Hi,

I see no reason that this should not be done for other groups of living
organisms where subclass relationships are missing.  

It seems very simple to me. Maybe too simple. Perhaps I am intimidated by the kilometers of discussions I'm reading about the taxon-centric aspect of Wikidata, when I'm not a biologist. So, there is no problem if we add that Cetacea is a subclass of aquatic mammals, as indicated by its Wikipedia page?

Cheers,

Ettore

On Sat, 20 Oct 2018 at 19:20, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/20/18 6:29 AM, Ettore RIZZA wrote:
> For most people, ants are insects, not instances of taxon.

Sure, but Wikidata doesn't have ants being instances of taxon.  Instead,
Formicidae (aka ant) is an instance of taxon, which seems right to me.

Here are some extracts from Wikidata as of a few minutes ago, also showing
the English Wikipedia page for the Wikidata item.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7386     Formicidae      ant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant
instance of     taxon
no subclass of statement

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1390     insect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect
subclass of     animal
instance of     taxon

What is missing is that Q7386 is a subclass of Q1390, which is sanctioned by
the "Ants are eusocial insects" phrase at the start of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant.  I added that statement and put as source
English Wikipedia.  (By the way, how can I source a statement to a particular
Wikipedia page?)


I see no reason that this should not be done for other groups of living
organisms where subclass relationships are missing.

peter