Category talk:Ray-finned fish

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[edit] Comment

Apostrophe- In your opinion most of the text is redundant but that does not make it a given fact.

The ray finned fish comprise nearly all the species of fish and the point of the text was to, rather than face people with a meanlingless list of scientific names, to provide examples of the well known species in each family with suitable links to guide the reader to the species they are looking for, ie make the page user friendly. It also lists all the families by scientific name which the subcategories do not as some subcategories have taken the common name instead.

Kerripaul 17:36, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

It is rather an unusual practice to put a list onto a category page. Ray-finned fish already has a fine list, so putting another one here is kind of redundant. Depends on one's view of categories - I tend to look at them as workhorses for editors and for readers who already have a good idea of what they're looking for, for whom it's easier to pick from the links than to remember how to type in the name. In such cases, it's better to keep the descriptive material at the top short, so as avoid a bunch of scrolling to find the actual category entries. A practical problem with the unusual format is that unless you can write down reasons that all future editors find compelling, you're going to have to camp out on this page for the rest of your natural lifespan. :-) Stan 00:24, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I see your point. To be fair one of the original reasons for me to create the page has reduced considerably. One of the problems with the page originally was that half of the subcategories had scientific names and the other half used common names, result total chaos. Someone has got rid of most of the common names lately and replaced them with scientific names - I would do the rest myself but us mere mortals dont seem to have the power to rename categories. If that occurred it would be reasonable to add the links to common fish species for each family to the ray finned fish article and delete it from the category. How do you rename categories? PS this is a much more constructive way to effect change than wholesale unilateral deletion Kerripaul 19:13, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Only way to rename a category is brute force - create new cat, edit all articles to be in new cat, remove old one (this last step does need an admin). I don't know that you're going to get very far with an attempt to force all Latin though - the general rule is to use English if possible, orders tend to be Latin only because most don't have an English form (curiously, de: never uses Latin for order names - they're all "-artige", meaning "-like"). A practical problem is that because changing the cat involves touching lots of pages, you're likely to get the attention of a great many editors. Some of them participate in Wikipedia:WikiProject Fishes, if you want to develop a consensus before trying to rearrange. Stan 20:53, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I think I will have a go for the simple reason that 43 out of 48 categories are already in the latin names and one of the english names in Eel which covers several categories Kerripaul 19:04, 15 May 2006 (UTC)