Commons talk:Wikiproject Tree of Life/Newsletter 2007-01

Ichthyologists don't actually trouble themselves about the paraphyly - even the most technical of books still title themselves using "fishes". Cameras are not the issue so much as that a great many species of fish are only known from the dead bodies pulled out of fishing nets - quite a few fish have never been photographed swimming around, by anybody. There are however many old prints that could be scanned. Stan Shebs 03:06, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Reasonable goals for coverage

I think it is important to set reasonable goals for coverage of diversity. Arthropods, in particular, are just overwhelming. How about trying to get representation of the major orders of arthropods, and then, perhaps, families of certain groups? It seems reasonable to get representatives of most families of lepidoptera, for instance. Perhaps we can start on nearctic and palearctic lepidoptera. One might do likewise for coleoptera. (There are lots of obscure families, however, seldom photographed, see the effort on BugGuide for North America. We've been working for three years and still have a long way to go.)

For that matter, vertebrates are pretty overwhelming at this stage, as are plants. Setting some reasonable initial goals (such as representation of all orders in a given class, then all families,...) will help focus effort in the project. --Cotinis 01:18, 5 February 2007 (UTC)