In the fullness of time, Wikipedia or some fork of it will be properly semantic, with a nice query interface that will let you ask questions like "what are all the birds native to the Chicago area?". In the meantime, people interested in such categorization have little choice but to create these explicit categories and lists, silly and overspecific though they sometimes seem to be. I don't see much harm in this, other than the dreadful waste of time (compared to, say, the time that could be spent implementing a proper semantic scheme once and for all) and the inevitable incompleteness and inaccuracy of the explicit lists.

On 24/03/07, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: Indeed. Note how a lot of lists were made more or less superfluous by the category feature. Lists these days need to be of value by order and/or annotation. - d.

No, that doesn't work. Something can be native to lots of places within N. America, while not being native to the whole of it. A bird found in Chicago and a neighbouring place should be mentioned in those 2 lists, not the main list, otherwise you lose the precision. Creating a list for "birds endemic to Chicago and X" would result in lots of very short lists for each possible combination of places.

"Endemic to X" means "native to only X", which is not what I was looking for. I was looking for a way to say "Native to X but not all of Y" where X is a subregion of Y. The region an animal is endemic to is not usually a region that would get a list in the "Animals native to X" collection, so it would have to appear on multiple lists, or on one more general list (which loses precision).

You're misquoting me. I said "Native to X but not all of Y", not "Native to *only* X but not all of Y", there is a big difference. A bird which is native to Chicago and Rockford and nowhere else is not endemic to Chicago, or endemic to Rockford, or native to the whole of N. America.

On 3/25/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: In articles on species the word is wikilinked to its correct definition, and, because of this duality of meaning, I generally parenthetically include its biological meaning in the article. On 3/25/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually this is considered endemic if it both populations are relictual populations from a once more widespread area. This is the definition of endemic in biology and for relictual populations with bimodal distributions. It means what you keep saying it doesn't mean, and it is used in botany how you say it can't be used, so I don't think we can go any further discussing it. On 3/25/07, *Thomas Dalton* <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: You could use primary sources, though. There is no rule against that. (You have to be careful to keep things neutral, but that shouldn't be too hard with papers about plants - just be careful if there is disagreement in the scientific community about something.) There is a rule against OR, which is why it's important to distinguish between the two. No, we can't realistically use primary sources for many things in a rapidly changing field like Botany or among the photosynthetic protists, because the primary sources are, today, proposing radically new taxonomies of various groups, some based upon controversial techniques such as environmental sampling of DNA, rather than culturing of organisms. What we do is quote the primary source if it is an important paper, but by the time it is an important paper, there are plenty of secondary sources confirming its importance with relevant discussions of it. Photosynthetic single-celled eukaryotic groups are placed at higher taxonomic levels all over the place, every once in a while we have someone come in and, in good faith, change the color code for these groups to lavendar or something. We do use the primary sources, but under careful circumstances, and after confirmation of their importance. There was an article that blew me away a couple of months ago in AJBotany, yet has made hardly a splash in the academic community, so I have to wait. Another plant family that I have been studying in the Chinese fossil record as a major contribution to basal angiosperm evolution recently made Nature, so we're good to go there. But, if I went with primary sources, Wikipedia would not be a useful source for people to come to to find information about botany. There is nothing neutral going on in botany today, it's massive upheaval, guarding of the old, fanning of the new, reassertion of the old, fights about molecular techniques versus morphology, cladistics or not, the entire basic classification scheme is in high disagreement. It's fun, but it's not neutral. KP

On 3/25/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote: In the biology of species distributions "endemic" means native to an area and only that area. Of course, the meaningfulness of the term varies with how the person defines the term. "Endemic to North America" isn't nearly as meaningful as "endemic to a single stream in Tennessee". Obviously, in talking about diseases, "endemic" has a different meaning. The term "epidemic to" isn't used for species distributions, although the same sort of modelling tools can be used for the spread of diseases and the spread of non-native species (which are often called "exotic" species, just to confuse ordinary people).