Talk:Saprolegniales

is it a fungus ???

I'm a mite confused, I dont know whether this thing is a fungus or not. it's linked to from quite a few fungus articles, but neither this article nor Saprolegnia ever actually describes the organism as a fungus and its not clear from the taxobox either. —Soap— 18:05, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Soap: it is an oomycete, also called a water mould. They are similar to fungi, and mycologists have a soft spot for them (hence the inclusion in WP:Fungi) but they're not fungi and are their own thing. The taxobox would say "Fungi" if it were a member of that kingdom. If you have heard of any oomycetes, then it would be the cause of the Great Famine in Ireland, Phytophthora infestans. --Nessie (talk) 18:41, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@NessieVL: Okay thank you for the quick reply. If I find the page that implied this was a fungus, I will change it. It may have been Oomycete itself, since the mobile UI's description for that page is "class of fungi", so that should definitely be changed .... it's somewhere on Wikidata and I will try to fix it if nobody else does. —Soap— 20:14, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cleanup

Sooooo .... i think there are probably quite a lot of references to oomycetes as fungi scattered around Wikipedia. e.g. Peronospora hyoscyami f.sp. tabacina starts out describing it as a fungus-like organism, but later in the article we switch to just "fungus", in The fungus is highly weather sensitive. During the time when the weather is cool, wet, or overcast the disease can evolve in a greenhouse or field. The disease spreads rapidly because of the fungal pathogen.

This could be all over the place. Part of it may be text that was written when most scientists believed that the oomycetes really were fungi. Others could be people contributing outdated information. This could take years to clean up and not be easy to automate, so I cant offer to do it myself, but I will at least fix anything I stumble upon. That said, this isnt really one of my main interests so I may not find much more than I have already. —Soap— 16:30, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I updated wikidata:Q223597 and the tobacco page now. —Soap— 16:31, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]