Portal talk:Biology

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August 10, 2006 Featured portal candidate Promoted
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Please do not edit archived pages. If you want to react to a statement made in a archived discussion, please make a new header on this page. Samsara (talk • contribs) 21:10, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

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The purpose of proposed content is to encourage more regular updates and make them easier to carry out, and to give people a chance to decide the content of this portal. Follow the link to learn more:

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[edit] Latin/Greek Roots and Pronunciation of Terms

Has anyone considered clarifying things a bit by adding latin/greek roots and pronunciation following the terms on the wiki bio related pages? I think it would be extremely helpful for students, like myself, who are learning an incredible amount of terms all at once. Any input?

[edit] Biology categorization

Hi -- the biology category is a bit unwieldy at the moment. Are other folks working on subcatting it? I propose, for starters, a subcat for divisions of biology -- Category:Types of biology but obviously, better terminology is okay. The notion is to fit molecular biology, microbiology, and so on, into a subcat. Then start working on the articles and other obvious subcategories. Other ideas? --lquilter 22:23, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

I would recommend Category:Fields of biology or Category:Biological fields. Another possibility is Category:Biological disciplines, but sometimes a scientific "discipline" means something more specific than just an area of research (i.e., a discipline has professional infrastructure like journals and societies). An easier and probably more useful possibility is to identify the articles in the category that should be just in a subcategory and prune the biology category from them; I'm sure half the articles currently in the biology category could be shunted to an existing subcategory, even many of the biological fields (since the main subdivisions of biology already have categories).--ragesoss 22:53, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Yep, I'm doing the pruning now. Will hold off on any types/fields/disciplines until pruning is done & more discussion here. --lquilter 23:00, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
On taking a closer look, I agree, though... even just the number of categories in biology is overwhelming. I'm doing some pruning as well, but unfortunately some of it just moves the problem elsewhere. Many of the subcategories (e.g., Category:Ecology) are massively overfilled themselves.--ragesoss 23:28, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, but, at least if they're in ecology we can then begin figuring out how we need to cat ecology. --lquilter 23:43, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes. On a related note, I've proposed moving Category:Tree of life to Category:Organisms: Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_January_10#Category:Tree_of_life. In addition to being more intuitive, this would allow us to move categories like "Category:Aquatic organisms out of Biology.--ragesoss 23:55, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] No wikiproject?

I'm trying to place the article death under an appropriate wikiproject. Unfortunately, even simply in biological terms it comes under the scope of many subprojects - ecology (predation etc), and its extinction subproject, evolutionary biology, and of course medicine. I thought it would be better to place it within a higher level category, since it is such a common theme throughout biology, but the wikiproject page just redirects here, so I'm left wondering what, if anything, I should do with it. Richard001 06:30, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

I see no pressing reason why it needs to be associated with any WikiProject at all. But if you just want somewhere to point from the talk page to a broader community of interested editors, then maybe you could add several links to the different appropriate projects in a "See also" template beneath the rest of the templatecruft. On the other hand, maybe it's time to un-redirect Wikipedia:WikiProject Biology, and set it up as a discussion forum (i.e., the role this page is serving).--ragesoss 07:42, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
I've recreated Wikipedia:WikiProject Biology.--ragesoss 18:37, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Monotreme eggs information required

I have these last weeks requested in the talk pages of the following articles, Egg (biology) and monotremes, more information about monotreme eggs and images of them. I believe that there isn't very much information about this. I would like to know futher about the characteristics of these eggs, the phisiological differences between monotreme eggs and other eggs, like reptiles, birds or amphibius. I have heard that they are "rubbery" (?). Do they need to be kept warm (?) I would appretiate any information... --Francisco Valverde 19:41, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Megafauna

I'm new to this whole Project and Portal thing but I noticed a page which I recently overhauled, Megafauna is in need of further attention. It also is not part of any WikiProject. Just thought maybe someone here might want to look into it. --Scorpios 04:48, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Formating

The formating on the main page got messed up somehow. It needs to be fixed. Joe I 04:45, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up.--ragesoss 04:52, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
Wow, that was fast :) Joe I 04:55, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] EMBL Reptile Database

Hello,

I don't know if you used to add links to the EMBL reptile database and related pages (www.embl.org) but the database has moved and is now hosted at www.tigr.org. The main page can be found here and the search engine for the database itself is here.
The database maintainer told me that he still got several hits at the old address from wikipedia, so it would be a good idea to check and update the links.

Regards, Hexasoft 21:29, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Flower's name wanted!

???
???

Please help me to find this flower's name, species or tell me where I can ask for this help. Thank you very much! --Beyond silence 03:43, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Try posting it to the Flickr group "What Plant is This?".--ragesoss 03:45, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
Dianthus alpinus
Dianthus alpinus

[edit] Where does the quiescent zone in the meristem come from during plant development?

I study biology and have a question concerning plant physiology (my textbook is Taiz & Zeiger). As you might know, the meristem is composed of the L1, L2 and L3 stem cells and beyond that is a "quiescent zone" with lower rate of cell devision. So my question is, where do these cells of the quiescent zone come from, from the L1, the L2 or from the L3 stemcells? I would be very glad if somebody could answer my questions. Thank you --hroest 20:21, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

You could also post at Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants, they're fairly active. Richard001 02:18, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Related portals: rationale for preventing bloat

An editorial decision has been made to limit the number of portals linked to, in a hierarchical manner:

Samsara (talk • contribs) 17:56, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

The science portals have now been reduced to one link. Samsara (talk • contribs) 18:14, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Benefits of clicking through

By clicking through, users see more of Wikipedia, become acquainted with its structure and diversity, and learn to understand the hierarchies that exist among subdisciplines and taxonomic groups. It also fits with what is known about learnability, discoverability, and ease of navigation. Additionally, this structure should help portals to better define their own scope and avoid overlap where possible, because they have fewer "related portals" to keep track of.

Samsara (talk • contribs) 17:56, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

embedding images is not the only objective of wikipedia. we should try to understand that by being more comprehensive and simple we can construct wikipedia in a better way. clicking through is not only accessibility, textual hyperlinks are enough. its worthless having graphics if doesn't satisfies the basic requirements for an encyclopedia. what you saying is not wrong but for a big portal like biology it is completely meaningless. see other portals like Portal:Science. graphics are not used there but the portal looks far beyond awesome. thanks, Sushant gupta (talk) 09:31, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Personally I think that Portal:Science is confusing to navigate. I already stated the reason that it's ok not have pictures there is that is the top of the hierarchy and needs to list everything. There is always a benefit for usability to including pictures that people can relate to. Every other featured portal uses images and while it would help for them to be standardized, removing them, making the portal text heavy, does not clarify form. pschemp | talk 22:38, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

On the biology page it had been suggested that the table of "topics related to biology" be merged onto Portal:Biology/Major topics. The topics table has been converted into the {{Biology topics}} template, much as was done with the {{Earth}} template. Should the "Major topics" be merged with the Biology topics template? — RJH (talk) 16:45, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

That template currently contains too little actual biology. Samsara (talk • contribs) 20:57, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
I merged everything that wasn't POV-heavy or frankly irrelevant. The template should probably be a subset of "major topics". Samsara (talk • contribs) 01:05, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
Thank you. — RJH (talk) 18:23, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Biology related hook that recently appeared at T:DYK

You may wish to add this to the Did you know? part of the portal, to be rotated through. It's up to you folks. Cheers, Cirt 07:31, 2 December 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Fishing portal

This is the icon, should we ever decide to include it:

Portal:Fishing

Samsara (talk • contribs) 10:12, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Content we should select

I have been thinking about what it means for Portal:Biology that there are so many portals lower down in the hierarchy, and what the point is in our selecting content, when the same content might be simultaneously featured on one of the sub-portals. The conclusion that I came to is that as the central rallying point for all things biological, our mission should be to feature content that is not covered by one of the other existing portals. I wanted to share some of my thoughts on this with you.

The argument for featuring such content is that it would not otherwise be covered by a portal, so we would be fighting bias on WP, which is a good thing. It might also inspire others to create portals for those various kinds of content, by being exposed to it here.

However, we have recently featured quite a few evolutionary biology topics. This was made possible by considerable editing effort to promote several evolutionary biology topics to FA status, by several editors including myself. I can see now that this may have been a good thing as there seems to be less pressure from creationists on evolutionary biology articles than there was a few months ago. I think we would be doing society a dis-service if we showcased only one side of biology, even though evolution is one of the major unifying themes (paraphrasing Dobzhansky and Maynard Smith and probably others). I would like to think that any content not based on empirical results from well-controlled experiments can still be kept out of scientific articles even if topics that are under attack from editors with pseudoscientific viewpoints aren't regularly featured.

The next task would be to identify topics that do not appear as selected content on other portals. Does such content exist? Samsara (talk • contribs) 08:07, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

It seems that fungi aren't covered yet. Samsara (talk • contribs) 16:46, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Link for "Requests" from the Portal page

The link goes to a page that does not have any Biology requests. As far as I've gotten through the maze those would be here Wikipedia:Requested articles/Natural sciences/Biology. Could someone check if I got that right and change the link, please.71.236.23.111 (talk) 18:56, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Y Done You were right. GoEThe (talk) 21:20, 13 May 2008 (UTC)