User talk:Wikiskimmer/eukaryotic taxonomy

hmm slime mould has some major flaws
from talk:slime mould

there are two major groups: plasmodial slime molds:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodial_Slime_Mold

not alot of info there.

and cellular slime molds: split by wiki into: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrasiomycota and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyosteliomycota

i see, this is a redirect for mycetazoa

woops and then we have another dictyostelid page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyostelid

how much more can i find?

anyway: the intro to THIS general wiki describes ONLY the cellular slime molds. then in types it describes both plasmodial and cellular, but it does not give the correct link to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodial_Slime_Mold

It looks like quite a mess. would someone like to help me find all the scattered wikis and we can clean it up? i don't quite know yet all the procedures for deleting and redirecting.Wikiskimmer 11:09, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
 * What do you have in mind for the slime mould page? I think it would be a mistake to make one article from all the current ones. I recently created acrasin and was thinking about adding to this from some of the other articles and tidying up, so I'd be happy to take from your lead. MattOates (Ulti) 13:59, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I've found a nest of over half a dozen pages and even more terms without wikis that are all confused. i am making a map of them all and will present a proposal.


 * how do i find all the people who might want to be involved and where do i post it?Wikiskimmer 19:35, 1 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, i've gone and done a major edit. i've made the slime mould page about myxogastria, protostelia, and dictyosteliida.  I put only a small discussion of dictyosteliida because i refer to the excellent aricle Dictyosteliida.  In the intro and in the description of different types i described the three other groups that are sometimes called slime moulds.  i added some links to 3 species accounts.  i suspect there are more in the wiki system.  we can hunt.


 * I unlinked things to the Dictyosteliomycota because that page sucks compared to the Dictyosteliida page. at some point we gotta decide whether to put the acrasid info in here: percolozoa or here: Acrasiomycota.  Neither page has alot of info on acrasids.  hard to find!  i also unlinked some things from the  myxomycota page and linked them to the slime mould page, because the myxo page sucks.Wikiskimmer 05:26, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

my intro to slime mould
Slime mould (or slime mold), is a broad term often referring to roughly 6 groups of Eukaryotes. The taxonomy is still in flux. Originally, they were considered Fungi, but now they have been split into various groups:

Myxogastria: plasmodial or syncytial slime moulds, Protostelia: smaller plasmodial slime moulds, Dictyosteliida: cellular slime moulds, Acrasidae: similar life style to Dictyostelids, but of uncertain taxonomy Plasmodiophorids: i.e. club root disease of cabbages, Labyrinthulomycetes: slime nets

This article will cover the first two groups which together with the Dictyosteliida, make up the group Mycetozoa.

duplication in eukaryote/cell wikis
from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology

guys i i'm just exploring this wiki thing and i find it very curious indeed! anyway i cleaned up the intro to the eukaryote page and noticed that god knows the rest of it needs a lot of work. then i noticed there is a cell page. alot of duplication.

what should we do? do we want them to remain independant? Wikiskimmer 01:58, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

contradictory mess in eukaryotic groups wikis
from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Prokaryotes and protists

i don't understand this: There should be articles for both phylogenetic and phenotypic groups

i've been finding something of a contradictory mess here. my interest is with the 'protistan' eukaryotes.

look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeboid from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protozoa

but there is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote

and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoebozoa

here is amoeba: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubulinea

ah then there is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protist

and then: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Slime_mould&diff=141780553&oldid=137191012

now i understand the need to discuss:
 * old classification systems so that people can make sense of the old literature
 * competing new ideas in classification.

but these competing WIKIs not only contain classification information, but actual details and examples about the critters. and they are often spotty and contradictory (as in the slime mold case). personally i think this phylogeny thing is a little out of hand. for instance: Lecointre and Guyader's "the tree of life: a phylogentic classification". it makes too much of subtle unique derived features but not enough of the features that actually describe ecologically well founded groups.

i'm thinking that at some low level of classification which is relatively stable, like the traditional protistan phyla, or some next lower level, we can have a single article for each group. then we can multiple articles that point to each other JUST for the competing classification ideas of all these newer fluctuating clades that include these groups.

whatya say? Wikiskimmer 12:12, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

hi stemonitis, i see you reverted my change in the stemonitis article
from user talk:Stemonitis

i changed the link from myxo blabla to slime mould because the myxo article sucked and it all the classification schemes are in flux and i decided to make the slime mould article the main one for the fluctuating grouping containing Stemonitis, and other "plasmodial slime moulds". see my revision of slime mould. If you think we should make Myxomycota the main article for these critters and put in different redirects let me know.

see my comment on the discussion page for slime mould, there is half a dozen pages surrounding this group and fluctuating taxonomy and it's a mess.

how do i get together some people to discuss how to clean it up? the archives on the various project pages bewilder me.Wikiskimmer 14:05, 3 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I just thought that having a link with one taxon name linking to a different taxon was confusing. I do not necessarily believe that one name is better than the other, and I know next to nothing of the higher systematics of the group. As I tried to crowbar into the edit summary, having "Mycetozoa" (and linking it to slime mould) in the taxobox would be fine, as would having "Myxomycota" and linking to Myxomycota. It's only the mixing of the two that I consider undesirable. These areas where the taxonomy and nomenclature are changing are always difficult from an encyclopaedia point of view. Often, it's best to stick with a slightly out-dated taxonomy if it provides the stability that we need. It also makes it easier to find the necessary references, since there's often next to no secondary literature about more recently erected taxa. In any event, the articles should explain the different possibilities. The talk page of the article slime mould has been tagged by WikiProject Microbiology, so that might be a decent place to get a discussion going. I don't know of any other applicable projects except WP:TOL, which has a vast remit. Finally, the poor quality of an article is not usually a reason to remove links to it, but rather a reason to improve that article. --Stemonitis 14:19, 3 July 2007 (UTC)


 * how about if i just turn myxomycota into a redirect to slime mould. there's nothing of valuue in the myxomycota article.  or rename slime mould mycetozoa and have everything redirect to that?
 * i think all this phylogeny in flux will flumox us. all the old categories were of course artificial, life is a tangled bush of 100million branches with no well defined levels, but at least the old categories were fairly stable for human life times.  For PhD students looking for a new organism to grind dna out of it's a fine game, but for an encyclopedia we need stable catagories.


 * my preference is to find the most stable units, like the 6 i identified in the slime mold article and  put the biology in each one of them.  then you can have a nest of fluctuating taxo pages pointing to each other...Wikiskimmer
 * i don't see much discussion in WikiProject Microbiology and that strikes me as being focussed on medical. WikiProject Prokaryotes and protists seems most appropriate but is inactive.  do i want to read the 20 archives in TOL discussion to see if there is a consensus?  argghhhhWikiskimmer 14:48, 3 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Like I say, I don't know much about the higher taxonomy, so if the two are reasonably synonymous, then redirecting one to the other might make sense. If, on the other hand, they represent two competing hypotheses about the evolution of the group, then separate articles may be warranted. The fact that there are no inbound links to Talk:Slime mould (and not even a page at Talk:Myxomycota) suggests quite strongly that the topic has not been discussed much. --Stemonitis 16:06, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

some more exploration and rambling about wiki pages
wiki slime mold:

TRY AGAIN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protozoa points to eukaryotes, protists, amoeboid, slime mould

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protist which has taxo box for

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excavate with link to percolozoa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolozoa which lists Acrasidae as one of them, but no hotlink, it has a paragraph that fairly well distinguishes them from disctyostelids

and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoebozoa

and text: heterolobosea: redlink: Acrasis

and in body links to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoebozoa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeboid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellate (which is old and a mess)

from eukaryote we goto: (hey you know on the eukaryote page, instead of all the crazy classifications, link to a brute list of 80 different major euk groups and leave the classification in flux)

link to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protist in text it has [Rhizaria]] containing various other amoeboids

Amoebozoa containing lobose amoeba and slime molds

taxobox is diff than protist taxobox! has http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoebozoa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excavata

now to find all articles to slime molds:

amoebozoa points to mycetozoa which redirects to slime molds

Amoeboid  points to lobose: slime moulds

[slime moulds]]gets us to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomycota called slime fungi has redlink to plasmodial taxobox lists only 4 classes Ceratiomyxomycetes Echinosteliomycetes Myxogasteromycetes Stemonitomycetes

see also links to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrasiomycota who's taxobox puts it in redlink: Discicristates

and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyosteliomycota

types paragraph plasmodial: redlinks to myxogastrids and total screw up: plasmodia links to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodia which is a totally different creature

par on evolution (!?!) describes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyostelid

says similar life styles are found in acrasids which links to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolozoa which mentions them only in passing.

plasmodial slime mold redirects to  myxomycota http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodial_Slime_Mold =myxomycota? same article odd

Sow how many ACTUAL articles on the boogers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold which is longer but a mess!

has taxobox for Protostelia Protosteliida Myxogastria Liceida Echinosteliida Trichiida Stemonitida Physarida Dictyostelia Dictyosteliida    OK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomycota which is a disaster!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrasiomycota which is pretty tiny, has old taxobox and doesn't really distinguish from dictostelids

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrasid = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolozoa which doesnt really say much about acrasids per se

oh, in the HISTORY of slime mold wiki we get myxomycota which sends us to: see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyosteliomycota which aint great, but at least describes the boogers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyostelid is The Best article of the bunch. but what links to it?

its taxobox says its in mycetozoa which brings us to slime molds who's taxobox DOES link to it dictyosteliid (two diff spellings)

ok none are mentioned in fungi