Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of Armillaria species/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was promoted by Giants2008 19:36, 22 February 2011 [1].

List of Armillaria species[edit]

List of Armillaria species (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): Sasata (talk) 02:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Armillaria is a genus of destructive wood-eating fungi that causes extensive losses to forestry industries around the world—but it also produces attractive mushrooms, many of which are edible, and some even glow in the dark. It seems there are no other "List of all species in a genus"-type FLs, so I'm thinking this will serve as sort of a template for future efforts of this kind (at least in the fungal realm). This is my first FLC, so go hard on me, it'll make it easier for future noms :) Sasata (talk) 02:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment !! Sasata, great conqueror of GAN and FAC, has come to the last untouched land of FLC! :) Two things off the bat. (1) Is this a complete list? If not it needs {{dynamic list}}. (2) What do you think about a color-indicator for the "transfer" species as opposed to those originally placed in the genus? The parentheses is a good starting point, but doesn't stand out a ton. Staxringold talkcontribs 03:02, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hi Stax. I have yet to wade in the waters of FS and GT/FT, so there's more virgin territory for me... 1) I'm not sure about the lingo: the list is "complete" in that it gives all the species we know of, but "incomplete" in that more species may be discovered and eventually added to the list. 2) Hadn't thought of color coding like that, I'll experiment a bit and get back to you. Is there a guideline for color usage somewhere? Sasata (talk) 03:11, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not sure, WP:COLOR deals more with colored text. Best I can say is look at other lists that use colors, it's probably best to stick with safer pastel-y colors so there's nothing too in your face (see the key in World Series Most Valuable Player Award for most of the common list colors I've seen). As for completeness that's actually an interesting question. I'd say that so long as this is every known species that would be complete (since you couldn't possibly add anything more), though I could see the argument the other way (particularly if there's a big chance there are more unknown species out there). Staxringold talkcontribs 03:28, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I really don't think formally separating "original" and "combined" species (the technical word) makes for a useful distinction. It would possibly be the first article to ever do that. The closest I know are some Paleontology article that describe the fate of species that USED to be in the genus being discussed. Circéus (talk) 03:42, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree; whether a species was originally in this genus or in another is merely an accident of taxonomic history that is not going to be of interest to many users of this list. Ucucha 14:48, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved comments from RexxS (talk) 06:00, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
* Please have a think about presentation, conformity with MOS and accessibility:
    1. WP:BOLD gives guidance on where bold text is used. Does the use of bold for the 'key' words accord with MOS?
    2. ditto for the column titles in the main table.
    3. If the answer to the first two questions is "table headers", then those cells need to be marked up as headers. See WP:ACCESS#Data tables for the guidance.
    4. WP:MOSCOLOR advises against changing the font-size. Is there an strong need for the small text for the species authority, sufficient to be an exception to that?
    5. Is the authority a part of the name? If not, why is it placed in the same cell as the name, rather than in a cell of its own?
    6. A screen reader might announce the first image like this: "Link, Armillaria borealis - lindsey.jpg, Armillaria borealis - lindsey.jpg, Link, A. borealis". Have you considered using alt text to improve the experience for a blind user?
    7. Is there a reason for your preference of using the html tag <br /> as a separator for multiple list items, rather than {{ubl}}, the unbulleted list template, to produce a list?
  • Otherwise, the lead is engaging, and the whole article is well referenced. I see you use the same page range style as I do (just enough digits in the second part to remove ambiguity), so don't let TRM talk you out of that. I would like to see a closer conformity with MOS, but this is an excellent candidate, and hopefully the forerunner of more to come. --RexxS (talk) 04:23, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Table-syntax stuff has been corrected/implemented.
  • Small-size for authorities is standard practice across Wikipedia via Template:Taxobox, as well as in numerous lists where they are used (e.g. List of Symphyotrichum species), this is because, although the author citation constitute a separate element, it is indeed considered an integral part of a botanical name when used. The smaller font-size, while a benign change (use of <small> is at least as accessible as the widespread font sizes of footers and other navigation templates), more clearly delineate the authority from the name.
  • I did not notice the lack of alt text when Sasata asked me to review the article. I usually write them in these lists. I'll get to it soon.
  • I was intrigued by the use of line breaks to begin with myself, but I always figure minor stylistic things like that fell under [[{WP:RETAIN]]
Circéus (talk) 04:48, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Circeus for fixing these up so quickly. To RexxS, I simply have to plead ignorance, I'm not terribly familiar with the MOS rules that apply to lists, and my experience with markup comes from picking up bits and pieces I find from other lists and trying to make it look right. This will be a good learning experience for me, thanks for your suggestions! Sasata (talk) 05:17, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, I think just listing the elements in "distribution" as a phrase, with commas and "and" (as we were doing for the agaricales genera lists), will work fine. Circéus (talk) 05:29, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for such a quick response. I've struck all the resolved concerns, but I would like to tease out the remaining two points please.
One of the principal tenets of accessibility is that we don't use presentational attributes as the sole means of conveying information. In this case, a blind reader will not hear any delineation of the authority from the name. That is not a huge problem in itself, but visually-impaired readers have genuine difficulty with small text. Infoboxes, footers, navigational templates, reflists and other elements which are constrained for space conventionally use small text, but each has a class such as "navbox" or "references" and a visually-impaired user can override the small size of such elements and return them to 100% font size if they choose. Unfortunately, this article's use of small fonts is "hard-coded" into the text and is not amenable to being overriden by the user's style sheet. That's not a good thing, and I'd suggest you really need a good reason to disadvantage one group of readers in an effort to convey extra information to another group. For what it's worth, I'd have exactly the same criticism of List of Symphyotrichum species!
WP:RETAIN is a guideline for national varieties of English, but the spirit is applicable to other situations where a tie-break between two equivalent choices is needed – in the absence of more significant deciding factors. I don't believe that is the case in deciding between {{ubl}} and text+br. I'd suggest that rendering a list of items as an html list is far superior to a single block of text with html line-breaks for two reasons: semantically the information in an html list is a group of related, but separate, block elements, while the text+br is actually a single element – accurate markup goes a long way to helping other media render the information in a sensible way; from an accessibility viewpoint, a screen reader sees the list as separate items that it can be made to announce individually, while visual indicators like <br /> may be invisible to a screen reader.
Anyway, neither of these is absolutely crucial, and I'm sorry if it's been somewhat technical, but I hope you can see that decisions made for the purpose of visual presentation alone have the potential to adversely affect a small number of our readers disproportionately. I don't mind if you disagree with my conclusions, as long as you satisfy yourself that you've weighed up all the issues and are happy with the decisions you've made.
I will revisit the review when others have had a chance to comment, and my intention is to formally support. --RexxS (talk) 06:56, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, I presume that someone that knows how to "override the small size of such elements and return them to 100% font size" of a styled span can perform the equivalent (and simpler!) operation on a <small> element. In fact, as a HTML coder familiar with HTML use guidelines, I very strongly disagree with your characterization of <small> as "hard-coded". In fact, it is arguably a more semantic usage in this case than a style element. If this is so bad an issue, {{small}} is available, but I've always been opposed to unnecessary use of templates as reducing code accessibility. Circéus (talk) 07:08, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No, because most folks who "know" how to override small text have asked the question and been told to put something like div.references {font-size: 100%;} in their monobook.css or vector.css. I should point out that <small> is not a semantic element here (and never could be on its own since it would then fail to convey its semantic meaning to a non-visual agent[2]). Presumably, as an HTML coder, you're familiar with h-15.2 where W3C states "The following HTML elements specify font information. Although they are not all deprecated, their use is discouraged in favor of style sheets ... SMALL ..." [3]. I note your 'very strong' disagreement and refute it by stating that any presentational HTML element we insert into wikitext is "hard-coded" because we are creating presentational effects which should be done by the site's css. If site-wide modifications are carried out, then hard-coded presentational elements may need to be painstakingly altered page-by-page to fit in, remembering that Wikipedia's content has to be delivered to other user agents than just the browser you're using now. I'm puzzled why you think templates reduce code accessibility? One of the reasons for their existence is to improve code accessibility, by removing the necessity for editors to learn HTML/CSS. They also confer the considerable advantage of providing a single point where they may be modified. Nevertheless, none of this addresses the question of why species authority should be rendered in smaller-sized text. --RexxS (talk) 05:11, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have an answer to this question, it's just the way I've usually seen it done around here (it's coded in the taxobox display, for example), so I've gotten into the habit of doing it myself. I looked at the other biology FLs, and of those that do give the authorities, half do so in small font: List of cetaceans, List of Testudines families, List of lemur species. Normal size authority font lists include List of mammals of Florida, List of mammals of Canada, List of mammals of Korea. I don't really care either way, and will go along with whatever consensus is reached here (the html/css stuff is over my head). Sasata (talk) 06:14, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
"folks who "know" how to override small text have asked the question and been told to put something like div.references {font-size: 100%;}" I'm amazed this is the approach being used, given the masses of small-size text across the encyclopedia such an approach would fail to affect. Such an approach would ail to affect every single of the 15,000+ instance of the aforementioned {{small}}. Given the Wikipedia idea of "accessibility", I can't say any of the available options can be called "accessible" by any stretch of the imagination. Circéus (talk) 06:39, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
@Circeus: No wonder you're amazed; you're confusing templates with style sheets. Cascading style sheets allow an end-user to make choices about how information is presented to them. Most people can cope with references being 90% of normal size, but anyone who is sufficiently visually impaired to find 90% difficult can render references at normal size as I indicated - and footers and navboxes can be treated in same way. Similarly, if consensus decides that references, navboxes, etc. should be a different size by default, then the default can be changed in MediaWiki:Common.css. If each reference were made smaller by hard-coding <small> or <span style="font-size:smaller; line-height:130%"> (which is what {{small}} does), then each one would need to be amended when consensus changed. Any time smaller text can be justified (e.g. because of lack of space in an infobox), then a style can be defined for that, or it may be hard-coded into a template like the taxobox as a temporary measure. If you think accessibility is so poor on Wikipedia, then I'd invite you to consider whether a proliferation of hard coding the presentation improves accessibility or makes it harder to improve?
@Sasata: Fair enough, although I think that for our best articles and lists, there ought to be some consistency across similar works. This isn't something that ought to be decided by consensus here, but if you look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life, a consensus has been reached on (for example) using italic for certain naming purposes to follow convention in the scientific literature. I'm sure you know the details better than I, and I was hoping that there would be a similar style guideline/rationale somewhere for how the authority is presented. Anyway, if WikiProject Tree of Life were to consider giving guidance on this, then I hope that they will consider the accessibility implications of small text.
I'm grateful that you have been kind enough to give my concerns such thorough and detailed attention, and I'll cap this discussion if there is nothing else you want to raise.
  • Support. The issues I raised have been satisfactorily addressed. --RexxS (talk) 01:40, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for your comments, RexxS. I wasn't aware of the accessibility issues before, and it is something I will certainly keep in mind for future FLC submissions. You're right there should be some consistency among lists that fall under the purview of the Tree of Life project; I may initiate a discussion there sometime about the general format I used in this article. Sasata (talk) 05:21, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I added the epithet to the image page. The species article is still too short to warrant another pic... but I promise to make it grow soon! Sasata (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Some thoughts:

  • I guess there's no prescribed way to do this yet, but I wonder whether a "notes" column with material like edibility (if edible, poisonous or toxic), bioluminescence and any major "human interest" (medicinal/other use, state mushroom, that sort of thing) would be useful. I guess that's a big ask, so, as much as anything, I'm just wondering why you decided to include the things you did, as opposed to anything else. What about common names?
  • I guess I'm still figuring out the balance between what to include on a list like this, and what to leave to the article page. Five of the species have common names (the others just aren't well-known to have been assigned them yet), five species are bioluminescent, another couple are interesting as candidates for "world's largest organism". Having a separate column for any one of these individually would result in a lot of blank spaces, but something like a "notes" column might work. But maybe this info should be instead included in the "Notes" section? Opinions anyone? Sasata (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Perhaps split notes like "The original spelling of the species name was cepaestipes" out from the references?
  • Mention the name "Honey fungus" somewhere?
  • Now in the first sentence. Sasata (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • You don't mention the type species anywhere- I'd say that'd be a great lead illustration as represenative of the whole list.
  • That's a great idea, done. That also freed up room below to add an image of another species. Sasata (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do we have full names for "Volk and Burdall"?
  • Yes, given in full the previous paragraph. Sasata (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • You also don't mention the authority/naming for the genus as a whole, which I feel would have a place here.
  • Good idea, now in the second sentence of the lead. Sasata (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've done little reviewing at FLC, so I'm not certain what I'm looking for, but I hope these thoughts are helpful. J Milburn (talk) 10:44, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support. This is well researched, sourced, displayed and illustrated. The question of what precisely to include hangs over our head, but I think we need a general discussion about fungal species lists, rather than hashing it out here- it's not fair to oppose based on guidelines which don't exist. I think a notes column would be a nice addition, but I'm certainly willing to support without it. J Milburn (talk) 23:42, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for helping out JM! Sasata (talk) 06:14, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support. All issues addressed; looking good. Ucucha 04:14, 8 February 2011 (UTC) Comments:[reply]

  • I think lists such as this should also include species formerly placed in the genus. That would make the list a lot longer, but also more useful to people who find some old Armillaria name and want to figure out what it refers to.
  • Yikes. I'm not against doing the work, but it seems to me that that would change the list from the tidy summary of current species it is now to a bloated monstrosity with over 300 entries and a greater number of references. Does Wikipedia really need that? Can't we assume that someone who's researching an old Armillaria name has the knowledge to check Index Fungorum or MycoBank for themselves? Sasata (talk) 15:22, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, I didn't think I'd make myself popular with this suggestion. I can also see why we wouldn't want to include this information, but I'd like to hear what other people think. We don't have resources like Index Fungorum for all groups; for example, there is a huge number of species formerly placed in Oryzomys, but no centralized resource where all can be found. Thanks for the fixes on the other issues. Ucucha 20:32, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Personally, I think that if such lists were to be created, they would be best kept at a separate "list of former X species" page, cross-referenced to the appropriate articles. Circéus (talk) 22:47, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • That seems reasonable; I might try that with Oryzomys and see how it works out. Ucucha 23:52, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • In the last reference (Volk & Burdsall, 1995), the "(PDF)" should come after the link, not after the year.
  • I just removed the format=PDF parameter; I don't know how to force the order of the template output. Sasata (talk) 15:22, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • The actual list is now in a section titled "Key", which doesn't make much sense—perhaps add a section "List"?

Ucucha 14:46, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Added a section header "Species". Thanks for commenting, Ucucha. Sasata (talk) 15:22, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Since NABS X has not been formally named, shouldn't the year be omitted? For the other species, it's the year of formal naming, not the year the species was first recognized. Ucucha 18:32, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good point. I removed the year from the column and added it to the footnote. Sasata (talk) 18:49, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Actually, there was a very good reason for their being "out of order", which was detailed in the Key. Circéus (talk) 20:20, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yeah, undone. Headcold means brain is not working at full capacity. Sasata (talk) 20:58, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support (yesterday I just mentioned that the references are not sorted but didn't look at the key, unfortunately :/, but now my deep review is finished) Very good list about one of my favourite mushrooms (:P), but it's a little bit strange, I thought there would be more species; are you sure they are complete? Anyway, I support this great list :D!-- ♫Greatorangepumpkin♫ T 09:51, 5 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks, and yes, I'm sure :) Sasata (talk) 16:26, 5 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment – Overall, a nice piece of work. Just two small things from me: I wish the References column was shortened to Ref(s) (would save some white space), and that the Distribution column could be made sortable. Giants2008 (27 and counting) 22:27, 5 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I may just be being picky, but I don't like the idea of the section header being abbreviated. How about as a compromise I center the refs so the whitespace is left/right equalized? I'm not convinced the distribution column should be sortable; since most of the cells are a list of items, what use could it be to the reader to have species list sorted by the first location in the distribution list? Sasata (talk) 00:50, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
"saving whitespace" is a boogeyman: at 800x600, the saving hardly changes the number of lines on the first and third column that gets broken, and it obviously makes virtually no difference at all on tiny screens. I also agree sorting the distribution cells is pointless since it only sort one element out of several within them. Circéus (talk) 00:55, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments this has had a fair bit of interest and support, and it seems I'm a little late to the party, but in any case, my comments, and forgive me if they've been discussed already.

  • "First treated by" this is expert-speak for me, why would anyone "treat" a mushroom? Needs to be accessible to all. Simliar with "assigned generic rank". What do these mean to the layman?
  • " with a cottony or membranous veils that typically forms " singular/plural/singular
  • Name col should be Name/authority in the key.
  • What if there's a name in parentheses and a name (or more) out of parentheses?
  • I don't like refs out of numerical order but I appreciate the key telling me why. I'm not sure why the ref's shouldn't be numerical though.
  • In the authority entries, there are a lot of "Dessur.", "Courtec." (abbreviated names), why?
  • NABS X has no year. At least put an en/em-dash there in the year col.

The Rambling Man (talk) 22:05, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • It's not the mushroom, it's the genus that's being "treated" as a subject. It might me mildly academic, but it is not jargon as far as I'm aware.
  • fixed
  • It should have linked to author citation (botany) from the start, but admittedly the wording was less than ideal.
  • I'm not sure why Sasata decided to put the original publications in a separate columns instead of putting them in the first and third (there doesn't seem to be much space saving or aesthetic improvement to justify it), but I respected it out of WP:RETAIN, if anything else.
  • This is the standard format across botanical literature and Wikipedia when giving author citations. (if it were running, as in the second sentence of the article, there would be no abbreviation, of course). Giving the full names (which is not always possible), would not be an improvement (notwithstanding the space issues).
  • fixed.
Circéus (talk) 22:34, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
To answer why I did it that way, it's because I saw that someone else had done the refs that way, so I just copied the format. Thinking about it some more, the extra column for refs seemed unnecessary, so I removed it. How does it look now? I'm thinking that the name/authority column looks a bit crowded, and and tempted to move the authorities to a separate (unsortable?) column (as suggested by RexxS). Any objections? Sasata (talk) 23:41, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Seems good to me. 04:14, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Done. Sasata (talk) 15:41, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
and made sortable. Circéus (talk) 16:13, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
and can be made more fully accessible by marking up row headers thus: [4] and then setting "plainrowheaders"[5] if you don't like the bold, centred row headers.
I've self reverted because I don't want to interfere, but you can see how it's done. Most folks don't see much difference, but you're enabling a screen reader to navigate up and down the columns of the table and hear which row they are on each time. It's not mandatory, but worthwhile. Cheers. --RexxS (talk) 17:47, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I really don't think that works; in fact I would very much oppose it. I would only ever do that if the table was a "cross-reference" (e.g. comparison of Internet browsers), or an election result table. This is clearly not such a case. Circéus (talk) 19:38, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Look, the marking up of row headers to make a table accessible is mandated by MOS at MOS:ACCESS#Data tables, so you'd better get used to it. It is a necessary feature of our best work that they be accessible to all. I've been willing to accept that it is something that editors need to become acquainted with, and have not pressed the point where the structure is unsuitable (or even if it would require a massive overhaul of a table), but in a case such as this where the upgrade would be trivial, I don't feel that I can support promotion. --RexxS (talk) 22:13, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You are completely misunderstanding the nature of headers: they serve to identify the data in the corresponding row/column. If you need to put a header on your headers (as you would have us do), then it is not a header! By your metric the first cell in every single table in Wikipedia should be a header, that's preposterous! Circéus (talk) 22:50, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'll suggest that I'm not misunderstanding the nature of headers. At present the table has column headers, but no row headers. I'm simply suggesting that it would improve the table's accessibility to have row headers as well. If you want an outside opinion, here's a book that demonstrates exactly the technique I'm recommending: Web accessibility. You could read the tutorial for how JAWS reads tables at Tables with JAWS and MAGic to get a better idea of why having both column and row headers improves accessibility. If you want the source of these, they derive from WCAG, and there is a criterion H63 for HTML 4 that you can refer to. Please have a look at some of these, and consider whether there might be more to my suggestions than you may have initially recognised. I'd be delighted if we can reach some agreement here. Regards, --RexxS (talk) 17:53, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

[Undent] According to the page you link, we do not need header cell to have an accessible table here: scope is legitimate to use even in the absence of a header cell (and in this case, I still firmly believe full-on header, where or not they are visible, are unnecessary). I'll happily apply scope to the "name" columns. I'd like to further note that this whole arguing spans from the fact that from the point of view of basic HTML, making the data tabular is not a formal necessity (hence the arguing about the best way to apply a table to the list): a table just happen to be the only way to get sortable data on wp: (and we view sortability as particularly desirable). If sortability could somehow be obtained without the use of a table, the data would not be tabular, have no formal need to be tabular, and the entire argument would be moot. Circéus (talk) 18:10, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't disagree with any of the points you make. You can indeed apply scope to data cells (such as those containing names) and make the table accessible, but then somebody will have to come along when we move to HTML5 and change the markup to make them header cells. There's really no reason not to mark them up now – after all, if it is semantically a row header (identifying the data in that row), then I would think marking it up as TH would be sensible.
If you consider the data structure, a table implements a list of lists in a structured way. It also possesses the advantage that we can navigate it 'vertically' i.e up and down a column – and we go to all this trouble to allow blind users the same facility. --RexxS (talk) 18:50, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support (might as well ) Baring people noting extra ameliorations that can be implemented or errors, I don't see how we can improve it further. Circéus (talk) 16:13, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose: The main table fails WP:WIAFL#5, specifically MOS:ACCESS#Data_tables, a top-priority requirement. --RexxS (talk) 22:13, 8 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose we need to take WP:ACCESS seriously. I don't see a problem with what RexxS has suggested, and he has an established track record of being very open-minded and fair with this sort of thing. I suggest you work with him rather than against him. Your accusations of his suggestions being "preposterous" are just short of bad faith, and as far as I can see, there's absolutely zero visual difference in the format RexxS has suggested against the format you prefer. All you had to do was use RexxS's edits; he'd done all the hard work for you... The Rambling Man (talk) 17:02, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Ultimately I consider the decision is Sasata's and I will defer to it, but I still believe that the suggestion is one of the most misguided approach to "accesibility" I've ever seen when we have so many articles that, by the same accessibility token, should never be allowed to have table at all to begin with, and the suggestion is made obsolete simply by changing the ordering of the columns (further demonstrating that no, in many, many cases there is absolutely no need for a column of header). Look at the tables in the example here, the first two are clearly similar to our examples and according to the spec, the first column does not need (I argue must not have) header cells; the second table illustrated (in the next section) has even less headers than you would expect (I would have put the dates in headers). The specs to me clearly implies that one should be conservative in the use of double sets of header. Circéus (talk) 17:43, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • I may be wrong but I think you've misunderstood what's going on here. RexxS has responded above, it's worth taking this advice seriously. The Rambling Man (talk) 17:56, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Jumping in the middle here, but Rexx helped with my nom very easily and it didn't really change the physical nature of the list at all, so why not include it? I have no reason to disbelieve what he and others have told me about this making things easier for screen-readers, I have 0 knowledge on that front. Staxringold talkcontribs 18:08, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • <technical warning> No, Circeus is quite right to point out that under the current HTML spec, it is acceptable to specify <td scope="row"> (or | scope="row" in wiki-markup). He is mistaken only in extrapolating that to forbid <th scope="row"> (or ! scope="row" in wiki-markup). In fact, HTML4 specifies scope as an attribute for both TD and TH, so either are acceptable. The problem is that the upcoming HTML5 spec will no longer allow scope on TD, so with an eye to the future, it is better guide editors into using ! scope="row" as that is valid now and will be valid in the future. I should add that "plainrowheaders" only works on ! scope="row", so if you want to mark up row headers differently, you can't use it.</technical warning> Hope that helps --RexxS (talk) 18:31, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • You blatantly misrepresent what I said. I meant that for our purpose "scope" on a normal cell was sufficient and that a header cell was not semantically required for accessibility (not to mention a different styling is unwarranted no matter how subdued it is). Circéus (talk) 18:36, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, I still agree: "scope" on a normal cell (TD) is sufficient for accessibility. The only two things we seem to disagree on is that I think the semantic markup for any table header is TH; and that I think using TD scope="row" is a bad idea because it will be disallowed in the next version of HTML. You'll find quite a few editors who will insist that the semantic difference between header cells and data cells has to be indicated by a difference in styling. But I respect your view that you don't want to see a different visual style, and I'd personally be happy to go along with it. Nevertheless, MOS:ACCESS#Data tables is the consensus guideline that requires ! scope="row" and the debate at MediaWiki Talk:Common.css/Archive 12#Bold row headers has decided the default behaviour of the "wikitable" and "plainrowheaders" classes. Neither of these are set in stone, and I'm sure that you would be able to make a reasoned argument if you wished to see them changed. --RexxS (talk) 01:50, 10 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've implemented the accessibility changes as suggested by RexxS. Sasata (talk) 18:59, 9 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. The issues I raised have been satisfactorily addressed. --RexxS (talk) 01:50, 10 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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