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 <strong><em>...</strong></em>. 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)