Talk:Social animal

Question
Not familiar with claims of sociality for horses and penguins. Can you provide a ref?Annelefolio (talk) 16:32, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Is that a joke? JamesBWatson (talk) 16:41, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Trivialization
I am doing some research on gregarious species. I had hoped this research would be furthered by reference to Wiki. However, in this case I was wrong. All entries on Wiki regarding gregarious species have been dumbed down into a muddle headed concept of "social" or "sociability".

To be clear, there are a number of applications of the word "gregarious". Some of these are popular and correlate well with the normal usage of the word "social". One dictionary definition describing this aspect of the word is: "Seeking and enjoying the company of others; sociable.". HOWEVER the word "gregarious" is at its root a technical term not a lay one, originating I believe in biology and botany. A dictionary definition of this use is: "Tending to move in or form a group with others of the same kind".

In common with all words the word "gregarious" (in its technical form) has a fuzzy boundary. However the word enables a distiction to be made clearly between those species that are gregarious, eg Bison or Hyena or Ants, and those that are not e.g. Leopards or Polar beers or Bumble bees. Clearly a "company" in this definition given above does not refer to a birth family that lasts only until the maturity of the offspring, nor to the very small groups of siblings that may last for a while after separation from the birth family.

The word "Social" is an entirely inadequate substitute for the word "Gregarious". Through this growing (?) tendency of Wikipedia to conflate concepts in a search for some sort of standardized or idealistic vanilla philosophical view / approach to information, Wikipedia seems to me set in train a seriously damaging tendency to its core value as a neutral source of high quality information.

LookingGlass (talk) 08:15, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

By all means, feel free to make whatever changes you need to draw these lines of distinction. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to extend the effort to make it right, and it will stand.

DrBurningBunny (talk) 20:51, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Conference?
Is it really necessary to have the section on the year 2000 conference on social animals? It doesn't seem to add anything other than the fact that the findings were published in a book. So what? 86.178.150.109 (talk) 14:26, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
 * You are quite right! I have removed the section.  Lova Falk     talk   16:01, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

What about temporary societies?
This article clearly suffers from multiple issues. One that occurs to me is that it indicates on several occasions that 'social' refers only to permanent groups. What about temporary groups? One example is elephants where the males form seperate groups until mating season when they join female groups and leave again at the end of the season. Surely these should be considered 'social animals'.__DrChrissy (talk) 18:20, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Move lists within this article
There are two lists in this article "Incomplete list of invertebrates showing social behaviour" and "Incomplete list of vertebrates showing social behaviour" which I believe should be moved to two seperate articles. This is because I believe it is general policy for articles not to contain extensive lists, and these lists are clearly incomplete and major expansion at some point seems inevitable. For instance, to list "spiders" is rather misleading given the range of social systems spiders have. By having a separate list, expansion would be possible without detracting from this current article.__DrChrissy (talk) 10:02, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Purpose
This article reads as a hasty essay, very poorly cited and barely maintained, which attempts (I think) to do the job of the existing, far better cited article Sociality. That article correctly identifies multiple degrees of sociality, all the way up to Eusociality, also a decent article. This article has been tagged for citations for five years without effect, and basically it is a poor WP:FORK without a niche or purpose. I shall boldly redirect it now, hope everyone's ok with that. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:47, 16 April 2018 (UTC)