Talk:Taxonomy
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♥ How do i make a taxonomic scheme using only kingdom and phylum? Its a report i have to do and i designed imaginary creatures and im supposed to make a taxonomic scheme using those two kingdoms.
I'm looking for a taxonomy to use for the basis of categorizing/sorting my on-line photo album. Does such a thing exist? Prefer a freely available or OSS source. -Speedeep 20:45, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] Web taxonomies
The Wikipedia does not mention the use of the word taxonomies to describe the hierarchically arranged information on Web pages. Vendors of content management systems offer the capability of producing a taxonomy for Web pages when designing a site. lenguas 1/27/05
[edit] Taxonomy = naming?
In grad school I remember reading--I don't know where--that taxonomy was essentially involved with naming, and I assumed that the "nom" part of the word was from the latin for "name", literally "taxon naming" (and the root of "nomenclature", "nominal" etc). The argument was that phylogeny (and phenetic classification also I guess) was the subject that dealt with relationships between groups (in the biological world), and taxonomy was principally involved with the rules and regs involved in naming the resultant taxa. Thus, I'm unsure whether taxonomy is more related to the process of classification vs the process of naming the resulting taxa. Or does it, in common usage, generally imply both? Can we check on this.....Jeeb 1 July 2005 03:42 (UTC)
- The "nom" is from νόμος (nomos, law, custom) and is thus related to words like economy. The greek root for name is ōnom- or ōnym- (usually with the y in English borrowings, unless initial, like onomastics). If 'name' was intended it probably would be taxonymy, like toponymy.
- However it might help explain why we, or rather the French whose word taxonomie we borrowed, have it spelled with -onom- rather than -inom- as the etymology from 'taxis' requires. ('Taxon' though is a later back-formation from 'taxonomy'.) —Muke Tever talk (la.wiktionary) 01:04, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Scientific Taxonomies vs. Folk Taxonomies
While both definitions are clear and accurate; is there a middle ground? In a corporate environment, particularly for a corporate communications department, the taxonomy could be considered to semi-scientific. While there exists a scientific basis for elements of the taxonomy, hierarchical branches and specific terms, they are intermixed with 'how we think about information' perspective, incorporating the vocabulary of the organisation.
[edit] how many kingdoms?
I am doing a project for biology and am trying to figure out if there is really just five kingdoms and why scientist think this -(unsigned 16:13, 25 September 2006 by 68.103.97.77)
[edit] Beware clarification
30-October-2006: In recent years, revisions to the 5-year-old "taxonomy" article, for the reason of "clarification" (quote), have actually blanked or eliminated significant sections. Last year, on November 10 (2005), the link to "cladistics" was removed after years of use; I have added a small paragraph about "cladistic taxonomy" under the new header "Various taxonomies" to keep linking cladistics, since it is quite important IMHO to the original meaning of taxonomy in biological naming.
Beware any future "clarification" to the taxonomy article that seems to simplify the article to be little more than a dictionary definition of "taxonomy" as a synonym for "classification" which omits the importance to biology and other fields that treat "taxonomy" as a key issue. Per WP:NOT, Wikipedia is not [just] a dictionary, so definitely add brief historical and related information to be more than just a "definition" about taxonomy. -Wikid77 12:46, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Various taxonomies
NOTE: I don't know enough about how Wikipedia works to tell if the following is appropriate and *working* or not... :
TEXT FROM PAGE (look at "edit" if you can't see the hidden ref bit!)...
In alpha taxonomy, as the scientific classification of organisms, the system includes the root called "Organism" (as this applies to all living things, it is implied rather than stated explicitly), followed by the ranks: Kingdom, Phylum (plural, phyla), Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, with over 40 various other ranks sometimes inserted, [1] such as subphylum, superorder, subfamily, subtribe, or subspecies to handle complex groups such as insects (more at: scientific classification or Linnaean taxonomy).
MY COMMENTS: Sorry, I don't know how to 'reveal' the code, as pasting it here has just reproduced the (for me) non-functional reference... In any case, it shows up with a [1] footnote, but clicking on it does nothing on my browsers (Safari, Firefox). In any case, it looks like a sneaky person slipped some obscenity in there... I "undid" the specific edit that changed "King Phillip Came Over For Good Sex" to "King Phillip Came Over For Good Penis", but frankly does this "ref" work for others?
Edit that inserted the obscenity (which I undid): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taxonomy&diff=next&oldid=101693248
WhyAskWhyNot 04:39, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Irrelevant part
The phrase "and commonly display parent-child relationships" seems to be irrelevant to the text and, therefore, I suggest that it be deleted. 194.27.68.137 09:43, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
- I'm not sure it means what you think it means. I'm no taxonomy expert, but it might simply be expressing the relationship between parent (higher) taxonomic groupings and child (lower) groupings. Admittedly, it does sound like someone's cut-and-pasted from an article on the art of parenting, but I suspect that's not the case. If I'm correct, it would still be very useful to reword so that this (mis-?) interpretation of the statement isn't made again. Cheers, --Plumbago 09:52, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
Indeed, "parent-child relationship" is a fairly generic way of referring to the relationship between hierarchichal entities, and is used in taxonomy in exactly this way by many. I'm not sure what wording would be appropriate, but it should not be excised.WhyAskWhyNot 02:11, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Unreferenced template
I never read the original article here and the first sentence of the article appears to be quite good, bringing in the Greek etymology. Then it starts to get highly abstract and very speculative, especially when it begins to speak of the classification of all things. Yet no theorists or philosophers are cited beyond the passing reference to a name or two. It often seems to me that the article is relying on the philosophic conjectures of modernist Wikipedia editors. That isn't right and the meaning of much of the article is lost in semantically overloaded words. The rest of us are not familiar with the overload. We need some theorists to be cited here.
FYI the Greek terms of the biological classification much precede the 14th century. That was an interesting guess, but don't guess. Your response should be "I'll find out (sir)." In fact they originate with the philosopher Aristotle. You need to read some Aristotle, whose works I am sure can be found on line. Now, he had his own biological classification, based on reproduction, with which Linnaeus, a classical scholar, was no doubt quite familiar. But, the classification that counts, the one that got passed on to taxonomy, is the metaphysical one. It divides everything (not just plants and animals) into categories, genera and species. Linnaeus got the whole thing from him. When you get into the top brackets certain problems with the category of everything start to happen and so ontology was born.
So you can see there is nothing de novo in this line of thinking. If you are going to become philosophers read some history of philosophy. Now, if you are introducing such terms as alpha taxonomy and the use of taxonomy outside biology and making all kinds of speculations then you need to state whose concepts and terms these are. We are all philosophers no doubt and we all slip into it unconsciously. However this is an encyclopedia covering basically the history of previous serious thought so you have to catch yourself up and get back to the published framework. I don't see any bibliography or any notes refering to any items in it. All I see are many links without specification beyond the name of what is to be found in what link. Go to work now.Dave 10:03, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Taxonomy has errors
I strongly believe that scientific taxonomy has many obvious errors and unnecessary groups. I think it would be much easier to classify organisms if the taxonomy system were simplified (but not over-simplified, as that would create more errors) into a system in which you can only go in one of two directions in a given group of organisms. This supports my hypothesis that a power of 2, organisms, have lived or existed ever since the beginning of living things.--Mathexpressions 05:31, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
