Talk:Chiroptera

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hum. The issue of whether we should use common vs scientific names has been discussed. The current tenative agreement is to largely keep things as they are and if anything move content from scientific names to common names. Remember, this is a wiki so making article names that are easy to link to and recognize is the best way to do things. Most mere mortals will only link to bat when wanting to link to the animal and will not know what the scientific name is. Since the other bat is also well known as a baseball bat how about we simply have the content about Chiroptera at bat and provide a link to baseball bat at the bottom. Otherwise, all the links to bat the animal will have to be changed to Chiroptera and will have to be constantly updated as new articles linking to bat are made. See what had been done with the Jellyfish article for an example. --maveric149

There are cricket bats, as well as baseball bats. There may even be bats that eat crickets, as well as cricket bats. I think it's all very batty. -phma

LOL :) However, the Chiroptera are the only example I can think of that are only known by just plain old bat (you first have to establish context for the other uses). As a biologist I was at first tempted to only use scientific names for things, but as a wikipedian wanting to make direct and valid linking as easy as possible for contributors and as a person who truely wants to democratize science, I am inclined to use common names whenever they exist as page titles. Anybody accidently linking to bat meaning to link to baseball bat can easily fix the link. I don't think that there will be nearly as many links to bat that are not intended to be for the animal -- It would be a stretch to think somebody could come up with a great, comprehensive article about baseball bats that really would cause a lot of linking to it anyway. Unfortunetely the Chiroptera do not have a naturally disambiguated and easy to remember common name. --maveric149

"Plain old bat" you say -- Hmmm! That is only slightly less pejorative than "old bitch" --Eclecticology

If and when the article at bat gets large and technical enough we could then split it between bat (which would have the general lay description) and Chiroptera (which could have the cladistics and more technical info). For the reasoning behind the move see my comments above. --maveric149

In response to someone's move of the entire Aves article to Birds, I went ahead and divided the material on a similar basis. Classification details are perhaps better placed on the latin name. --Eclecticology, Friday, June 7, 2002

Sounds like a good compromise to me. --maveric149