Talk:Messor (ant genus)

Untitled
The superfamily is not at all superfluous in an article about a subfamily. Domains and subkingdoms are less important, but I don't see what's wrong with being precise. Useful factual imformtion is being succintly conveyed in a way that would be impractical in a conventional encyclopaedia - however, this is not a conventional encyclopaedia. 62.64.130.105 16:23, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The problem is most of these ranks aren't useful, and aren't necessarily factual. First, there are many different ways to cut up the animal kingdom and arthropod phylum, so these intermediate ranks are only semi-standard. At some point we have to put something, but we don't have to use infraclass Neoptera and subkingdom Metazoa everywhere. Second, they don't tell us anything about Messor. Everyone who knows what Metazoa means will know it includes Arthropoda, who knows what Endopterygota means will know it includes Hymenoptera. As a result, this provides less information about Messor and more about semi-standard groups, and this is not an appropriate place for that. We agreed to leave such ranks out on WikiProject Tree of Life. I'll leave in the superfamily, though I don't think it's really informative to repeat it on every ant genus page, when a single mention on ant would do as well. Josh 18:56, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)