Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life/Archive 1

Can I make some suggestions to the standard template?


 * 1) References should go at the end.  Most people who find an article, after all, either won't be interested in them, will only be interested in them for fact checking, or will be interested in them as a source of additional information.  Actual information we have here should come first.
 * 2) Problems should be dropped.  In the event that a group has variable composition, we shouldn't give one particular version as if it's standard and then explain that only some people use it, we should explain the different circumscriptions that the group has.
 * 3) We should add that the placement should only consist of principal ranks, i.e. class but not subclass, or at least should leave out any ranks which are not standard.  The subkingdoms Deuterostomia and Tracheobionta got repeated too many times, and I think it is simply making life difficult to repeatedly point out that every order of mammals except the monotremes are Eutherians.
 * 4) If the common name and scientific name are the same, then by golly, treat them as such.  After all, they refer to exactly the same thing!

Thanks, Josh


 * These are all good points. "Problems" was there as a first attempt to deal with the cladistics issue, but that approach has gotten nowhere.  I mostly agree with 3, but there will be times when the secondary ranks will be useful.  Eclecticology, Friday, July 12, 2002


 * I think that the references (at least taxonomy references) should go in the table after the children list, and the link text should be suitably abbreviated. Also ITIS TSNs should not be used unless the reference is ITIS; in firefly, for instance, ITIS is not the reference and in fact had a genus misspelled. ITIS numbers are meaningless outside ITIS. -phma

Trillium chloropetalum rubrum has a trinomial name, but a Binomial name link. How should we handle subspecies and varieties? -phma

Put them in with the species, perhaps under distinct headers:
 * Subspecies (ssp., subsp.),
 * Varieties (var.),
 * Forms (forma, f.)
 * Hybrids, (Genus species x species)(Genus x species)
 * Cultivars (Genus species 'Cultivar'), cv.

and such. Or leave as is, but put in a link from the species -page. -Henriette 09Sep02

Hello all, I think I've understood the problems around Wandering Jew but I'm not certain. Could you look it over and see? Thanks, --KQ (an English major and film student, not a biologist).

user:Caltrop has noted some problems at Indridae. Taxonomists and biologists, help? --KQ

The All Species Foundation has a very similiar goal and a useful search engine. Maybe the participants of this WikiProject could coordinate efforts with them. -- Stephen Gilbert 03:47 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

Hello all. I am new here. I have read several of the pages discussing taxonomy, biology and naming conventions, etc. I am not a biologist IANAB, I am a systems analyst and database analyst.

I believe you have a problem with the taxo-table you plan to place on each page. If you include live hyperlinks to the higher levels (domain,kingdom) from the lower levels (genus,species)then the scheme will not scale.

To see what I mean go the article for Plant or Animal and follow the What links here link. These pages are already too long to be useful. Imagine what they will be like when we have tens of thousands of plants and animals. I recommend that the only live links on a Species article should be Genus and Family. From Genus, live links should go no higher than Class, from Family the live links cound go all the way to Domain with little or no scaling problems.

Gary Curtis 11:00 25 Feb 2003 UTC

Welcome! This is an inherent scalability problem with any popular Wikipedia page. For example there are thousands of pages linked to United States and tens of thousands linked to square kilometre. So the length of the 'What links here' list shouldn't dictate whether or not we provide convenient navigation links in our articles. If anything the 'What links here' feature has the scalability problem and not any set of articles - that feature should eventually be revamped to address the scalability problem. --mav 18:32 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

This page does not seem to have been touched in a while. The stuff concerning the page arrangement I am not especially interested in, since it's entirely "database management" stuff and doesn't seem to get used that often anyways. However, the taxoboxes are used all over the place, and are actually pretty cool. This seems like it should be the place where the standards for those are maintained, right? Currently it doesn't even acknowledge the six-kingdom scheme that we've shifted to. Yes, I know that would be easy to change. What I'm wondering is if this is the place to do it.

Other concerns. The articles on most of the ranks (phylum, class, etc) have all been changed to redirect to Scientific classification, which seems pretty reasonable given how much content would be available to them. In that case, having them all linked is redundant and distracts from the actual information available at the highest and lowest level ranks. Having only some ranks linked might be awkward, but is there really much justification for linking any of them at all, when the scientific classification page allows one to access all the relevant information?

Also, it occurs to me that having an extra row in the tables giving the derivation of the taxon's name might be useful. It is, after all, something that applies to all groups, is often interesting, but rarely fits well into discussion. Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

--Josh


 * Yep, this page should be updated to reflect the 6-kingdom scheme and is also the place where the taxobox standards are kept. IMO now that most of the taxon articles are redirected to scientific classification there is no point in linking to any of them in the table (so long as scientific classification is linked). This will only tend to make the tables more attractive anyway. I'm not sure if it is such a good idea to place derivation information in the table since many of these derivations will need more space than we should allow in the table. Having this information in a 'discovery section' in the body text would probably be better and/or for short derivations additional text can be added in the parenthesis that already contain the scientific name (I do this in the history sections of each element article; see lithium). --mav

Aside from the references, this page still hasn't been touched in a while. I think it would be more useful if it were changed to reflect practices actually used in wikipedia - in particular, with the obsolete structure section removed - and maybe changed into a more user-friendly set of guidelines. Would anyone strenuously object to such changes? Suggestions as to which of our taxoboxes are model examples would also be helpful.

Just popping by... :-) I've seen many different types of article opening that give the latin name and genus (or whatever it's called); the one at rhubarb I found particularly nice:


 * 'Rhubarb' (Rheum Rhaponticum, Polygonaceae) is a perennial plant ...

-- Tarquin 09:18 Mar 8, 2003 (UTC)

There are many HTML errors in the tables on this page. I hope no one is taking them as model examples. --Zundark 10:02 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)


 * Instead of complaining, perhaps you should go and correct it. I have corrected the HTML errors in the actual page source; however, there are more errors that are generated by the actual Wikipedia software. (Quite disappointing, really.) -- Timwi 10:28 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)


 * My way of fixing such a mass of errors would involve stripping out all the needless end tags which make it difficult to see what's going on. But some people are very insistent about the use of unnecessary end tags, and I don't feel like getting flamed for fixing someone's broken tables, so I thought that putting a comment on the talk page was the safest option. (The HTML errors caused by the Wikipedia software can probably be circumvented. I may have a go later.) --Zundark 10:56 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)


 * The particular error caused by the software that I'm talking about is that it renders pentuple-apostrophes (i.e. combined bold and italic) as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Of course, the end tags should be in a reversed order. I'm sure this can be circumvented by adding additional spaces between the apostrophe groups, but a much cleaner solution would be to fix the broken source code, so I'm doing that now. - As for end tags in table rows/cells, I don't have very strong opinions about them, but many web gurus consider XHTML the future, and XHTML requires them, so putting them in now makes migration to XHTML later easier. -- Timwi 11:34 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)


 * Migration to XHTML will involve writing a conversion script to convert everything, and this will work better without unnecessary end tags. (What I mean is that unnecessary end tags cause many errors in tables, and these are bound to cause problems for the conversion script, which will have to guess what the correct code is supposed to be. Tables without unnecessary end tags will be easy for the conversion script.) I hope, however, that before we convert to XHTML (if we ever do), Wikipedia will have converted to using wiki markup for everything - it's too much to expect people to type correct XHTML when they can't even type correct HTML. --Zundark 12:03 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)


 * You have a point there. Indeed, I too am anxiously looking forward to a Wiki markup for tables. -- Timwi 12:23 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

-

Families/Genera - singular or plural
I couldn't find any accepted policy on wether the article names for families or genera should be in singular or plural. As long as they are just the latin names it's no problem, but how about if it has a common name. This becomes a real problem if it has a species with the same name, as e.g. the Mole Salamander (Ambystoma talpoideum) is a member of the family Ambystomatidae, usually referred to as the Mole Salamanders - but it is not the only species of it. In external sources they are usually given in plural, and at least the latin family name is a plural as well. andy 23:13, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Animal taxa have always been in singular case here. I consider this a good idea. The guideline in German wikipedia to place families in plural case and species in singular case and genera sometimes in plural and sometimes in singular case is often leading to a complete confusion of duplicate articles and inconsistencies. So in my view it is the best solution to place everything in singular case. -- Baldhur 08:53, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I think those (common) article names for families/genera should be in plural if possible to avoid problems. Sometimes common names for families are (in singular) the same as a Latin name for a genus like Agamas for Agamidae (family) and Agama (genus).
 * Jurriaan 08:54, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I tend to oppose that. Most users will search for the information in the Agamas article; they are probably less interested in a list of scientific species names. Unfortunately they probably won't find the information under Agamas, if they previously searched for Agama. We have disambiguation pages in order to point users to a page, if family and genus are ambiguous. At least you should point from the Agama page to the Agamas page in another way than the expert-only Agamidae link. -- Baldhur 10:30, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Well, you are right that the Agama article is still far from complete and should also point to the Agamas article in a "non expert way" too. Yet that was not my point. My point is that if you would use a name in singular for the family name (so let's assume the Agamas article would have been called Agama), what name would you use for the article on the genus Agama? I would like to discuss a standardized solution for these kind of problemsJurriaan 11:15, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Agama (genus). Common names should get the benefit of the simplest article names, for lay readers, and scientific readers will be perfectly happy with hordes of disambiguators, obscure links, redirs, etc, that being how the scientific literature looks. :-) The "(genus)" disambiguator is already being used by a bunch of articles too. Stan 14:53, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * What about Mole salamander (family) for the family level where this is ambiguous? or Mole salamander family. But I do think there are many cases where the so-called common name is less commonly used than the scientific one and we should just use the scientific name. WormRunner 17:33, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I agree with the above proposals by Stan and WormRunner. It should be Agama (genus) and Agama, with Agama containing the family details. The salamanders should be placed under Mole Salamander (for the genus) and either Mole Salamander (family) or Ambystomatid (in accordance with articles like Icterid) for the family. -- Baldhur 08:15, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

In practice, I've tended to use singular for bird groups, and this seems to work reasonably well. The worst that can normally happen is that someone ends up at a family page eg nightjar, rather directly at the expected Nightjar. The only time I've had a real problem with this was distinguishing Wood Warbler, Phylloscopus sibilitrix, from the American wood warblers, Vireonidae.

I know that the parrot articles include a parrot (family) article, but this is an exception. There are now at least 250 bird articles at order, family and genus level, plus probably at least 800 on individual species, so as far as the birds are concerned, any changes would present a major challenge.

One advantage of the capitalisation convention for birds, is that, for example, barn owl, family Tytonidae, is a different article but links to Barn Owl Tyto alba. jimfbleak

A related factor is that moves away from Eurocentricity in bird names mean that species formerly called the Swallow, Wheatear or Kingfisher, now have qualifiers, such as Barn Swallow, Northern Wheatear etc. Again, the old name will get there in the end, via a group article such as wheatear. Jim

I'm a bit late in the day (very busy of late) but there is a standard policy on group names: to use the singular. This is something that follows naturally from the overall Wikipedia policy that we always use the singular for article titles unless there is a very good reason not to. I'm not entirely convinced that this is the best policy (there are good reasons both for and against) but it would be a huge job to change it now, and I think it would run into significant opposition from other 'pedia contributors (i.e., people who don't normally contribute to the fauna articles). Their argument (and on the whole, I agree with it) would be that the singular is the easiest form to make natural links to, and that almost all the other 'pedia articles are titled in the singular.

Good points made above by Stan, Jim and others.

I think we need to remain flexible, however. I think I've use plural titles twice, in both cases to avoid clumsy and ugly disambiguation titles. One was the article on echidnas, which I renamed to get rid of the horrible echidna (animal) it was previously under. I couldn't use the plain and obvious echidna because that points to an article about the astronomical constellation. Although the animal is far better known (and thus would normally claim the primary article under standard Wikipedia disambiguation rules), it was named after the constellation (I think) and this rather changes things. Besides, this was easy, practical, and non-controversial.

I think we should also be prepared to use the plural where there is an actual conflict. Imagine, for example, that someone decided to split emu into an article about the sole surviving member of the group (the Emu), and another article about the emu family (Emu, Tasmanian Emu, King Island Emu, and so on). Then, it might make sense to have Emu and emus, rather than something seriously ugly like Emu (bird) and emu (family).

Last point: please don't take parrot (family) and parrot (order) as a precedent! It's a horrible way to disambiguate and every time I look at it I try to think of a neater, less ugly way to do it. (Yes, I know I was the fool who did it in the first place, but I plead not being able to think of anything else.)

Tannin 13:36, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)