Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Viruses/Archive 5

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Virusboxes for unaccepted taxa

Hey y'all, i am working through the ~45 renaining articles that have not yet converted to {{virusbox}} from manual {{taxobox}}es. Almost all of them are unaccepted virus taxa (i.e. not listed at ICTV. Most are also putative infraspecific virus taxa. Some are lacking any references.

For these uncharacterized strains, is it better to have no taxobox at all (as even the rank is unclear), or to have something using {{Taxonomy/Incertae sedis/Virus family}} that is just incertae sedis all the way up (with 'virus' as the rank)? For some examples, see 'Wineberry latent virus and Bandicoot papillomatosis carcinomatosis virus. awkwafaba (📥) 15:43, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I think for some of these additional research may turn up a taxonomic placement.

For example, according to this 2024 preprint, Wineberry latent virus is an isolate of Blackberry virus E (which is now Allexivirus epsilonrubi). And there is detailed description of it here (published in 1985, with references going back to the 1970s). Blackberry virus E was only described in 2012.

Beet leaf curl virus has a source that is an archived copy of an old version of the ICTV database () where it is treated as a species; it seems like it ought to be at least a synonym of a currently recgonized species.

I did some sleuthing a few months back at Talk:Narcissus white streak virus; two different sources each list it as a synonym of an accepted species, but give different accepted species. I suspect NWSV may not be a single virus, but that there are multiple viruses that cause a disease with a symptom ("white streak") in a particular host (Narcissus). Plantdrew (talk) 16:26, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm sure that with enough sleuthing, a lot could be found out, but I'm not trying to expand 45 stubs to C status, just getting them the next step up with a automated taxobox (or not). ICTV keeps it's old taxonomy searchable, but does not mention beet leaf curl anywhere currently. This happens with a lot of these strains as ICTV has increased its rigor. I think using an archived link that is no longer acknowledged, or has been basically retracted, by the current body doesn't seem like a good RS. Plus I haven't even mentioned the speculative monogeneric family Pandoraviridae containing Pandoravirus, Pandoravirus dulcis, Pandoravirus salinus, and Pandoravirus yedoma, none of which are accepted taxa nor have virusboxes. awkwafaba (📥) 18:49, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I do not know if this helps, but wineberry latent virus is in GENBANK (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/OQ877124.1) - same study as the 2024 preprint, but not on the Master Species list by the ICTV nor the REFSEQ database. And, yes, it is listed as a isolate of Blackberry virus E there. Though, it is also listed as a unclassified Allexivirus in some places (probably taken from NCBI taxonomy browser.

I belive the best idea is to include in the article that it may be a isolate or an unclassified virus.

BPCV seems to be a close relative to Betapapillomavirus, saying "possibly under Firstpapillomavirinae" (taxonomy template with /?) would be enough.

I changed 6 Articles under Pandoraviridae (I did not see the reply by you beforehand)

I believe addressing the dsRNA Viruses and (-)ssRNA Viruses articles first would be good, partly because I do not know what one would do with the taxonbox there.

_>>> Webclo^udd@their-talk-page 08:24, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

I think those would need something like {{Paraphyletic group}}, though i think they wouldn’t italicize all the ranks. awkwafaba (📥) 13:46, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Zoonotic origins of COVID-19#Requested move 14 December 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Zoonotic origins of COVID-19#Requested move 14 December 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 14:24, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Abolished viruses and never classified viruses

I've been working on hantavirus articles lately and have encountered two issues that I'm not sure about, both about unclassified viruses. The first is that the ICTV has been abolishing classifications for viruses that don't have enough of their DNA/RNA sequenced for their analyses. For example, Oxbow virus was previously recognized as a species but was abolished. They've been doing this for member viruses of species as well, as in the same reorganization that abolished Oxbow virus, Gou virus, El Moro Canyon virus, and Laguna Negra virus all lost recognition from the ICTV, which they now consider to be potential isolates of other viruses. How should articles for these kinds of viruses be dealt with? The second thing is unclassified viruses that have never been recognized by the ICTV, for example Tanganya virus and Bloodland Lake virus. Should WP:GNG apply here? Velayinosu (talk) 02:46, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

Hi Velayinosu, the only role of the ICTV is to classify (and invent binomial names for) viruses. In my view, viruses that are not included in the ICTV scheme should be called simply "unclassified". They do not have any lesser importance (or notability) because the ICTV has yet to include them. If viruses still have a common name, that is enough to warrant their inclusion in Wikipedia. Graham Beards (talk) 09:45, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

PS. Hasn’t oxbow virus just been renamed from Oxbow orthohantavirus to Orthohantavirus oxbowense?

See the link Velayinosu provided; it was renamed in the 2022 ICTV release, and abolished in the 2023 release. Plantdrew (talk) 18:53, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. Graham Beards (talk) 19:05, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

New editor using only primary sources and telling me to not "interfere" in his edits

Scientific observer (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Wow, this I think is a new one. On Talk:Mpox and elsewhere, this brand new editor is saying repeatedly that I should not interefere...because [I am] biased toward [my] interest in vaccines and antibody therapeutics and that the viruses [I] studied (Zika, Ebola, and Hantaviruses) are not related to poxviridae.

Funny enough, I did actually use modified Ankara-strain Vaccinia during my PhD, and did a lot of small-molecule article reviews and similar relevant experiments. lol. But let alone that this is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand of whether or not my input is warranted, and whether this user is following the WP:PAGs...

The main issue is that they are proceeding to add claims about the use of certain off-label drugs and small molecule inhibitors to different poxviridae-adjacent and other related articles (Mycophenolic acid, Mpox, Vaccinia), using only primary sources and WebMD/the FDA page for "off-label drugs". Despite the local (and global consensus) that such primary sources and irrelevant WebMD/etc are not suitable for such claims. They are also starting (and hugely expanding) a few articles with mainly primary sources Zelenirstat, IMP-1088, N-myristoyltransferase inhibitors. In and of itself, it's not an issue to be adding primary articles (which, I suspect, this user may have authored) to wikipedia. The issue is that this user is not understanding the meaning of a proper secondary source.

They also went and found a source I personally authored and removed it from the relevant article (Zika virus).

Could definitely use some outside eyes (and patience) on this one. Thanks. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 20:28, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

An IP editor just pointed out on Talk:Mpox that in the 6 days since one of these journal articles was published (Witwit et al in Viruses - "Repurposing Drugs for Synergistic Combination Therapies to Counteract Monkeypox Virus Tecovirimat Resistance") one person or several people (including ( some Chula Vista, California and Scripps Research Institute IP addresses (192.26.252.1)) plus the above username, altogether this/these user(s) have added it as a citation to 12 different wiki articles. See Altmetric.

Overall, I'd say there's a pretty good case to be made based on the evidence that this user may be an author on the article. I've tried to caution them accordingly... — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 21:15, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Watching. Graham Beards (talk) 12:09, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

ICTV binomial names

There has been some discussion above and elsewhere on Wikipedia regarding the incorporation of the newly coined ICTV binomial names for virus species. I found this Science article from last December ‘Silly and pompous’: Official new names for viruses rile up researchers useful, especially this part, which was written by a representative of the ICTV in response: "Virologists could similarly write that "the incidence of infections with HIV-1 (Lentivirus humimdef1) has declined,” and refer to the virus as HIV-1 throughout the rest of the article." This supports my view that we should retain common names, where they exist, for the titles of our virus articles and only give the binomial names in parentheses and in the Taxonomy sections (or boxes). Graham Beards (talk) 10:39, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

We're not necessarily using common names as titles of articles. We're mostly using whatever was the last ICTV name was before binomial nomenclature was adopted. It's pretty clear clinicians are going to ignore the ICTV binomial names, but they're probably going to go for the most part for previous names that did have standing under the ICTV, but not necessarily the last pre-binomial name. Before binomial names were implemented, the names of species were still getting changed based on changes in generic placement, and clinicians weren't happy with that instability.

Human alphaherpesvirus 1 was recently moved to Herpes simplex virus 1. The latter does appear to be the most commonly used name. We can not assume that the last pre-binomial ICTV name is the common name. Pretty much every virus that infects humans, domesticated animals or cultivated plants is going to need to have the title evaluated, and there will probably be multiple titles that should be considered.

Early in Wikipedia's history there was an attitude that any name for an organism that was not the scientific name was to be preferred as the article title. People who held that attitude rarely bothered to determine which common name was most commonly used when there were multiple common names, failed to check if common names might refer to multiple species (I don't think that will be a major issue with viruses, but there will surely be some case where a common name referred to a species that has since been split into multiple species). And common name titles were sometimes applied arbitrarily with little concern for what topic readers might be searching for: Cardinalidae was at Cardinal (bird) for a long time. While there are some birds called cardinals in another family, all of the cardinals in Cardinalidae are in the genus Cardinalis. The incoming links to Cardinal (bird) that weren't coming from templates almost all intended northern cardinal, which is surely what most readers searching for a bird called cardinal would be looking for.

Using common names as title requires some thought and caution. I don't think the ICTV binomials for human pathogens are good titles, but whatever is the current title for a human pathogen isn't necessarily the best title. Plantdrew (talk) 20:33, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you Graham. I'm sure for most viruses no one much cares, but I agree that for "popular" viruses we should proceed with caution and discourage any well-meaning virus enthusiasts from unduly emphasizing the new names by page moves or rewrites. Where new names do catch on, we can certainly move pages on a case-by-case basis.

It did make me smile to see the Science author quote (now largely inactive) User:Soupvector, who then somehow failed to mention the most important ramification of the naming scheme: the potential for disagreements among Wikipedia editors on official vs. common names. Ajpolino (talk) 21:43, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Quite right @Ajpolino - that should have been top of my mind during that interview, and I wonder whether the writer would have included it? Seriously, I do agree that WP is !news and our articles should reflect actual usage of new terms (not just their invention). (And yes, I should be more active - maybe when I retire a bit...) — soupvector (talk) 22:12, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:NOLABLEAK" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Wikipedia:NOLABLEAK has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 February 24 § Wikipedia:NOLABLEAK until a consensus is reached. TarnishedPath^talk 12:49, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

Peer review of 1993 Four Corners hantavirus outbreak

I have been working on this article for a while to try and bring it up to FA status. It's currently under peer review right now: Wikipedia:Peer review/1993 Four Corners hantavirus outbreak/archive1. If anyone is interesting in contributing, feel free to do so. Input is appreciated. Velayinosu (talk) 00:36, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Inclusion of reverse-transcribing viruses under "DNA virus" and "RNA virus"

I've been writing an update of the DNA virus article and may do RNA virus. I'm wondering if dsDNA-RT viruses should be included in the DNA virus article and if ssRNA-RT viruses should be included in the RNA virus article. Currently they're not included but I can include them. Velayinosu (talk) 01:36, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

Hi Valayinosu, I think yes to both. Graham Beards (talk) 08:23, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

New WikiProject page for CS1 maintenance categories

Bamyers99 added the CS1 maintenance categories to the cleanup listing, but they're getting removed. Fortunately, StefenTower created a list for our group which can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Viruses/CiteMaint. Velayinosu (talk) 02:51, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

Whataroa virus

I started the above article to blue a redlink in another article I recently reviewed (Opifex fuscus). I'm not really familiar with the standards for writing virus "species" articles, so please update and apply fixes, and I'll learn. Cheers, Esculenta (talk) 21:23, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

Removal of economics-focused articles from this project

WhatamIdoing removed Economic impact of HIV/AIDS from the scope of this project. Should all economics-based articles be removed from the project? Here are the ones I found (all COVID-related):

• Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
• Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada
• Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand
• Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Ireland
• Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups
• Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia
• Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines
• Category:Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Ireland
• Category:Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States
• Financial market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

Velayinosu (talk) 00:16, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

I think these should be removed. From the project page (particularly the Aims and FAQ sections), my impression is that the intended scope of the project is primarily virus taxa. Viral diseases are pretty entwined with virus taxa (often virus taxa don't have stand-alone articles, but are only covered in articles about the disease). But going from diseases to articles about particular outbreaks of diseases, to articles about the impacts of the outbreaks is getting pretty far afield. Of course, an argument about getting far afield from the scope of a WikiProject could be applied to other WikiProjects as well, leaving articles with topics that relate to the intersection of several WikiProjects without any WikiProjects where the topic is a core interest of the project (of the projects left on Economic impact of HIV/AIDS, I think Disability, Women's health, and International development are pretty marginal to the topic).

And if there are enough active editors who are interested in seeing a broader scope for WikiProject Viruses, the project page could be rewritten to reflect that. Plantdrew (talk) 01:10, 23 October 2025 (UTC)

Edit request at Talk:SARS-CoV-2#The classification box needs a couple more ranks

Hi, and hope you're well! May I kindly ask someone knowledgeable please help me check the request from three weeks ago at Talk:SARS-CoV-2#The classification box needs a couple more ranks? Please kindly leave any comments there instead of here. Thanks in advanced! Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 21:14, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

Discussion about WikiProject banner templates

For WikiProjects that participate in rating articles, the banners for talk pages usually say something like:

• "This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale."

There is a proposal to change the default wording on the banners to say "priority" instead of "importance". This could affect the template for your group. Please join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council#Proposal to update wording on WikiProject banners. Stefen 𝕋ower ^{Huddle • Handiwerk} 19:52, 6 December 2025 (UTC) (on behalf of the WikiProject Council)

One year of resolving cleanup issues

A project of mine during 2025 was to work on cleanup issues on virus articles using the cleanup listing made by Bamyers99's bot. I started with the categories I felt were the easiest, such as broken anchors and CS1 errors, and for most of the year settled into resolving 20–30 issues per week. Toward the end of the year, I increasingly ran out of "easy" issues to resolve, so in the 3rd week of December I only resolved 10 issues and in the final week just 3. But on the history page you can see just how massive of a decline it was.

On 2024-12-31, there were 1644 articles on the listing out of 4958 total, with 3625 issues. There was a large-scale removal of redirects and other non-articles from 2025-07-08 to 2025-07-15 so that only articles are counted, and a removal of a bunch of articles from the scope of the Virus WikiProject from 2025-10-28 to 2025-11-11. Using some basic math to subtract the articles removed from this WikiProject (probably not fully accurate), there were around 1564 articles with issues at the start of the year out of around 3722 articles that are currently covered by the Virus WikiProject, ~42.02%. On the final listing of the year, 2025-12-30, there are 915 issues on 3802 articles, ~24.07%. So about 17.95% virus articles were "cleaned" of issues tracked by the cleanup listing. The number of virus articles with cleanup issues on them declined by more than 600 and the number of cleanup issues by more than 1,300 from ~3,400 to 2080.

Many categories were eliminated: Self-contradictory articles, Vague or ambiguous geographic scope, Weasel words, Categories needed, External link cleanup, Link rot cleanup, Orphaned articles, Pages with broken anchors, Disputed statements, Spam cleanup, Weasel-worded phrases, all CS1 errors, Failed verification, Harv and Sfn no-target errors, and Reference errors.

Many other categories were nearly eliminated: Clarification needed, Vague or ambiguous time, Notability unclear, Minor POV problems, Original research, Peacock terms, Accuracy disputes or self-published, Cites no sources, and Incomplete citations. Some of these categories actually were eliminated, but newer issues were added to the cleanup listing that aren't "easy" to resolve, so I left them alone.

Many other categories have been reduced down to a manageable level, most notably Dead external links, which was over 300 at the start of the year and is now down to 20 "hard" ones to resolve. Anytime a new dead link appears, it's easily spotted and usually resolved.

If you look at the graph on the cleanup listing history page, you'll see a large spike that occurred on 2025-07-08, which was immediately eliminated. This was the addition and removal of CS1 maintenance categories to the cleanup listing. The cleanup listing bot does not track these issues anymore, but another bot does and has a listing here. Like CS1 errors, CS1 maintenance categories are easy to resolve, so I have been able to keep this listing under control. Inactive DOIs are the exception since I don't know how to resolve them.

The result of all this effort is that virus articles as a whole are a lot "cleaner" at the end of 2025 than they were at the start of 2025. I will try to continue to chip away at cleanup issues in 2026 but at a slower rate. There aren't many "easy" issues to resolve anymore, i.e. the remaining ones are more time consuming, and there are other things I want to do. But hopefully the line will go down in 2026 like it did in 2025.

Velayinosu (talk) 02:31, 31 December 2025 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Hepatitis C

Hepatitis C has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. C679 10:17, 5 March 2026 (UTC)