Talk:Helianthodae

First aid needed
The article may be a mere stub, but it doesn't have to be confused. I'm no expert, but taxonomic groups are more nearly "invented" than "discovered". Also, is the term Heliantheae used in the same sense in the text and in the box? DCDuring (talk) 13:42, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Propose merge into Asteroideae article
As far as I can tell from Proposed_article_mergers this is a "type 2" merger, to be discussed here but which doesn't require a large amount of elaborate process (perhaps with a touch of the "type 3" but keep reading on that).

The case for this merger is pretty simple: the supertribe is well covered at Asteroideae and this article is a short stub without a lot of need to expand it.

As for *how* to do the merger: (1) I don't see any text which needs to be moved over, (2) I suppose I'd copy over the first two references (the third is already cited in Asteroideae), (3) the trickiest part of the merge appears to be taxoboxes, so I'll write about that in the next paragraph, (4) no need to merge history - we'd make this page a redirect to Asteroideae and do some of the stuff with talk pages and the like described at Merging.

Right now at least some taxoboxes under Helianthodae list family, subfamily, supertribe, tribe, and then genus. I'm proposing we'd want to change that to family, maybe subfamily, tribe, genus. I don't know if we have an exact guideline about how many levels to put in a taxobox but often family to genus is enough, although in Asteraceae I'd argue for tribe at least, just not necessarily all three of subfamily, supertribe, and tribe. As for how to do this, I didn't look at every affected article but as one test I tried removing "display_parents = 3" from Dahlia and got what struck me as a reasonable default: family, tribe, and genus. The automatic taxobox system does seem to be reasonably well able to deal with taxa which are not (normally) listed in taxoboxes, so on the whole it seems we don't need to make huge changes to the taxonomy templates just because the articles get merged.

If we want to merge the articles but still list both subfamily and supertribe in the taxobox I suppose we could and the supertribe link would be a link to a redirect to Asteroideae. Not sure I'd love this as a long term situation (depending, I suppose, on how many places it shows up) but I'm not sure it is terrible either. And if we have some degree of agreement about where we are headed we may or may not be able to get there all at once.

Anyway, this merge struck me as simpler when I was just looking at the content of the articles and whether I thought Helianthodae was likely to grow into a large article which couldn't be well covered by a section of the Asteroideae article, and I guess that is still my overall reaction, but also would be interested in hearing from people who have experience with how we have handled this elsewhere in wikipedia, whether it is too much trouble to try to merge anything, etc. Kingdon (talk) 05:15, 15 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Maybe not immediately relevant, but a big Compositae system systematics book is available for download. Lavateraguy (talk) 14:32, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Well now you've done it. How am I supposed to have time to edit Wikipedia (or my other hobbies or duties, for that matter), with that to distract me? Kingdon (talk) 03:19, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
 * My initial reaction was that as a large and diverse clade Helianthodae deserves an article. But having skimmed through bits of the book (I originally stumbled across the book when looking into a difficult to identify, even to family - post-flowering - South African composite), the morphologically distinctive clade is the Helianthae alliance, which argues somewhat against the notability of Helianthodae. The other obvious thing to add here would be a cladogram showing the relationships between its constituent tribes, but that could equally well be added to Asteroideae.
 * A superficial examination of the literature suggests to me that the supratribal classification of Asteroideae is not robust, the problem being the position of Doronicum and thereby the monophyly of Senecionodae. Several more recent studies don't sample Doronicum, which makes them uninformative on this subject. A paywalled paper has Doronicum sister to Calenduleae (with surprisingly Calenduleae outside of Asterodae); another recovers Doronicum as sister to Senecioneae, but with very weak support; a third has Doronicum basal in Asteroideae. Lavateraguy (talk) 10:36, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
 * I didn't do a careful look at what the different sources included in each group but my superficial glance was that Helianthae alliance and Helianthodae are the same thing, with the literature being more likely to call it the former (perhaps because they don't want to commit on Asterodae, Senecionodae, and/or new supertribes if needed, perhaps because they don't prefere Linnean names for these groups, perhaps some other reason as they don't usually say why). The question about Doronicum does seem to be mentioned at Asteroideae and I added a sentence at Doronicum. As for the proposed merge, a non-robust supratribal classification of Asteroideae would tend to argue in favor of the merge but I guess I'd lean towards the merge even if the classification were fully established. I mean, I'm making a bit of a guess about how much content we're likely to get on Wikipedia (we wouldn't want as much as in Systematics, Evolution and Biogeography of the Compositae, or at least not written quite that way), and I suppose the articles could in theory be expanded a lot, but I'm assuming the next eight years is likely to be like the last eight, with a quantity of writing which would fit nicely in a combined article. Kingdon (talk) 16:03, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 * There's no guarantee of consistency between sources, but my understanding is that Helianthodae includes Inuleae and Athroismeae and the Helianthae alliance doesn't. Regardless I think you might as well go ahead with the merge. Lavateraguy (talk) 17:31, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Closed. I have done the merge. Please let me know and/or be WP:BOLD and fix loose ends if there is something I didn't get right about how to merge; I tried to follow the instructions at Merging Kingdon (talk) 06:40, 19 February 2022 (UTC)