Talk:Taxonomic rank

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Taxonomic rank is part of the WikiProject Biology, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to biology on Wikipedia.

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Articles merged: for previous discussion, see Talk:Rank (botany).

[edit] Infrafamily

a) the ending "-odd" is, well, odd and almost certainly wrong (I never saw it before)

b) "Infrafamily" (botany) = "tribe" (zoology)? Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 17:26, 26 December 2007 (UTC) huh??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.21.154.8 (talk) 15:11, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Don't know about botanical infrafamilies, but in zoology tribes and infrafamilies are distinct. And, yes, the ending is -odd and I've supplied the reference. I suspect someone realised they were running out of Latin/Greek terminations and decided it would be cool to form them from Welsh or something. Gnostrat (talk) 16:56, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup required: Table of terms in various languages

The table of terms in various languages needs to be cleaned up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.176.79.109 (talk) 13:30, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

That table has arabic characters (I think just noise) in the section Japansese, and the Japanese kanji's do not match the chinese ones. --Squidonius (talk) 02:16, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Before effort is put into editing. Why is there a table of taxonomic terms in the English wiki?132.206.178.40 (talk) 07:58, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm not really sure what you mean by that question. These ranks (some of them anyway) are used in English-language taxonomic literature as well as in Wikipedia classifications and taxoboxes. Why shouldn't an article about them include a table? All the same, on English Wikipedia there's no need for them to be listed in any languages except Latin and English.
I'm more worried about all these unsourced intercalary terms — midkingdom, interkingdom, claudius, etc. Over at Linnaean taxonomy I've been meticulously building up a table of ranks based on cited sources and there are major discrepancies between that table and this one, which is particularly frustrating when I would like to merge that section of Linnaean taxonomy into this article. I doubt that I've got all the details right on the other article (if only because I've put it together from a patchwork of sources for want of a single source which has the joined-up picture) but it would be useful to have some citations for the ranks here so as to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of each table.
A further problem with this article is the inclusion of bacteriological terms like serotype or serovar, biovar etc. If you consult the relevant articles, it is evident that these are not taxonomic ranks but different kinds of grouping at the same rank, in other words, different ways of defining a subspecies. I would delete the lot but I don't have the expertise to know whether there are some actual ranks mixed in among them.
In short, I recommend (a) citations and (b) calling in the experts. Gnostrat (talk) 17:50, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
But first things first. Looks like removing the unnecessary non-English columns won't be controversial and would need doing eventually, so I've done it. Next, the English could be improved while we're waiting for somebody to verify these ranks. Gnostrat (talk) 00:27, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

I'm proposing that the Taxonomic ranks section of Linnaean taxonomy be merged in. Listing all the ranks in the latter article is an exercise in the superfluous. Once the discrepancies between that list and the one in this article have been ironed out, the full table can be consolidated here and, perhaps, replaced in Linnaean taxonomy with a simple summary of the main ranks. This would prepare a shorter and more manageable Linnaean taxonomy for eventual merger with Scientific classification. I am hoping the merge template will also attract some notice to the need for expert attention over here.

I can't see any need for maintaining separate short articles for the zoological and botanical ranks, either. The two systems have far more in common than divides them, some material appears in both articles, and they are better treated together for comparison. (The articles are misleadingly titled as well, since the botanical system is also used in mycology and the zoological one also applies to protozoa.) So I may be bold and merge those in even sooner. Gnostrat (talk) 04:00, 4 April 2008 (UTC)