Talk:Endemic

Elm Trees
pedantic correction: last sentence of (otherwise excellent) definition "Endemic in biology and ecology..." contains a redundancy: also.....as well.

On a more 'on-topic' note, I think it is unfortunate that "endemic" is so often used in general contexts (ie not strict biology and ecology)in the sense of "characteristic of an area or population", because in such contexts it could equally well mean "not found elsewhere", which is quite different in meaning. This would not matter were it not frequently the case that the context will not assist in deciding between the alternative meanings.

"Warfare was not endemic to North Island tribes at this time" could either mean that "Warfare was not restricted to Northern tribes", or it could mean that "Warfare was only an intermittent feature of Northern tribal life."

The formulation using endemic seems to be to add nothing to either of the alternatives I quote, which are each unambiguous. Leaving this to one side, they also avoid fancy words, hence will be more universally understood.

The list concerns me because its a percentage thing; e.g. a place has three species, two of which are endemic so it has the world's highest percentage of endemic species, even though it's only two plant species. What about New Guinea which has an estimated 16,000 species 124 genera of which are endemic; and the western half (most isolated from Australia) is being wiped out via deforestation and various other Indonesian activities.[-- Daeron 18:33, 6 May 2004 (UTC)]

I can't see any thing to be gained from disambiguation - all the current items are examples of the use of the same basic word, and the page is'nt over long. Who's going to fix all the redirects? jimfbleak 12:44, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Well, I have ;-)
 * James F. (talk) 00:20, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I'd like to say it was a team effort, but it was mostly James (he even provided the G&T). ((But I got the pizza.)) More to the point, since they're now two separate articles, I felt a little freer to expand on the epidemiology bit (no longer trespassing on someone else's lovingly crafted ecology section), making it clear that there is a very real difference between the two uses of the word, what with endemic being a mathematical concept in epidemiology 'nall. And ecology can expand a little too now, if it likes. :-) --Viki 00:36, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Propose rename, redirect
I just did a couple hundred more disambiguation edits of endemic. I would recommend renaming this page to "endemic (disambiguation)", redirecting "endemic" to endemism, and putting the "endemic redirects here" template on endemism as well as the "for other uses see endemic (dab)". I would say 92% of links to endemic are for endemism, with 7% of the remaining for diseases and 1% for non-technical usage which shouldn't be linked anyway since that is just linking to a plain English word (WP:CONTEXT. Obviously the dab linking for endemic is a recurring problem, and doing the redirect to endemism would make it go away for the most part. AdamMorton 06:08, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Not used in place of epidemic
The article is incorrect; people do not use "endemic" mistakenly substituting it for "epidemic"; when one says "corruption is endemic" somewhere, the implication is that it is deeply rooted, hard to extirpate -- that corruption is so rife it constitutes part of the fabric of society. That seems to me much closer to the biological meaning than the article implies. 74.65.208.91 (talk) 05:57, 5 January 2011 (UTC)