On 3 Jul 2006, at 11:13, Bogdan Giusca wrote: Its pointless trying to classify animals based on the political boundaries they happen to inhabit. It shows a deep misunderstanding of classification. Delete them. Justinc

On 7/3/06, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote: Perhaps but there is no shortage of books on say the fauna of the British Isles. -- geni

On 3 Jul 2006, at 13:16, geni wrote: Yes, but thats just a way of making a smaller book. Usually for portability reasons. And the British Isles, being islands, are a more sensible geographic unit for animals (although not birds; my birdbook is Western Europe). There appear to be lists of "Birds of Belgium" but not books that I can find. Justinc

I find the idea of deleting these categories bizarre. While they are unweildy and need a little refinement, they are very useful categories. Our species pages have precious little information as is. The range of the species is useful information, and it so happens that this information is most readily available in terms of political boundaries. The assertion that you will have species in 100-200 categories just isn't true - to begin with, are there 200 sovereign states in the world, and if so, the species that are found in all of them are things like rats, cockroaches and houseflies. It might make sense to limit the use of these categories on such cosmopolitan human commensals. But other than that, these are useful categories. With regards to Justin's concern about the size of the categories, that's easy enough to solve by breaking them into subcats as they get bigger - already you have "Avifauna of Foo" - breaking things down into Class or Family is quite feasable. As for saying that it isn't "useful" to categorise species by country - thanks for calling my professional interests "useless" Ian On 7/3/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: