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Not ‘Geraniums’! Grrrr! 🤬

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  • PalustrisPalustris Posts: 4,252
    The plants described by M. Monbret were in fact Tritonia, not Crocosmia according to the botanists.
  • pansyfacepansyface Posts: 22,742
    edited January 2020
    Time for you to modify Wikipedia perhaps then?🙂

    https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Coquebert_de_Montbret

    And Merriam Webster wants to muddy the waters, it seems

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/montbretia







    Apophthegm -  a big word for a small thought.
    If you live in Derbyshire, as I do.
  • FireFire Posts: 18,138
    "Time for you to modify Wikipedia perhaps then?"

    Go for it. Editing WP is open to all. Add some strong refs.
  • Hostafan1Hostafan1 Posts: 34,743
    Fire said:
    "Time for you to modify Wikipedia perhaps then?"

    Go for it. Editing WP is open to all. Add some strong refs.
    which is why many consider it to be totally unreliable as a source of "facts"
    Devon.
  • FireFire Posts: 18,138
    Hosta, Sigh, ellipsis
      WP has always been an open source, community project with thousands of volunteer editors. We have just reached six million articles in English. That's six million free pages kindly donated to you; over 40 million in 305 languages. Nobody is paid. It collaborates closely with The British Library, The British Museum, The National Archives, the Royal Society, The Science Museum and many others as part of the GLAM project.
    Nowhere does not purport to state "truth" or pitch definitive view points. That would be daft and spurious. Instead it offers you a selection of citations to check and delve into. On the articles' talk pages you can question citations and data and offer amended references. It is a model of continuous improvement and collaboration based on discussion and consensus. You will find that doctors are often the lead stewards on medical pages, poets on poetry pages, mathematics professors on maths projects etc. Much of time it is these groups of professionals who wrote most of the articles in the first place, within tight guidelines. The medical WP projects typically out-perform many medical text books. Link into assessment studies here.  Admittedly, medicine is one of WP's strongest and most rigorously monitored fields.

    Please join us and discover how it works and what you can offer.

    Some articles for your perusal:

  • Hostafan1Hostafan1 Posts: 34,743
    forgive my cynicism, but there's no way I'm ever going to believe a source of information which can be "edited" by anyone.
    If I want to know the capital city of country X or the date of birth of Y, I'll check out wikipedia, but pretty much everything else I take with a very large pinch of salt. 
    Devon.
  • wild edgeswild edges Posts: 10,183
    This is why people refer to the 'Wikipedia rabbit hole'. You go to look something up, decide to check it against the cited source material and 20 minutes later you're reading something totally irrelevant with no idea how you managed to get there. 
    Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people
  • pansyfacepansyface Posts: 22,742
    Well, I’m too old to worry much what a plant is called now.

    On any given day I can wander into the garden with a companion and say “Oh, just look at that...” and then the rest of the sentence is composed of finger snapping, pointing, arm waving, eeeuurrrghh... sounds and a curse followed by a sigh.


    Apophthegm -  a big word for a small thought.
    If you live in Derbyshire, as I do.
  • It gets even more confusing when older members of my family call pelargoniums ‘gerani’, because they’re Italian and that’s what pelargoniums are called, in Italy 🙄
    Honestly, I have given up all hope @Dovefromabove
  • Lizzie27Lizzie27 Posts: 11,999
    I had a Dobies seed catalogue delivered yesterday - even they referred to geraniums when they should have said pelargoniums.  I have to say that as part of the older generation, pelargoniums will always be geraniums in my head, the same as I still think in feet and inches.
    North East Somerset - Clay soil over limestone
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