Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life

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Deletion of Eunectes akayima

I have made a suggestion for deletion of the page on Eunectes akayima Here as the name is not going to stand in anyway that can use this name and it is premmature to try. When new taxa come out it is better to give a little time before creating a page to let the dust settle. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 03:19, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

I would not endorse wholesale elimination of the content, especially the extensive discussion. I might, however, support a merge of the content into the article for Eunectes murinus, with maybe a greater emphasis on the critical reviews (those suggesting that while there may well be a separate northern species, it should probably be called Eunectes gigas, of which akayima is likely a junior synonym, if it's even an available name at all). There is already one paper that says this and can be cited now, and I imagine there are going to be other similar papers or reviews published to support that particular outcome. At that point, when there is community consensus as to the splitting of the species, the appropriate content could be removed and placed into its own article, with E. gigas as the scientific name, and the history of the name discussed. Dyanega (talk) 14:55, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps you would consider stopping by and giving your opinion on the talk page of the Northern green anaconda article, where there's more discussion The Morrison Man (talk) 16:11, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

April lichen task force newsletter

The April issue of the lichen task force newsletter is available here. Delivered by MeegsC (talk) 21:17, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Potential identification issue with photos from commanster.eu (cross-post from Commons)

See discussion at Commons. (The misidentified photos I've found so far are all of insects, but this could be an issue for other animals and even plants and fungi.) Monster Iestyn (talk) 18:38, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Correct spelling of Bubalus wansijocki/Bubalus wansjocki

The article Bubalus wansijocki asserts that "wansjocki" is an error and that "wansijocki" is the correct spelling (without any good citation I might add), but the vast majority of scientific literature spells it "wansjocki" [1] rather than "wansijocki" [2]. The original publication is presumably the 1928 book "M. Boule, H. Breuil, E. Licent, P. Teilhard de Chardin Le Paleolithique de la Chine Masson et cie, Editeurs, Paris (1928)". I can't find an online version for this publication, so I have no idea which spelling is correct. Would appreciate help resolving this issue. Thanks. Hemiauchenia (talk) 15:32, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Just for proper evaluation, note that the conditions under the Zoological Code allowing for changes to spelling are very stringent and explicit, and note in particular the example given:

32.5. Spellings that must be corrected (incorrect original spellings)

32.5.1. If there is in the original publication itself, without recourse to any external source of information, clear evidence of an inadvertent error, such as a lapsus calami or a copyist's or printer's error, it must be corrected. Incorrect transliteration or latinization, or use of an inappropriate connecting vowel, are not to be considered inadvertent errors.

32.5.1.1. The correction of a spelling of a name in a publisher's or author's corrigendum issued simultaneously with the original work or as a circulated slip to be inserted in the work (or if in a journal, or work issued in parts, in one of the parts of the same volume) is to be accepted as clear evidence of an inadvertent error.

Examples. If an author in proposing a new species-group name were to state that he or she was naming the species after Linnaeus, yet the name was published as ninnaei, it would be an incorrect original spelling to be corrected to linnaei.

By way of comparison, a colleague published a species named "tolkeini". In the text of the paper, the etymology said "Named after J.R.R. Tolkein". Because the name was misspelled in the etymology, the only evidence that the name was misspelled is external, and the Code prohibits the use of any external evidence. Accordingly, this species is still spelled "tolkeini" despite being an obvious error on the author's part. I wouldn't be surprised if the "wansjocki/wansijocki" issue is similar, but the prohibition on the use of external evidence is very important, and not to be overlooked. Dyanega (talk) 16:39, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

The databases linked in the taxonbar all use wansijocki. The PBDB says it "belongs to Bubalus according to Croft et al (2006)" (doi:10.1644/06-MAMM-A-018R.1), which uses wansijocki in the systematics section. REPAD has an entry for Bubalus wansijocki Boule & Chardin, 1928 that states "Synonyms: Bubalus wansjocki Boule & Chardin, 1928; Buballus wansjocki Boule & Chardin, 1928 [orth. error used by (Dong et al., 1999:130)]". —  Jts1882 | talk  16:46, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Heh, reminds me of the poor Ginkgo which is a misspelled ginkyo (japanese for silver apricot, also sounds a lot better). I really wish the ICZN fixed spelling according to etymology, it would be satisfying. — Snoteleks (talk) 18:09, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Using categories for measuring number of taxa

Not sure if anyone else is interested in this but I like the idea of being able to gather a number of species, genera, etc. of higher taxa through the category system of Wikipedia. We already do this for at least genera and families, and although not all taxon pages are correctly categorized, I am currently reorganizing the protist categories to make this easier. But I realized not all taxa are accepted, and perhaps creating categories called "Accepted species" or "Accepted genera" would be way too much work. I'm thinking that we could make two categories for unaccepted taxa instead, named "Junior synonym" and "Basionym", so that we can obtain the number of accepted species by taking the total number of species and subtract the basionyms and junior synonyms. But perhaps this can't work, because we would have to somehow distinguish between synonyms of species and synonyms of other ranks such as genera and families, so that we only take species into account. This makes me think the "Accepted [taxon level]" idea is more realistic. Someone who has more experience with categories can probably shine some light on this.

On another note, could we use the automatic taxobox system to let a bot automatically categorize them in their taxon level? Of course that still leaves redirects (i.e. synonyms and monotypic taxa) for manual categorization, but I think it could be useful anyway.

Would love to explore both of these ideas. It'd be kind of like building a taxonomic database, and it would help us editors see what amount of coverage we have on a given taxonomic group (e.g., we could see results such as "around 40% of described annelid species are on Wikipedia", etc.). — Snoteleks (talk) 13:36, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Petscan might be able to do what you want. This search for squamate species looks for pages in Category:Squamata (and subcategories) that use {{speciesbox}} and returns 11239 results.—  Jts1882 | talk  14:03, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

That's excellent, thank you. — Snoteleks (talk) 14:08, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

We did this with lichen species in the lichen task force, and I liked having the number of species readily available so much that I did the same with fungus species. I've grown accustomed to not worry so much about "accepted" species. Buellia frigida isn't "accepted" by Index Fungorum, but they don't indicate why. However, it's perfectly "notable" by Wikipedia standards. Esculenta (talk) 15:32, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree, but I was referring to redirects from unaccepted combinations, not unaccepted species that have their own independent article. We already categorize redirects, but many of them are unaccepted synonyms of accepted species. — Snoteleks (talk) 15:37, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

@Esculenta So the lichen species category completely disregards junior synonyms and unaccepted combinations. Should I do the same with protists? It seems more intuitive, but then do you categorize junior synonyms? Or do you not categorize them at all? — Snoteleks (talk) 15:40, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, we disregard them (in the "species" counts). I'm not sure I see any advantage in including them, and then having to do math to figure out the species count. The # of taxa is what we're interested in, right? (not the number of synonyms/redirects) The junior synonyms are categorized normally ("R from alternative scientific name|fungus") Esculenta (talk) 15:46, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I guess I just didn't think of that option. Thanks. Also, great work with the lichen species category, it is so satisfying. Eventually I hope we have such lists for major protist groups as well. — Snoteleks (talk) 15:47, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

@Esculenta I have more questions regarding your system. Do you keep the 'Lichen species' and 'Fungus species' separate, or do lichen species receive both categories? Also, do you categorize genera? If so, do you keep monotypic genera in their own category, as it currently happens with things like brown algae? — Snoteleks (talk) 15:55, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

They are distinct but interconnected; fungus species is the parent cat of lichen species. For lichens, we also categorize genera, families, orders, and classes (haven't gotten around to doing this for the fungi yet). Monotypic genera are kept in higher-taxa subcats (eg. category:Monotypic Lecanorales genera. Esculenta (talk) 16:10, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

@Esculenta I'm thinking of designing the protist species categories in a similar manner, but making distinct categories for every protist group that has more than a certain number of species. This would imply deleting a lot of intermediate categories that are for smaller groups. I was thinking that 2,000 species could be a good threshold. Any thoughts on this? — Snoteleks (talk) 17:12, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

TBH, I'm not sure. I guess it depends on what your objectives are. One of the goals of the lichen task force is to eventually have a page for each lichen taxon, so the taxon categories help give a sense of progress towards that goal. E.g., there are roughly 1050 lichen genera; our category:Lichen genera cat shows that we are close to getting them all bluelinked. We are quite far from doing that for the 20,000+ lichen species, but it's nice to be able to track the year-to-year progress. I suppose my advice is to plan out your category structure carefully beforehand to avoid future Caftaric/Nono64/Notwith scenarios! (check archives if you're interested and are unfamiliar with their historical nightmare categorization schemes) Esculenta (talk) 17:26, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

@Esculenta Useful advice, coincidentally I started doing exactly that. I opened a word document just to start planning protist species categories, because I expect that without planning I would end up going insane. — Snoteleks (talk) 17:29, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

@Esculenta One more question. Is there any way to make categorizing easier than going through each individual article and manually changing or adding categories? — Snoteleks (talk) 18:52, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Other than making a bot to do it for you, I don't think so. But alt-tabbing in batches and hot catting is pretty quick imo. Esculenta (talk) 19:26, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

@Snoteleks:, commons:Help:Gadget-Cat-a-lot might be helpful for you. When you are in a category page, it allows you to select articles to put in a different category without needing to open each article. Plantdrew (talk) 02:48, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

@Plantdrew Woah, thank you so much. This is a lot faster! — Snoteleks (talk) 12:44, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

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)

Help requested: Streblomastix family

I'm trying to look for the original description of the family of the metamonad Streblomastix. Although the wiki article claims its family is Polymastigidae, sources point towards an enigmatic family known as Streblomastigidae, often referring to a chapter in the 2000 book Illustrated Guide to the Protozoa. This chapter, in turn, refers to the first volume of Traité de Zoologie by Pierre-Paul Grassé as the origin of various oxymonad families, including Streblomastigidae, but does not explicitly say Grassé is the author of the family. Can anyone get a hold on an online version of this treatise and verify if Grassé actually describes the family Streblomastigidae? — Snoteleks (talk) 18:43, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

In particular, the citation is of a specific chapter in the treatise: "Grassé, P. P. (1952). Famille des Polymastigidae, Ordre des Pyrsonymphines, Ordre des Oxymonadines. In: P. P. Grassé. Traité de Zoologie, Vol. I. Masson et Cie, Paris. Pp. 780–823." — Snoteleks (talk) 18:49, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

The citation is on Google Books, but only snippets can be seen. If you go to this page and enter "Streblomastigidae" into the search (""From inside the book"), you can see bits of the pages the keyword is on. From one of the snippets (page 797), it does indeed look like there is a description of the family. The family authority, however, is given as Kofold et Swezy, 1919. Hope this helps. Esculenta (talk) 20:17, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! It did help. I checked the Kofold & Swezy publication, which is at BHL, and they indeed described the family. — Snoteleks (talk) 20:47, 16 April 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 [3].

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 [4]. 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)