User talk:DexDor/BioCat

A few more classes of categories

Your nomination of the toadlets category reminded be about Category:Tree frogs, and the subcategories of Category:Birds by common name. Categorizing organisms in vernacular name categories is a thing, although it's not very frequent. Some of the bird categories (e.g. Category:Parrots) use vernacular name titles for a taxon category, but most of them are vernacular names that don't correspond to a taxon, or are an additional category on articles which also have a scientific named taxon category.

There are also categories for species that are model organisms; Category:Caenorhabditis elegans, Category:Arabidopsis thaliana Category:Drosophila melanogaster (these should be subcategories of genus categories, and I think the eponymous article belongs in both the species and genus category). And there are categories for foods (or other natural products?) Category:Brassica oleracea, Category:Chocolate, Category:Strawberries. Again, these should be subcategories of a genus category, and the article on the species should be in both the food category and the genus category.

Regarding footnote/reference 1, there are around 400,000 articles on taxa on Wikipedia; see Category:Articles with 'species' microformats (that does include animal breeds and plant cultivars, but they are a small fraction of the total). Plantdrew (talk) 19:43, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Yeah there are lots of categories that probably should be CFDed (Category:Toads? Category:Crotalus by taxonomic synonyms? ...).

I've updated the ref. All comments on the essay are welcome (and I'm happy for editors like yourself to make minor edits to it directly). In the longer term I intend to move it into Wp namespace (e.g. under WP:TOL). DexDor ^(talk) 21:12, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Names versus taxa

In a couple CfDs, you've noted that we don't categorize by characteristics/properties of a name. I don't think that is entirely true (not that I'm saying we SHOULD categorize in this way). The most widely deployed categories on organism articles are fundamentally about characteristics of names, and only incidentally characteristics of taxa. Or we go through contortions to make something that is essentially a characteristic of a name into a characteristic of a taxon; see the advice at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Plants/Description_in_year_categories regarding categorization of Muscari racemosum.

A single name can be used for different taxa (due to lumping/splitting; Pandion haliaetus could refer to all extant birds in the genus Pandion, or just those populations outside of Australia, and the osprey article is rather confused as to which taxonomic concept it is about).

A single taxon can have multiple names (due to changes in rank for genera and higher taxa, or due to transfer between different genera for species). Lemnoideae and Lemnaceae refer to the same collection of genera and species (although which name is used has relevance for what genera are considered to be part of Araceae)

My impression is that articles have categories in roughly this order of prevalence (with all other characteristics used for categorization much farther back)

1. b. By position in the biological tree of life (ToL)
2. r. By the regions in which the organism is/was native (i.e. the range/distribution)
3. y. By year of description
4. l. By level of taxonomic rank
5. n. By the person who named the taxon

y. and n. are very straightforward characteristics of names. I'm not sure that they are defining characteristics of taxa. Cases such as Muscari racemosum can be resolved by treating the year/describer as the one relevant to the taxon rather than the name, but it is likely that most complicated cases have just been placed into the category that is most obviously relevant to the name, rather than the categorizing editor having examined the the particular situation in detail. I'm not sure a typical reader would find much value in these categories, and for taxonomists, they're rendered useless if the year/describer isn't strictly the one associated with the NAME. A huge amount of editor effort has gone into populating these categories (which are still far from complete and surely have errors if taxa are supposed to be modeled instead of names). I don't ever populate these categories myself, and regard them as mostly a nuisance that suck up editor effort that would be better directed elsewhere (but I'm reluctant to see all that work destroyed).

l. is also a straightforward characteristic of a name; if a taxon is changed to a different rank (e.g family->subfamily) the name will change and so (presumably) should the category. I don't see any pitfalls in modelling l. members as taxa rather than names. Categories are probably of some interest and use to both lay and specialist readers.

b. once we get to the level of placing species in categories for genera the name/taxon distinction crops up again. Move a species to a different genus, the name changes on so does the category. The individuals and populations that comprise the species don't change; the taxon is the same (although the taxon concept of the genus has changed. It's not a problem, but the genus is a characteristic of the binomial.

The various other categories you've cataloged are pretty straightforward characteristics of taxa. Plantdrew (talk) 02:04, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Categorizing by the characteristics of a name is things like putting the Mosquito article in a category for Spanish loanwords.  None of y./n./l./b. are like that - for example: the year in which a ship is launched is a characteristic of the ship; the year in which a ship is named is also a characteristic of the ship; the year in which a species is (first) assigned a binomial is a characteristic of the species (although probably not one that forms a useful category). 

Re the order of prevalence: I think r. is used on about half the articles.

Re "reluctant to see all that work destroyed": the information should still be in the article (e.g. the infobox) (and referenced) and it may have been copied from there to WikiData - so, if we were to delete those categories it shouldn't lose any information. DexDor ^(talk) 12:13, 9 April 2020 (UTC)