Talk:Opuntia/Archive 1

While nothing on this page is wrong except the staement that there are only twelve plants known as "prickly pear", it is oddly skewed toward the American east, which is in no way the exemplary home of the thing under discussion. It would be like describing "Elephant" as a genus of small mammals once common on Mediterranean islands now mostly extinct but with two remaining species elsewhere in the world. ;')

I believe that since "prickly pear" is a common name and worse yet an inexact term, the plants in question should be addressed in in article on the genus Opuntia.

Prickly pear is a vernacular name for a species in the Opuntia genus. As such it is known in the USA as a "pricly pear". So in my opinion it should be the other way round: prickly pear referring to Opuntia. and Opuntia being the meat of the subject. GerardM 19:22, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)~

In general the rule is to use common names wherever possible, but Opuntia does include chollas and so forth that are not "X prickly pear", so yes, in this case it makes sense to put things under the generic name. Stan 21:08, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

One problem with the rule is that they are often different names for the same species are used. Not only that, the same common name is sometimes used for different species or a bunch of species. Technically it is not a BIG problem you just refer to an other page... GerardM 07:41, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Amen, check out sardine or mackerel for some fish disentanglement I did a while back. Conversely, in several areas, especially birds, there have been recent efforts to settle on a set of English names that are as precise as the Latin ones. So we want to use an English name for the type if we have one that's sufficiently precise, and fall back to Latin otherwise. If you haven't seen it, Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna) plus the associated talk pages have extensive argu^Wdiscussion :-) about all the fine points. Stan 08:50, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)