User talk:I heard you like clades

Hello, I'm UtherSRG. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, Palm civet, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. You can have a look at referencing for beginners. If you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. UtherSRG (talk) 23:48, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

		The Barnstar Barnstar
		I heard you like Barnstars...   ~  dgaf)  17:45, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[reply ]

I do, in fact, like clades. And well-formatted cladograms. Thanks for your work.

You repeatedly say you are "flipping two branches of cladogram to be more consistent with xyz page". Well, why would you do that, exactly? To put it another way, why flip page A to be consistent with page B? Why not flip B to be consistent with A? - there is no answer. There is no "higher" and lower"; when there is a straight fork with a clade each side, there is precisely no right way to arrange things. What if there are a thousand pages, all with interdependencies? Who is going to say this way is "better", that way is "more consistent"? There is no way to decide. It is not encyclopedic to try: it just makes no sense. It may well be that one page has a particular arrangement to emphasise features of its clade; that arrangement might well be unhelpful on other pages. Practical encyclopedia writing can dictate a wide variety of arrangements: we don't need them all to be the same, specially for some indefinable aesthetic. Chiswick Chap (talk) 22:05, 28 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is a browser-limitation reason for formatting cladograms in a particular manner, the manner recommended by the documentation page for the Clade template, which is used to generate cladograms:

"Most browsers now use the algorithm that produces cladograms like the two on the left in the diagram. Safari (under both MacOS and iOS) uses another algorithm, producing cladograms like the two on the right in the diagram. No automated 'fix' for these differences exists at present. If there is a choice over the ordering of the terminal nodes (leaves) of the tree, cladograms look best in a Safari-like browser if as much branching as possible is at the bottom of the cladogram."

This is further clarified on the file page of the image given in the documentation:

"Cladograms which are arranged so that at each internal node the subtree with the largest number of branches is at the bottom look best in (Safari)."

This is a definable aesthetic, with a reason to prefer it. In addition, the techniques recommended in the template documentation for building large cladograms (that would otherwise exceed Wikimedia software limitations) also result in this format, with subtrees with the largest number of branches at the bottom.

This is not the only advantage to formatting cladograms consistently; it makes it easier to compare cladograms to see how they substantively differ, which can be indicative of a difference in phylogenetic studies' results, which likely of interest to readers.

Conversely, it can aid in finding errors that occurred in transcribing cladograms from sources: In the process of formatting the cladograms on the caniform-related pages Caniformia, Ailuridae, Arctoidea, and Musteloidea, I found that they were not all equivalent, even though they listed mostly the same sources, and in investigating I found that one article both cited a more recent study and had an error where the cladogram did not actually match the cited publication. Thus, the less important process of formatting led to a necessary update to an article, and the addition of more up-to-date information to several other articles.

I encountered a similar situation in the sloth portion of the cladogram in the Xenarthra article, where after comparing to other sloth articles' cladograms, I found that they were substantively different from each other, which led me to investigate the sources and again determine that there was a meaningful discrepancy between the wiki article and the cladogram in the source publication. I was able to add a double line in a branch to reflect a polyphyly in the cited source that had until then been unaccounted for in the article. The different sloth articles' cladograms are still different from each other, because they have different sources with meaningfully different cladograms from each other, but they are now formatted in a way that makes it easier for any reader to see where those meaningful differences are.

As an aside, some of those sloth articles' cladograms might be good candidates for a template for reuse, since several cladograms share the same sources and are identical aside from the article titles being in bold and coloration of borders indicating superfamily. I noticed that the Fern article uses such a template Template:Fern_cladogram.show(Orders_&_Outgroups). I heard you like clades (talk) 01:02, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is a second reason why its best to go for more derived taxa at the bottom. Because the new Vector-2022 skin uses the right hand margin (as does mobile view), the clade template has been modified so that it doesn't overflow the content width and overlaps the menus in the right margin. The scroll bars are displayed at the bottom of the cladogram which are most useful when the widest part of the cladogram is also at the bottom. If the widest part of the cladogram is at the top and overflows, the scrollbars may not visible on the screen if the cladogrma is taller than the screen height. —  Jts1882 | talk  09:17, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]