Commons talk:Taxonomy

animals

moved from Commons:Village pump --Conti|✉ 16:55, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

moved from en:User talk:ContiE to get more general input. Plugwash 04:54, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

i saw the following in my watchlish Cuon moved to Cuon alpinus ahivng an article per species when we only have a few images for the whole genus seems a bit ott to me. Did you base this move on some policy or do you have another reason for it? Plugwash 03:22, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I moved "Cuon" to "Cuon alpinus" because that's the correct name for the species (see Dhole), and according to that article it is also the only species of that genus, so the content will be exactly the same. I started creating an article for every species on Category:Vulpini and continued with doing so. There are not too many animal pictures on commons yet, but looking in the future I think it is good to have an article (or category or whatever it will be) for every species. I filled Vulpes vulpes with some pictures already, and I think it will grow much much bigger than that in the future. I just started editing some animal articles the way I think they should look like, and I welcome a discussion about this. I am not aware of any policy on this, maybe that's the reason why there is not too much order in the animal categories yet. Maybe some kind of WikiProject about animal pictures on commons would be a good idea. :-) --Conti|✉ 03:54, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)

ok i didn't realise it was the only species in the genus. persoanlly i think too many small articles is a pita. I like the way en:mains power plug is done, Good general information some inforamtion on each specific type inline in that page and then individual articles for those few types that we have lots of information on.

I agree that many small articles can be pretty annoying, but I think that most of the animal articles will soon have many more pictures in them. Another problem would be the question on how to name the articles instead. Just going by genus would be a mess IMO, "Canis" would be huuge, "Vulpes" would be moderately big and "Cerdocyon" would again just contain one not so well known species. I'm not sure how we should solve that. --Conti|✉ 04:21, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)

i would say that the genus article (or catagory title section or whatever) should contain a few (say 1-3) representatives for each species and then for species with lots of pictures there should be an article for the species. Plugwash

My opinion would be to use genus level as 'default', and when this gets too large, split off either the larger species (i.e. those with most pictures) or all species into separate pages. - Andre Engels 14:57, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, that would make things a bit more complicated and still wouldn't solve the problem with many genera having only one species. A new software feature would be quite nice: Every species (or genus) has its own category, and you as a user could go to Category:Vulpini and just select "show all pictures from subcategories" or something, and all foxpictures would show up. --Conti|✉ 19:08, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

User:Plugwash just added a Dog picture to Canis lupus. It is of course technically right to do so, as the dog is the "Canis lupus familiaris", but I think we should make an exception with domestic dogs (and cats). This is a good example of the problem we have here: There'll be many many pictures of cats and dogs, compared to other wildlife animals. I'm not really sure what to do, if we're going to create galleries by image count we will have a gallery for one dog breed, one for a genus and another one for a whole family, and that feels a bit odd to me. --Conti|✉ 22:44, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

If we get a lot of dog images (we either don't have them or they aren't on any page i can find). Then we should create a seperate page and leave the best 4 (4 images is a single gallery row) images on Canis lupis. Later should the need arise we can do the same to sections of the dog article. Plugwash 22:57, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There's a whole category, see Category:Dogs. Hmm, who is gonna choose the 4 best images? Also, what are we going to do with interwikilinks? If we have many different animals on the same page, then there will also be alot of interwikilinks to the same language. This would be possible to do, but it doesn't look too nice. Maybe we could do both, creating articles for every species and creating articles for every genus. That would be much more work for us to do tho. --Conti|✉ 23:39, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

hmm im sure my search for dog didn't find that catagory (thumps the mediawiki search engine). Plugwash 00:00, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I added another 3 dog images to canis lupus put in a comment to keep it at one row and added a link to Category:Dogs. Commons like wikipedia works on the wiki principle : edit first ask questions later. I can't see how the issue of picking a small sample of good dog pics would be any more or less contentious than picking the images for the dog article on wikipedia. Plugwash 21:29, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Animal galleries

moved from Commons:Village pump --Conti|✉ 16:55, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

There was a discussion recently about how to make galleries of animals. It was argued that creating a gallery for every species (e.g. "Vulpes macrotis") was too detailed for many animals, as we don't have many pictures for such animals. It was proposed to rather use galleries for every genus (e.g. "Vulpes"), but the problem here is that there are some genera (like "Canis") that then would contain way too many pictures. Personally I don't really like the solution to use a species-gallery here and a genus-gallery there, so I thought up something different: I created Vulpes by simply using the already existing species articles as a template (like {{:Vulpes vulpes}}), therefore creating a gallery for the whole Vulpes genus. There are some problems with that, like the wrong interwikilinks, but I like the idea. That way we could create galleries not only for genera, but also for families, orders, etc. without too much work. The individual species galleries have to be refactored a bit, so they look good on the other pages too. Another problem I see is that things get more complicated and might be pretty unfriendly for newbies. What do you think? --Conti|✉ 18:06, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Two comments: First, the radical solution (requiring software changes) would be to switch to a keyword-based system where every picture is described by a set of keywords on its description page and category-like pages are created automatically by the software. That way, when you upload a picture, all you have to do is fill out the image description page, no need to create categories or edit regular pages.

Second, the less radical category solution (requiring no software changes) would be to place an image of, say, a Vulpes vulpes schrencki into Category:Vulpes vulpes schrencki, Category:Vulpes vulpes, Category:Vulpes, Category:Canidae, Category:Carnivora, Category:Mammalia, Category:Chordata, Category:Animalia, Category:Animals, and also Category:Snow, Category:Hokkaido, Category:Japan etc. That way, the picture would show up in all of those categories, as opposed to the most specific one, as is currently the case. The software support for navigating large categories isn't quite there yet, but that's a relatively minor problem that doesn't require radical changes. In other words, there would be both a species gallery and a genus gallery, as well as a family gallery, etc. up to a kingdom/regnum gallery. --MarkSweep 18:59, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In terms of the second suggestion - a picture of a species shouldn't be added to every taxonomic devision to which it belongs - simply a category for that species. That species category would then belong to a genus category, and so forth. Eventually, Category:Animalia would hold millions of images and other media if we added EVERY animal to it. The same goes for phyla, classes, orders, and genera to lesser extents. --Oldak Quill 13:39, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I think the idea of categories is good, but I wil do it only with the family, the specie, and the sub-specie or any other division of the specie (Like in category:dogs). The categories of canidae, mammalia, animalia... should only hold pictures that show something that is common for all the species in the category. I would see a good idea to put a picture about the reproduction of the mammals in Category:Mammalia, but no a picture about a detail of the life of the foxes. When most above we go in the taxonomic division, less things in common will have the species, and less pictures will belong to the category. --Arturo Reina 18:30, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)