The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.‎

The result was keep. General consensus to keep. (non-admin closure) SSTflyer 02:06, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bullata (disambiguation) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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This disambiguation page doesn't actually disambiguate anything. Only the genus of snails is actually known only by the word "bullata", and the rest are all partial title matches (that is, no one even calls any of them just Bullata). This wouldn't normally be a problem, since you could just redirect it, except that the title ends in (disambiguation), so redirecting doesn't work. A similar nomination was at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tinctoria‎, but those titles didn't have the (disambiguation) ending. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 02:52, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Disambiguations-related deletion discussions. Everymorning (talk) 03:04, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete or redirect to Wiktionary. There are hundreds (thousands?) of pages on Wikipedia that are species epithets which are either redirects to a particular species (ignoring that there are often other Wikipedia articles with the same specific epithet, or at least other described species with the epithet that aren't represented on Wikipedia yet, and the redirect is inherently imprecise) or disambiguation pages (ignoring that the epithet is never used in the real world without enough context to make it a partial title match). I applaud Oiyarbepsy's AfD/PROD nominations for specific epithets. Sending these hundreds (thousands?) of pages to redirects to List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names (the usual outcome if deletion fails) is going to lead to that list being bloated by many Latin and Greek words that aren't actually very commonly used in systematic names. Wiktionary is a better place to handle grammatical variants of Greek/Latin words than the systematic name list. Plantdrew (talk) 03:55, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Question - I think the crux of the nom's argument here is the assertion that Only the genus of snails is actually known only by the word "bullata". Is there any evidence available for this assertion? ~Kvng (talk) 14:12, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's hard to find evidence to prove a negative. Species epithets don't stand alone. They're always accompanied by the genus (or an abbreviation of the genus). Nobody would say "I'm growing a bullata in my garden". The exception would be in informal speech, where context has already established the genus: e.g. "I like growing by Buddlejas, and have some davidii and lindleyana, but I want to get my hands on a bullata." While that's a plausible way for the species to stand alone, I don't think that anybody participating in a conversation like that would think that "bullata" was a good term to search the internet for more information on the subject. Plantdrew (talk) 17:54, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that you can't prove a negative. I'm not very familiar with biological taxonomy so was wondering if there was any way this assertion could be substantiated through citation or other non-original research. If not, the conservative approach is to keep.

If someone heard part of your example conversation, they may, in fact, try a search for bullata. They would see some snails, shake their head, click on the hatnote link and then find what they're looking for from this article. If this article is deleted, they would have more WP:ASTONISHment. ~Kvng (talk) 18:12, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Wikipedia is intended to be useful for readers with little knowledge of the subject. This page may help unfamiliar readers stumble their way (e.g. a visit to Bullata from a search page then a click over here from the hatnote) to what their looking for so there's potentially benefit in keeping it. The page makes it clear that Bullata is the primary topic so I don't any harm in keeping it. ~Kvng (talk) 14:12, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Unfortunately, Kvng, this page utterly fails in that regard. There are, for example, 20 different plants listed, and the person with little knowledge of the subject will be totally hopeless to find what they were looking for. They won't know the family and genus names provided, at least not for the plants. So, unless they're looking for the snail, they won't be helped (and in that case, they didn't need the disambig anyway). There is a reason that we don't list all of the world's zoos at Zoo (disambiguation) and this is pretty much why. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 00:03, 20 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per WP:PTM, none of these entries are known as "Bullata." For example, you might call a certain bacterium E. coli or Escherichia coli, but it's never simply coli. -- Tavix ^(talk) 16:01, 21 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep clearly the nominator doesn't understand how Genus/species works. all of these species have the species name bullata but are each from different genus.  InsertCleverPhraseHere  11:41, 25 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep as this list of species is enough to keep as this is easy for listing the applicable articles. SwisterTwister talk 22:56, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep The genus is prominently linked above the subheading, this should prevent confusion for anyone who came looking for the most common usage. The rest is added value.-- Elmidae (talk) 17:28, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.