Talk:Monotropa

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[edit] Merge proposal

This genus only has two species, Monotropa hypopitys and Monotropa uniflora, both of which have separate articles which are essentially stubs, and in which the first two paragraphs are carbon copies of the first two paragraphs of this article. Seems awfully redundant to me. I think the articles should be merged into this one. Peter G Werner 05:50, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

The pictures make them look quite a bit different. It might be worth saving them as short articles just for that. Or both could be in the main article. Question: even if the get grouped into the family, is there really an article there? Another question: in statistics, every probability distribution has a page, in biology, does every species have a page? If so, it would make sense to follow the generaly map that wikipedia appears to be following. Pdbailey 01:22, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

A page for every species of living organism? Surely you jest – there are some 1.5 million named species, and estimates of the number of species on earth (which taxonomists are constantly at work putting new names on) represent another 2-50 million more. That's far larger then the number of probability distributions out there. So, no, each and every species should not have its own article – many species simply aren't notable and the entire literature on them may only be an entry in an obscure monograph. In many cases, an single article on a genus or even a family (or similar size clade, since taxonomy is increasingly making less use of Linnean classification).

As for Monotropa, it would be quite easy to merge all the information in all three pages without any loss of information at all – each species would get its own subsection. In fact, I did just that but was reverted, so I figured I'd start some discussion of the question before I made any other edits. Here's what the merged page looked like prior to reverting: [1] Admittedly, I lost one illustration, but I could easily incorporate that in. Is there really in article there? Certainly – Monotropa is a very interesting group; the article just needs fleshing out. Peter G Werner 02:21, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Peter, I'm not sure why 1.5 million articles on species is out of the question, especially when you cut it down to the list of species that people might start articles on. But I'll agree with you that in this case, the text on these two pages does not have great reason to be seperated into two articles. What I was interested in is this, when I showed the photo I took (that you removed) my family was able to identify it by it's traditional name of `Indian Pipe' and show me other pictures in books that looked the same. The colorlessness was the most surprising feature and screamed that it wasn't using photosynthesis to get it's energy. In the sense that someone might have the same experience as me, it is useful to have all that information in one splot. If the new article maintains that and wraps up the whole family, by all means, sounds great--if you are interested in the one surely the infromation on the other would also be interesting. Pdbailey 03:29, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree that condensing both of these into a single article is overkill: they're strikingly different in appearance and have distinct colloquial names. Cutting down the redundant leading paragraphs is OK, but I disagree with the merger. As Pdbailey pointed out, only a relatively small subset of the 1.5 million species are likely to be documented in a sufficiently detailed and non-esoteric fashion as to appear on Wikipedia, so I think a relatively liberal attitude towards the creation of such pages is proper. Choess 23:09, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

The usual method of keeping species separate should work best in the long run. These two are distinct. There is enough information that both articles will expand in time. As for getting the information all in one place, there are the other seven genera in the family Monotropaceae to contend with in the future. Meggar 08:43, 3 August 2006 (UTC)