Talk:Zonkey (zebroid)

message: Colchester Zoo claim to have bred the first of these, and they call it a "Zeedonk", perhaps the article should be there?  -- sannse (talk) 18:05, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I've gone for Zeedonk, it's the spelling the BBC and Colchester use for the option that's most popular on Google - the others are all redirects of course - sannse (talk) 18:29, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: I've done some reading around on-line, and every mention I can find on this issue says that they are sterile - I've removed the contradictory sentence in the first paragraph -- sannse (talk) 22:59, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You might have to remove the bit about the odd number of chromosomes as the article mule states that donkeys have 62 chromosomes while the article zorse mentions the same number regarding zebras. This, of course, would leave us with the question where the infertility really comes from.  –  Korako 09:54, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The zebra article says that "Grevy's zebra has 46 chromosomes; plains zebras have 44 chromosomes and mountain zebras have 32 chromosomes". However this article says "the zebra has between 44 and 62 (depending on species)". Unfortunately there is no citation for either. Through googling I found this link, which includes a table from a 1971 book Genetics of the Horse which agrees with the zebra article. Does anybody object to me change the the contradictory in in this article so it agrees with the zebra article? --Bytor (talk) 17:58, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

text: Please see my updated numbers on Google references in the "rename as ZONKEY" posting below.  — Lisasmall 13:25, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Title of Article / Colchester Zoo

message: I didn't know a zonkey was a real animal until I did a search on the term.  I beleived much as Tonight Show Staff probably did - that the author mispelled the word donkies.  I thought it an interesting bit of trivia.
JesseG 00:49, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Headlines

message: I had a long discussion with Admin Goatasaur tonight about the pending rename of this article.  We mused a very long time over whether zedonk, the name preferred by breeders, should be used instead of zonkey, the name preferred by the general public.  Here are the Google statistics from February 8 and tonight:
* zonkey=25,500 on Feb 8; today: 19,500 & 227 images (Y=4,620)(L=3,190)
* zedonk=11,000 on Feb 8; today: 10,200 & 95 images (Y=1,140)(L=975) 
* zeedonk=670 on Feb 8;   today: 689 & 45 images (Y=917)(L=1,280)
* zebrass=892 on Feb 8;   today: 23,300 & 82 images (Y=1,090)(L=1,710)
* zebronkey=857 on Feb 8; today: 712 & 3 images (Y=223)(L=232)
Y=Yahoo & L=Lycos.  Admin Elf and I both repeated the search after Feb 8 and got varying numbers, though the rank order didn't change.  Goatasaur explained that it depends on which servers Google happens to be using at the moment Google runs a particular search; that's why figures bounce around.  The sudden and incongruous 2,612% rise in "zebrass" appears to be an anomaly:
*it's not consistent with the Feb 8th numbers or the times I've checked since
*it's not consistent with the image frequency 
*it's not consistent with its rank position if the comparative searches are done in Yahoo or Lycos in lieu of Google
*checking the images' captions, "zebrass" often seems to reflect non-English speakers' attempts to pluralize "zebra" -- but not 23,000 times, surely, and that doesn't explain why it turned up in today's count and not in the count a month ago.
*there is a funk/soul/disco band called ZeBrass, also spelled Ze-Brass, that is producing hits on "zebrass" tonight but again, no explanation for why today and not in February.  
In any case, the use of "zonkey" is generally twice to four times as common as the use of "zedonk."  The Wiki policy quoted by Elf above is Wikipedia:Naming conventions: "Names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors; and for a general audience over specialists."  That, in combo with the stats, seems to suggest that the common usage, "zonkey," should take precedence over the breeders' preferred term, "zedonk."  I plan to request a move later this week after  a few days for anyone who has a differing opinion to weigh in here.
Sounds more than reasonable to me!
I know I didn't really contribute to this discussion, but it's been a while since anyone has commented, and it seems to me that consensus has be met that the article should be moved to Zonkey (which I agree with), so I'm going to go ahead and move the article and redirect articles linking to Zeedonk. —Mears man 05:36, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Title of Article; Renaming Update 

message: "Zeedonks are very rare." [...] "In South Africa they are called zonkeys and are fairly common where zebras and donkeys are found in proximity to each other." - which is it? --McGeddon 09:36, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rarity contradiction 

message: * 17:34, 3 June 2004‎  moved to 
* 18:12, 13 June 2004‎‎  moved to 
* 14:19, 17 December 2007‎  moved to  per talk
Also:
* Zenkey
Ngram – hmm, I wonder if Wikipedia is responsible for the post-Y2K divergence; before the millennium there were two close competitors. wbm1058 (talk) 03:15, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  This sure has a lot of names