you are welcome to provide a better one, but please - we want a short general summary of physical appearance, not a holotype diagnosis. -- Elmidae ( talk · contribs) 15:11, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Elmidae, thank you for taking an interest in my work, though not in the way I was hoping. I'm not trying to use Wikipedia as an indiscriminate dump of information. The primary goal of me and my colleagues is to increase the reach and accessibility of taxonomic and descriptive information for a wider audience. We recognise that most people don't know how or don't have the time to trawl through the taxonomic literature. Thus, we have collated diagnostic and taxonomic information into a
DELTA database which we can use to output (relatively) natural language descriptions for each taxon. Side note at this point: all of the text is created by us from the information in our taxonomic database and so not "copied wholesale from some publication". We aim to take this information and create new taxon articles also with up to date taxonomies, all linked LSIDs, images with main identifying features and as many references as possible.
Now, the text in the "description" section which you are referring to is perhaps not intended to be read as is, but more as a section that will provide people the necessary information when trying to identify an unknown specimen they have found. To that end, we know that Wikipedia articles are often the top hit on a google search so having that string of descriptive terms in the article helps someone find what they're looking for a lot faster - For example, someone is working with a group to survey fauna in a bay and have taken a benthic sample. They are unfamiliar with the finer details of marine annelid taxonomy, but found some animals that they know are polychaetes with scales and so determine that they are in the scale worm family. They take the samples back to the lab and quickly peek at them under the microscope and see a few note-worthy characters. Now, you could scrounge around for that hard-copy publication from decades ago that may or may not have the key in it and may or may not have up-to-date taxonomy or even the taxon you are actually looking for... or perhaps you might just google "polynoidae with tentacular cirri without subdistal inflated region [or whatever character/s you have actually observed]", and there you go, you have a quick and simple method for identifying your unknown specimen and comparing it with others that also have articles on Wikipedia. Moreover you have actual links that you can click on to take to you all of the information available on the internet for that taxon, and we see big, big advantages of linked data for the future of taxonomy.
Additionally, data aggregators such as EOL and the Atlas of Living Australia pull their "descriptive information" straight from Wikipedia, so again, we are trying to use the platform to increase the reach and accessibility of taxonomic information that otherwise is going to be lost in the dark depths of the taxonomic literature.
I definitely see your point, and we have been working to create other sections that are much less detailed, more readable, more encyclopaedic, such as general taxon recognition, distribution and taxonomic certainty and general phylogeny, to create a more whole encyclopaedia article, with the offending "description" section at the end of the article. If we're talking precedents, I have seen this format and content in quite a few taxon articles on Wikipedia and have drawn inspiration from some of them, for example Olenellus.
I will outrightly reject that this information has no place on Wikipedia, but I do agree that it at least needs to not be the only text included in a taxon article and should be included as a section of a whole encyclopaedic treatment of a taxon.
As far as your deletion rampage goes, I work hard contributing, promoting Wikipedia, and encouraging people to contribute and help share knowledge, and this sort of thing is certainly a far cry from encouraging contribution and increasing access to information. Sus barbatus ( talk) 07:52, 29 May 2020 (UTC)