[WikiEN-l] Category destruction

[K P]

On 5/2/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> K P wrote:
> > If you break down a family into genera, then you can wind up with
> something
> > from one of the big families, where you have 5 genera with 100 members
> each
> > and a couple of thousand genera or categories with only one member each,
> > again, you haven't done anything useful.
>
> I expect the way this would be done according to existing common
> practice on Wikipedia would be to create subcategories for those five
> genera with lots of members, and then the remaining thousand species
> that each belong to their own genera would remain under the root family
> category. People don't generally create categories that will only ever
> hold one or two articles, there's no point.
>
> That's assuming all of those species even get articles, of course.


Then you've articficially, uniquely and originally to Wikipedia created
groups that don't exist elsewhere.  Is this acceptable, that you group
organisms in ways they aren't already grouped, and when do you do it, and
when not?  The problem is that these genera are probably already sorted in
some level of groups, tribes or other, that aren't necessarily used.  So,
what if two of the big genera belong to one group, but they've been given
their own category, and some of the singular genera, belong in various other
groups, but have been grouped together, artificially, and originally, by
Wikipedia editors?

The problem is that categories in taxonomy mean something, whether Linnaean
or phylogenetic.  Nature didn't sort them like Wikipedia wants them, in nice
tidy groups.  When you group organisms you are implying that they belong
together for some reason, such as they are evolutionarily closer to each
other than to members of other groups.  Any time you use a classification
system based on something else, you can't extrapolate a different type of
classification system into what you are doing.  If organisms are categorized
according to taxonomical systems, then Wikipedia editors can't come in and,
because of the convenience of or need for categorization, add a layer of
unrelated groupings to the system.

In botany we create categories all the time that will only ever hold one or
two articles simply because of this, we categorize by families into orders,
and some orders have many families, others only one, we classify genera into
families, and some families have 20,000 genera, others only one.

Taxonomical systems group organisms based upon morphological similarities or
upon evolutionary relationships.  Nature didn't order evolution by numbers,
only 10 allowed here, 20 there.

So, either we use existing taxonomical systems, and then Wikipedia has to
commit to not altering them (what the librarian suggested so readily), or we
don't use existing taxonomical systems of categorizing organisms and simply
make up our own original system.  But what we can't use part taxonomy and
part something we use to accomodate categorization on Wikipedia.

KP