Talk:Blue agave

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2020 and 18 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Erienchyma.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 15:59, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

TMA

I'm not plant pathologist, so if you are, or you at least have more detail than I do, please feel free to improve my discussion of TMA. -Harmil 16:13, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Question

Shouldn't the kingdom be changed to Eukarya? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Orelenok (talk • contribs) 17:30, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Principal product

This INEGI page http://www.inegi.gob.mx/est/contenidos/espanol/rutinas/ept.asp?t=epib01&c=4746&e=14 is evidence that the agricultural prodcuts of the state are only a third compared to manufacturing. I'm leaving my edit as it is. SalvadorRodriguez 01:23, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

"Does tequila grow in other parts of the world?" I think tequila is actually a legal word; the drink must be made only from the blue agave (not others), and only from the blue agave which is grown in certain parts of Mexico. If your question is 'does blue agave grow in other areas besides the legal ones': yes. http://cbs2.com/video/?id=18173@kcbs.dayport.com

Lead Sentence

"Blue agave, the tequila weed of the Agave tequilana species" - that does not make sense to me. Can anyone clarify this? Thanks! sherpajohn (talk) 12:52, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Vandalism from five months ago that somehow didn't get caught, now reverted. Stan (talk) 13:46, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

moved to Agave tequilana

The page "Tequila agave" has been moved to "Agave tequilana" to follow the naming convention of the other agave species articles. Iepeulas (talk) 22:58, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

vague statement removed

I removed the statement, "Researchers from Mexico's University of Guadalajara believe blue agave contains compounds that may be useful in carrying drugs to the intestines to treat diseases, such as Crohn's disease and colitis. Reference, Chicago Sun-Times Sun April 1, 2007 p. 6A, or announcement made at ACS's annual meeting March 2007 in Chicago" because it is really too vague for the introduction and not supported by any content in the article. Plus the reference details are too vague to identify and/or verify the actual source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.94.166.193 (talk) 21:18, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Names

While "mezcal" and "maguey" refer to the genus Agave, I don't think they specifically refer to this species (as opposed to other species like Agave americana). Therefore I've removed them from the lede list, which should include synonyms but not hypernyms.

OTOH, This book says Agave tequilana is aka Weber's maguey (presumably Frédéric Albert Constantin Weber), but I'm skeptical. I surmise that in the name Agave tequilana Weber var. Azul which is used in the sources, "Weber" names the Variety (botany) whereas "Azul" names the Plant variety (law). jnestorius^(talk) 18:15, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Requested move 19 August 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved Clear consensus that blue agave is the COMMONNAME. (non-admin closure) В²C ☎ 23:58, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

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Agave tequilana → Blue agave – WP:COMMONNAME. This plant is well known as "blue agave", and that proposed title has redirected here since an undiscussed move in 2009 (citing "the naming convention of the other agave species articles" per a comment on the article's Talk page). It seems to me that the common name policy should take precedence here. —BarrelProof (talk) 17:37, 19 August 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. Natg 19 (talk) 02:02, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

• Support, is the recognizable common name. As an example, here are uses on NYTimes, with the species name only having a couple of mentions compared to "blue agave"'s hundreds. – Thjarkur (talk) 18:13, 19 August 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. BD2412 T 19:00, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
• Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 00:04, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose. The COMMONNAME argument is not supported by a read through of the references. The majority use tequilana, and too many do not even mention "blue". --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:07, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • What I see is a bit different. Some of the sources are not readily accessible. One of the sources is entitled "In Search of the Blue Agave" and doesn't mention the Latin name at all. Another opens with the sentence "The alcoholic beverage tequila is produced by the fermentation of the center of the blue agave plant, Agave tequilana var. Azul" (listing the vernacular name first). Another one appears to exclusively Latin names for everything on the whole site. Another is a one-paragraph article in another publication that exclusively uses Latin names for all article topics. The YouTube video doesn't use either name – it just says "agave". There is another one that uses the Latin name in the title and abstract but I cannot access the article body. That was all of the cited ones that I could access. I think it is understandable that Latin names are more common in formal academic biology literature, as contrasted with material written for general readership, and certainly this plant is widely known as the source of tequila – it is not something obscure that is only familiar to academics. Google Ngram shows "Blue agave" as clearly more common than "Agave tequilana" for the last 30 years. —BarrelProof (talk) 18:41, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

"Blue agave" appears to be made popular through marketing associated with Tequila#Production. This explains the surprising results in google ngrams. Raw data like that is easily biased like this. Blue Agave is not used in sources about the plant, and this article is botanical, about the plant. The tequila production aspects should be reduced out of this article and put where they belong, at Tequila#Production. Content forking is bad. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:34, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose. "Blue agave" is often used to refer to (sell) Agave americana, thus ambiguous vernacular name in English. The name "blue agave" for this species is itself likely a recent calque from Mexican Spanish introduced by the tequila industry. Leo Breman (talk) 16:00, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • It seems that the issue you are raising is whether this is a proper WP:Primary topic for "blue agave". Your search link above was not for the exact string "blue agave" with Americana – see here for that, producing very few results – a total of 6 hits! Most of those 6 are not referring to Agave Americana as blue agave – they are just talking about both plants on the same web page (and one of those is Wikipedia). In the cases where "blue" is used to refer to Agave americana, it is mostly being used descriptively rather than as part of the name of the plant. When I search for "blue agave", Agave tequilana is the clearly dominant result. Note that ever since it was created in 2004, "Blue agave" has been completely stable as a redirect to "Agave tequilana" or "Tequila agave". Also, note that a hatnote suffices to identify the alternative topic in a WP:TWODAB situation. —BarrelProof (talk) 17:31, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
• Comment Google News hits on my side shows "blue agave" with 146 k hits, and agave tequilana 13k. Don't think there's an argument that blue agave isn't the WP:COMMONNAME.--Ortizesp (talk) 04:28, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
• Support, "blue agave" is the common name. JIP | Talk 13:18, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
• Support. "blue agave" appears to be the common name per the Google ngrams.[1] Rreagan007 (talk) 19:51, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Ortizesp and Rreagan007, "blue agave" is the tequila industry term, a marketing term, but the current Agave tequilana is the botanical name. This is the botanical article, and tequila production should not be here. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:36, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

It is the clearly dominant common name of the plant, not just a marketing term. Wikipedia has a policy of using common names in preference to academic binomials, as long as the common name is actually common and sufficiently unambiguous. Wikipedia is intended for broad readership, not primarily as a resource for academic botanists. And whenever a plant has an agricultural use, that usage is (and should be) described in the article about that plant. —BarrelProof (talk) 16:14, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

If it is so clear, why is the term not used by references to this article? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:25, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

It is used in at least two of them. There aren't a lot of cited sources that are readily accessible. That is further detailed above. —BarrelProof (talk) 23:00, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

It is a case of scope creep. Tequila#Production spilling into this article. Tequila commands a lot of attention as a popular alcohol, swamping this otherwise uninteresting plant; but of the sources seriously speaking to the plant, this article as distinct from Tequila, they use the current title as its name. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:56, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

This article currently, on my screen, devotes only 4 lines of text to discussing the use of the plant for tequila production. That doesn't seem excessive to me, especially if the plant is "otherwise uninteresting". I think the usage in the context of discussion of tequila production is a further argument for why the article should use the vernacular name, since I believe the vernacular name is used more often than the Latin name when people talk about tequila. —BarrelProof (talk) 18:53, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

The few lines is not excessive, although you must have a very big screen. Retitling the whole article on the basis of the references to that section, which really is an excerpt from the tequila article, is to give it too much weight to the section. Category:Agave has strong consistency for botanical titling of the botanical agave articles, and this proposal would make tequilana special on the basis of a superfamous liquor connected to one specific cultivar of one species. Instead of converting this article into an article on the source material for Tequila#Production, that section should be given more attention with regards to the cultivar used, which is not all Agave tequilana. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:02, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

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The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.