Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life

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Taxa named by ... et al.?

We have categories for Taxa named by [individual author]. What do we do with taxa that have multiple authors, or that have so many authors that are often authored as [first author] et al.? Do we only refer to the first author, or to all of them, each in their own category of course? — Snoteleks (talk) 10:19, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Each in their own category (if every author even needs a category), it's pretty rare that the exact combination and order of authors have published multiple names, so such category would usually contain a single article, which is of little use. FunkMonk (talk) 11:19, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Honestly not that rare when it comes to insects and spiders. Lots of species means publications including multiple new taxa at the same time are pretty common even now. For the more niche groups, the number of experts also tends to be fairly low, resulting in a good few cases of the same authors publishing multiple articles together. Probably a lot less common in more widely-studied yet less speciose parts of the tree of life, though.

But yeah, I'd say that generally speaking, there is little benefit in creating layers of author-combination taxa categories on top of individual author categories when multi-categorizing the articles works just as well. Basically the only exceptions I could think of from top of my head are a few historical cases where all taxa named by all involved authors were named in a single shared publication, and that's a sufficiently rare situation it's really not worth making an exception for (since it'll likely result in the non-exception multi-author categories getting created as well by well-meaning folks who don't realize it's an exceptional case). AddWittyNameHere 12:05, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Even when it's the same authors, they might not be listed in the exact same order for every publication, but yeah, either way, list them each as their own category, that also gives a better impression of what a single author has published on. FunkMonk (talk) 13:37, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

I have a similar question: which author categories should we use in cases where the taxon's current valid name cites multiple separate authors? For example, would "Zanha africana (Radlk.) Exell" go in Category:Taxa named by Ludwig Adolph Timotheus Radlkofer, Category:Taxa named by Arthur Wallis Exell, or both? Or in the case of "Orobanche alba Steph. ex Willd.", should we use Category:Taxa named by Franz Stephani, Category:Taxa named by Carl Ludwig Willdenow, or both? Ethmostigmus (talk | contribs) 03:31, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

@Ethmostigmus:, following the principles of Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Description in year categories, Zanha africana should be in Category:Taxa named by Ludwig Adolph Timotheus Radlkofer (and should be in the year category 1907, not 1966). And Orobanche alba should be in the category for Willd., not Steph. (see Author_citation_(botany)#Usage_of_the_term_"ex").

However, the principles of Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Description in year categories are not consistently followed in Wikipedia's categorization, especially not for organisms that aren't plants. Plantdrew (talk) 15:58, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps we could come up with a consensus. I suggest that basionym redirect pages should belong to those categories with the original author and year of description, while new combinations (i.e. the article itself) should belong to the emending author and emendation year. Many protist taxa follow this rule, at least when it comes to year categories. This is the same as what already happens with monotypic taxa, essentially, because it's just a different kind of "synonym" – the monotypic order redirect has its own categories for author and year that may be different from the family article. — Snoteleks (talk) 19:25, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Cheers for the WP:Plants link, that's very helpful! I was scouring this WP for exactly that kind of guidance - turns out I was just looking in the wrong place :P

I think the use of the term "named by" in these categories is somewhat problematic, given that the person who gave a taxon its current name isn't necessarily the person who described it. Personally, when I first saw the "taxa named by x" categories, I interpreted it as referring to the individual that gave the taxon its current name, not necessarily the individual who described the taxon. But that may just be me being a bit too literal/pedantic.

I'm quite keen on Snotleks's suggestion to categorise botanical synonym redirects in the way protist taxa do, but I'm also wondering there should be some change to the way we apply these categories to make that distinction between "named" and "described" more clear. I think there's room for improvement here (it would be excellent if this WP could come up with some standardised guidelines for categorising all taxa!) but for now, applying categories based on the earliest valid description will do just fine. Ethmostigmus (talk | contribs) 04:38, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Changes to protist categories

The past few days I have been revamping the category system for protist taxa. Please take a moment to review the changes made:

1. "[Taxon] taxa by rank" renamed to "[Taxon] taxa". Reasoning: to include unranked taxa and to simplify the category name.
2. Creation of "[Taxon] species" categories for major groups. Reasoning: this was inspired by the category:Fungus species and category:Lichen species effort, since the species rank is arguably one of the most important in taxonomy and it could be used to quantify how many species are represented in Wikipedia.
3. Several minor groups ommitted, with their species and genera merged to higher taxa. Example: 'category:Cercozoa species' → category:Rhizaria species. Reasoning: only major groups (+2,000 species) are allowed their own separate categories due to the sheer quantity of species.
4. Several major groups ommitted, with their subcategories merged to higher taxa. Example: 'category:SAR supergroup taxa' → 'category:Protist taxa'. Reasoning: this was also inspired by the category:Fungus species and category:Lichen species situation, where the purpose of categories is to quantify taxa into two easily recognizable groups, without unnecessary intermediate clades diluting the effort. This shall be done to other higher clades such as 'bikont'.
5. Paraphyletic taxa deprecated. Example: 'category:Excavata species' → 'category:Metamonad species' + 'category:Discoba species'. Reasoning: paraphyletic and polyphyletic taxa (such as Chromista) are becoming increasingly obsolete, and thus make categorization more difficult.

Any criticism or discussion is welcome. In addition, these changes should ideally be implemented into category:Eukaryote taxa as well. — Snoteleks (talk) 23:07, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Brief comment - which nomenclatural Code governs names in these groups is often difficult to pin down, or may even be contentious. Editors working with some of these taxa may come into conflict if (e.g.) one editor treats a name as if it were zoological, and another editor treats it as if it were botanical. For example, authorship citations of the form "Coleps hirtus (O.F. Müller, 1786) Nitzsch, 1827" are not typically used in zoology, but do appear often in the protist literature. It might be helpful to establish a policy to help avoid or resolve any disputes like this. Dyanega (talk) 23:54, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Good point. Although for protists it usually is "(Author, year) Author, year", it's currently not solidifed as a policy. I should write it in the WikiProject page. — Snoteleks (talk) 13:15, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

@Snoteleks: "[Taxon] taxa by rank" implies to me a container category (one that doesn't contain articles directly, only subcategories), which seems to be how they have mostly been treated even if they have not been explicitly marked as container categories. How do you plant to include unranked taxa in a "[Taxon] taxa" category? Directly, or would there be a subcategory of Category:Eukaryote unranked clades? Do you plan to directly include articles for taxa at minor ranks (infraorder, superfamily, subclass, etc.), or create subcategories for every minor rank?

Wikipedia:WikiProject_Plants/Categorization#Taxonomic_rank_categories is the only documentation I know of that gives guidance for "[Taxon] [rank]" categories. They are supposed to be separate from "[Taxon]" categories. That guidance is quite consistently followed for plants; other projects are not obliged to follow that guidance, but generally do. If there are "[Taxon] [rank]" categories across the board where [rank] goes down to species, what goes in "Taxon" categories? E.g., Amborella is in Category:Monotypic angiosperm genera (a "[Taxon] [rank]" category) and Category:Angiosperms (a "[Taxon]" category). With a proliferation of "[Taxon] taxa by rank" categories, I think there is a likelihood that editors will get confused and end up putting articles only in "[Taxon] [rank]" categories. "[Taxon]" categories are the basic categories that have been around a very long time on Wikipedia. The "[Taxon] [rank]" category is more recent (but still pretty old), and is a secondary way to categories

"Several minor groups ommitted"/"Several major groups ommitted". That is fine by me, but you can't control what other editors might do. Any categories you empty might be recreated by somebody who hasn't read this discussion and isn't aware your intention to restrict categories to groups with 2,000+ species. Caftaric created categories for every node in the animal phylogenetic tree above phylum. Getting to Category:Animals from Category:Annelids is a crazy mess (once you get to Spiralia, you can either go Protostome unranked clades->Animal unranked clades->Animal taxa by rank->Animal taxa->Animals or Protostome unranked clades->Protostome taxa by rank->Protostome taxa->Protostomes->Nephrozoa->Bilaterians->ParaHoxozoa->Animals); Caftaric's system does break the assumption that "taxa by rank" categories are container categories. I would prefer to have each animal phylum as a subcategory of Animals.

"Paraphyletic taxa deprecated". That is again fine by me, but you're working on categories for Protista, which is paraphyletic. Do you have a plan to ensure that plants/fungi/animals aren't going to end up in subcategories under Protista?

"Creation of "[Taxon] species"". I'm not necessarily I opposed, but "[Taxon] species" haven't really been a thing on Wikipedia (at the time of Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2020_February_6#Category:Bromeliaceae_species, I wasn't aware of any other "[Taxon] species" category). The absence of species categories probably stems from the basic category system being "[Taxon]" categories, not "[Taxon] [rank]" categories, where the finest scale "Taxon" categories have been categories for genera. There are 2000 Carex species and close to 1000 articles in Category:Carex. Using your threshold of 2000 species, should there be a Category:Carex species (and what would then belong in Category:Carex? "[Taxon] species" will need to be maintained and populated. I regularly find new fungus species articles that haven't been placed in Category:Fungus species; I add that category when I notice it is missing, but I am sure I sometimes fail to notice it's absence. Is anybody else (Esculenta?) making sure that the fungus species category has every relevant article as new articles are created? If that kind of ongoing maintenance isn't happening, the category is not too useful for "quantif[ing] how many species are represented in Wikipedia". Plantdrew (talk) 22:03, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

Ongoing maintenance is fun! I've found that several others have been using the fungus species category, so it seems to have caught on. I admit to having missed quite a few fungus species in my initial sweep (I mostly found species using the Category:Fungi described in year category, and of course not all of the fungus species articles have this cat yet), but I'll get to them eventually. Esculenta (talk) 22:37, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

@Plantdrew to answer to each question:

1. I plan to place unranked clades directly in the "[Taxon] taxa" category. Ideally, if enough suborders and such are present, a "[Taxon] suborders" category could be made, as is the case for example with category:Apicomplexa suborders.
2. I think "[Taxon]" categories, at least for protists, are a bit of a catch-all right now. I'm not sure if I even want to modify them. Pages whose titles are not strictly the taxon name (e.g., chrompodellid, ochrophyte, centrohelid and other common names) definitely belong there, but I don't feel the need to exclude other pages from "[Taxon]" categories.
3. Precisely that's why the category redirect template is so useful.
4. To avoid plants appearing, I am placing all Archaeplastida taxa except plants in "Green algae taxa", "Red algae taxa" and "Glaucophyte taxa" (Rhodelphidia and Picozoa would go directly to "Protist taxa"). Initially I made a category for "Opisthokont protist species", but it felt wrong, so I merged it with "Opisthokont species", which includes Fungi and Animal species, but that's the only category where this happens.
5. This threshold of 2,000 species is specifically for protists, so I cannot speak for WP Animals, since they deal with hyper-diversified genera. Just like Esculenta does for fungi, I try to ensure that no uncategorized protist species remain. It is ongoing, of course, because I found out there are many species whose genera don't even exist as articles. But that can be said for many other categories.

— Snoteleks (talk) 14:39, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Rafatazmia

Most of the article is a digression about the controversy about discoveries by the person it was named after. If he is considered notable this can be moved to an article about him. WP:BLP would be relevant. Lavateraguy (talk) 20:01, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

Cecidotaxa, cecidogenus, cecidospecies, etc.

It may be too early yet to apply these new terms to Wikipedia (possibly?), but I thought I may post information on them here anyway for those who are interested: a recent article by a number of ichnologists (Bertling et al. (2022)) appears to be proposing (among other things) a new group of parataxa for fossils of bioclaustrations (defined as including galls, embedment structures, blisters, so I understand?), which are considered separate from trace fossils (ichnotaxa) but said to be governed under the ICZN code. They are called "cecidotaxa", singular "cecidotaxon".

The authors also propose the abbreviations "cfam.", "cgen." and "csp.", short for "cecidofamily", "cecidogenus" and "cecidospecies", respectively, similar to the names for ranks in trace fossil classification. These rank names and their abbreviations are already being used in a few academic papers since this article, such as in [1].

If we were to start applying this concept to articles on Wikipedia, Chaetosalpinx and Burrinjuckia for instance are considered "cecidogenera" now according to these authors. (They were mentioned by Wisshak et al. (2019) in a list of names for bioclaustration structures not considered ichnotaxa.) Monster Iestyn (talk) 21:29, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

To put it another way, there are now ichnotaxa (for trace fossils), ootaxa (for egg fossils) and cecidotaxa (for bioclaustrations). Monster Iestyn (talk) 21:32, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Who is Michael Fibiger and why is the general public unaware of him?

Per Category:Taxa named by Michael Fibiger, he's done a lot for his community. Perhaps too much? I don't know, but was hoping someone more creative here might be able to string together a word or two about he and his apparent great deal. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:48, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

There's an obituary here. Seems like he was actually a psychologist for a dayjob and was a lepidopterist as an avocation. Here are the results for him on scholar [2]. He might pass WP:NPROF for his lepidopterist work, but I am not sure. Hemiauchenia (talk) 04:23, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

I've always thought there's something oddly psychological about how humans see moths and this confirms that bias (for me). Thanks for the quick dig! Also not sure it's quite enough yet, but a fine start toward understanding the single source of (what I assume are most of) those 232 apparently passable articles. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:43, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Anyone interested in a quick review of my featured article nomination?

I know it's obscure, but here is my attempt at all that is known about this small animal Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Heptamegacanthus/archive1 Mattximus (talk) 19:36, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Feed for new articles

Hello, sorry if this has been asked before, but is there a feed for newly created articles that are within the bounds of this project or Wikipedia:WikiProject Animals/WikiProject Plants/ WikiProject Fungi. I would like to be able to see what new genus/species articles are created in particular. Thanks in advance, -- Classicwiki (talk) If you reply here, please ping me. 19:53, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

@Classicwiki: Yes, they're found at User:AlexNewArtBot#Biology and medicine. —Trilletrollet [ Talk | Contribs ] 20:12, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

@Trilletrollet, thank you! Would it be helpful to link this on the WikiProject page somewhere? -- Classicwiki (talk) If you reply here, please ping me. 20:28, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

There are a couple there I wasn't aware of. Classicwiki, the links you want there are the ones that say "Search result". You can watchlist any of the pages at the "Search result" link and see when they are updated each day. All of them rely on keywords which might not be present in any given article (false negatives, which are pretty rare), or which may be present in an irrelevant article (false positives, which are more common). There isn't anything designed to pick up animals in general, so any animal that isn't a mollusc, arthropod or chordate may slip through the cracks. Nor is there anything for protists or bacteria (but the log for plants usually picks up any new bacteria articles due to including the family ending -aceae as a keyword, which is also used in bacterial nomenclature).

User:AlexNewArtBot/SpeciesSearchResult is intended to pick up species in any group of organisms, but does not pick up taxa at any other rank (subspecies, genus, family, etc.). Plantdrew (talk) 20:30, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

@Plantdrew, that is a shame that the results are problematic.

Prior to asking, I tried to see if there was a way to find them via WikiProject template transclusions. I used What Links Here tool for WikiProject Animals and sorted by last edited. Which is insufficient as it only shows last edited, and not newly created articles.

I could see a more centralized feed of every new taxonomic article (species, genus, family, etc.) being really useful for reviewing new pages and addressing problems. -- Classicwiki (talk) If you reply here, please ping me. 20:46, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

@Classicwiki:, I use the AlexNewArtBot reports to find new taxon articles that don't have any WikiProject banners yet. Most days there are 5-10 of those. I also do a search every week or two for articles that have one of the taxobox templates without any WikiProject banner (to pickup what slips by AlexNewArtBot, e.g. non-arthropod/chordate/mollusc animals).

I've thought about creating a rule-set for AlexNewArtBot that would pick up all taxa, but I haven't learned the syntax of the rule-sets. If I knew how to do it, it would be something like: full points for any taxobox template, high points for "species", "genus" or "family" near "-idae/-aceae", and some points for broad terms for higher level groups of organisms (plant, fungus, insect). Plantdrew (talk) 21:10, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

A non-species taxon list could have title searches for appropriate suffixes (-idae\W, -aceae\W, -ales\W, -iformes\W, -inae\W, etc). If 10 is the threshold, both the taxobox matches and title matches could be given 5 points. —  Jts1882 | talk  09:15, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Is there any way that this bot could add WikiProject Protista to its list? — Snoteleks (talk) 00:14, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Pinging @Bamyers99. -- Classicwiki (talk) If you reply here, please ping me. 01:28, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

You need a file of search terms in regex, e.g. User:AlexNewArtBot/Plants or User:AlexNewArtBot/Birds as described at How to add feeds to the new article bot I couldn't work out whether there is a file listing the pages for the bot to use or if the files is picked up automatically. There is a list to inform the bot at User:AlexNewArtBot/Master —  Jts1882 | talk  07:00, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

A downside to automatic taxoboxes is that strings for higher taxa that would be present in a manual taxobox may not be present at all in an article with an automatic taxobox. That makes the potential rule sets for things like animals and protists much more complicated. Articles for animal genera/species generally do not include the term "animal" anywhere in prose, but describe the article subject as being a member of some less inclusive group. I think "protist" also rarely appears in articles about protist genera/species. How many different terms might be used to describe a member of the SAR supergroup? There will be quite a few, and that's just one group of protists. Going back to animals, take echinoderms. Echinoderm species are almost never described as animals, and usually won't be described as echinoderms. They might be described as a "starfish", "sand dollar", "sea cucumber", "sea urchin", "brittle star", or "crinoid", and the are other names for each of those groups that might appear instead (e.g. "sea star", "ophiuroid", "sea lily"). And that's just one animal phylum.

The rule-set for arthropods (User:AlexNewArtBot/Arthropods) is probably the one that covers the greatest diversity of terms that might appear in an article. And it looks like it is relying pretty heavily on the presence of categories that might not actually be present (maybe I don't understand the syntax correctly, but as I understand it, the rule-set looks for "centipede" and "millipede" as categories and not as terms that would occur in prose). Plantdrew (talk) 15:55, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

The match /Category:[^\]]*millipedes/ looks for a category with any text ("not ]") before "millipedes" so picks up "Category:Cave millipedes", "Category:Bioluminescent millipedes", etc. I'm surprised it doesn't also look for millipede in the text. Good point about automated taxoboxes; most of the search term files were set up before they were introduced. You are right that finding the protists won't be easy due to the high diversity. —  Jts1882 | talk  16:55, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

@Plantdrew, @Jts1882, this is why I was initially thinking of targeting talk pages. Sure you will miss out on the new articles without talk pages/missing the associated WikiProject, but hopefully they will be tagged eventually. It is a very uniform string to target: WikiProject Animals, WikiProject Protista, etc. Is it possible for the bot to target article talk pages? -- Classicwiki (talk) If you reply here, please ping me. 19:44, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

@Classicwiki: I can't see anything that would allow you to target the search to talk pages.

However, perhaps this Petscan search is helpful. It looks for template "WikiProject Protista" (set in Templates and Links) on main space talk pages and finds "Only pages created during the above time window" (in this case May 1st, set in Page Properties). —  Jts1882 | talk  13:15, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata identifiers for new Species Files databases

I've made a proposal to add nine new Species Files identifiers to Wikidata so they can be added to {{taxonbar}}s. The new Species Files cover the polyneopteran orders Zoraptera, Dermaptera, Plecoptera, Grylloblattodea, Mantophasmatodea, Embioptera and "Isoptera", as well as hemipteran groups Aphidomorpha and Coleorrhyncha.

Please contribute to the discussion at d:Wikidata:Property_proposal/Identifiers_for_Species_Files_databases. I think support has to be added to each proposal separately. —  Jts1882 | talk  12:55, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Discussion on notability

There is a discussion on the notability of species at Wikipedia talk:Notability#Biology that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Choess (talk) 02:27, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Titles for virus species

Every virus species has been renamed in the last few years. I've started a discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Viruses#Titles_for_species_articles to get a sense for whether we should be using the current species names for the titles of articles. Wikipedia has ~1000 articles on virus species. Plantdrew (talk) 18:22, 30 May 2024 (UTC)