Lum, Taylor, and Zidek have proposed a revised procedure for wood species grouping in ASTM standard D 1990. We applaud the authors' recognition of the importance of considering a strength distribution's variability as well as its fifth percentile. However, we have concerns about their proposed method of incorporating this information into a standard. We detail these concerns in this paper. We also provide both theoretical and empirical arguments that sug-gest that revisions of the standard should not be based on a two-parameter Weibull assumption.