Wikipedia talk:Automated taxobox system

This talk page can be used to discuss issues with the automated taxobox system that are common to the entire system, not just one of its templates. Discussions of this nature prior to 2017 can be found at Template talk:Automatic taxobox

Those familiar with the system prior to mid-2016 are advised to read Notes for "old hands".

Full examples and guidance for stem-group and total-group?

Hi folks- I see that the usage of /stem-group and /total-group are mentioned at Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system/advanced taxonomy#Taxon variants, but only in the very basics. It would be great to have examples and guidance along the lines of the Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system/advanced taxonomy#Questionable assignments subsection. I did not initially find this documentation, and started a discussion at Template talk:Automatic taxobox#Proper handling of stem taxa that resulted in an unresolved dispute over how these constructs work.

I tried to document what I thought was correct (which appears to match what is here), but was informed by @Peter coxhead and @Jts1882 that that way of doing things lacks sufficient consensus to be documented.

I'm hoping that posting here will get the attention of whoever added the documentation that is already here, and that they can help resolve the debate.

I don't much care how this works, I just want to be able to use it without being told I'm doing it wrong. That discussion has now resulted in Template:Taxonomy/Ctenophora/stem-group being handled in a way that contradicts what is documented here. As you can see in that talk thread, we were unable to find consistent usage of these terms in various papers.

In particular, I'd like to know (and would be happy to help document if there is sufficient agreement and no one more knowledgeable is available):

• Explaining the rationale behind which groups get which parent (this is the heart of the disagreement in the other thread)
• When to use the total group vs the stem group (we discussed the use of total group as an alternative, but I assume it has an expected use already?)
• When to use either of these at all- it seems to be common in very high level taxa, where there isn't anything grouping between, say, a phylum and "Deuterostomia" or even "Animalia". But I don't think you ever use it for something like "stem mammals": You'd use Mammaliaformes or Mammaliamorpha. A more ambiguous case would be the class Crinoidea, as most of its orders are outside of the crown group, but I don't recall seeing a lot of things assigned to stem-Crinoidea (Paleozoic Echinoderms in general are an unresolved mess, but Crinoids are relatively well-understood)
• How to handle ambiguity- my sense is to leave it under the non-variant because while it is ideally the crown group, it's a bit ambiguous. Or should this be done with /? tacked on somewhere?

Ixat totep (talk) 04:12, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

Guidance on duplicate names

Are there conventions for handling taxa with identical names that are still both in use for whatever reason? One that already exists is Stylophora, which is both a genus of corals and class of echinoderms:

• Template:Taxonomy/Stylophora (page: Stylophora (coral))
• Template:Taxonomy/Stylophora (classis) (page: Stylophora)

Is the convention to put the rank in parentheses?

• Is that just done for whichever is added second, regardless of rank? In this example, the higher rank got the "(classis)", but Template:Taxonomy/Rhombifera already exists as a class, while there is no entry for the genus Rhombifera within that class (I'm writing pages for these two taxa at the moment).
• What if the ranks are the same, as is the case for Rotadiscus (gastropod) and Rotadiscus (an eldonioid)?

I'm happy to help write up documentation given clarity on what should be documented.

Ixat totep (talk) 04:25, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@Ixat totep: the taxonomy templates should, ideally, correspond to the article titles, so I think that this is an article title issue, not an automated taxobox issue.

Thus I think that the two Stylophora taxonomy templates should be changed to follow the article titles. (Btw, as both the gastropod and eldonioid Rotadiscus are names under the ICZN, one must be a junior homonym.) Peter coxhead (talk) 07:46, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

Although, it is possible for plants and animals to legitimately share the same binomial as hemihomonyms. This occurs for a few species (and hundreds of genera). These article titles may not be disambiguated at first, but will eventually when the second article is either created or referred to. Loopy30 (talk) 13:46, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead

Btw, as both the gastropod and eldonioid Rotadiscus are names under the ICZN, one must be a junior homonym.

I don't write the papers or update any sort of formal registry, I just put stuff in Wikipedia. If the papers don't mach ICZN, that's a problem for scientific workers to fix- us doing so would be WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH.

As I understand it, ZooBank is the official ICZN registry and it doesn't contain either Rotadiscus genus. Nor does ITIS. IRMNG considers both to be accepted, abeit with an outdated parent for the eldonioid (gastropod; eldonioid). PBDB likewise includes both (gastropod; eldonioid, also with an incorrect parent even given the source it cites— Caron 2010 doesn't ever even mention Eldoniidae, and no paper I've read that does anything like a formal assignment assigns the eldonioid Rotadiscus to anything other than Rotadiscidae since it was established in 1991, at which time Rotadiscidae itself was assigned to Eldonioidea).

So when scientists formally change the name of the eldonioid Rotadiscus, then we should, of course, follow. But various workers have been publishing papers using that name for more than 20 years now, so that's what we need to document unless and until it is deemed "fixed" in a cite-able source and picked up by additional researchers. There was a proposal to change it in a dissertation in 2012 which has been completely ignored by numerous other researchers who have published since then.

This is one thing I find frustrating here. I ask how to deal with what the scientific community has published, and get told they're doing it wrong. That is not our problem. Our problem is capturing what they're doing in a consistent and usable way. The scientific community continues to publish (e.g. Schroeder et al. 2018; Li et al. 2023) about Rotadiscus grandis in family Rotadiscidae, so that's what we need to handle.

Ixat totep (talk) 15:48, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

The Caron et al (2010) paper refers to Rotadiscus as an eldoniid (not eldonioid) which might be where PBDB got the idea they belonged to family Eldoniidae. However, the same sentence also refers to them as cambroernids (for the higher taxon Cambroernida) so they probably weren't making a family assignment.  —  Jts1882 | talk  17:08, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@Jts1882 yeah, see the eldonioid talk page for an extensive discussion of this mess. The Eldonioidea are a bit of a dumpster fire because Linnaean systematic paleontology and cladistics don't really go well together, and we seem to be stuck in a transitional period. So you get cladistic papers throwing around casual terms like "eldoniid" without ever clarifying what formal taxon is intended (I just triple-checked this in Caron et al., which just uses "cambroernids" and "eldoniids" – "Cambroernida" was formally defined by Li et al. 2023, which uses "eldonioids" informally instead of "eldoniids"). I had a document tracking every formal assignment and cladogram of this group, but I seem to have misplaced it. Rotadiscus and Paropsonema have definitely never been assigned to Eldoniidae in any formal way I can find. It's on my TODO list to re-build it and make sure all of the Eldonioidea pages are thoroughly supported with citations. Sadly PBDB's error reporting process is "contact the person listed in field X, even though it's not a link and we won't give you any contact info for them." Ugh. They also mess up Schroeder et al. 2018 by fabricating a family Paropsonemidae that isn't mentioned in the text at all. I'm too lazy to copy-paste a table flip emoji, but consider my tables flipped :P

Ixat totep (talk) 18:38, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead

Thus I think that the two Stylophora taxonomy templates should be changed to follow the article titles.

1. Is that documented somewhere?

2. What are the rules or conventions for article titles, and are they documented anywhere?

Answering my question with yet another assertion that something else has been done "wrong" without any sort of documentation that I can point to when I try to follow your advice and someone else pops out of the woodwork to tell me that what I'm doing at your direction is "wrong" isn't very helpful. It just moves the problem.

Ixat totep (talk) 15:52, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@Ixat totep: I deliberately labelled my comment on Rotadiscus with "btw" and put it in parentheses; I'm sorry if it wasn't clear that this was not any kind of attempt to say what we should do – of course we must follow the literature (although we can, with a reference to the ICZN, say that two identical genus names for animals are not allowed).

Conventions for article titles are documented at WP:NCFLORA and WP:NCFAUNA. Neither are helpful on what disambiguation terms to use.

When I started editing here, I shared your obvious frustration that there aren't clear documented guidelines in some cases, or if there are, it may not be obvious where to find them. If you look at the history, you'll see that I created and built up Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Index and quite a few of the guideline pages it links to in order to assist me and other plant editors. However, what I've discovered over the years is that many editors are very committed to WP:5P5 and WP:IAR, and that, as WP:Policies and guidelines says, "The actual policies and guidelines are behaviors practiced by most editors." So often the only answer to questions such as yours is "well, this is how I've learnt to do it by copying other editors in the same area". Certainly this applies to disambiguation terms; I've just copied other plant editors who use "(plant)", and if I've ever needed to use such a term in a different area, I've just looked to see what was usual there.

My view that article titles and taxonomy template titles should generally match when the disambiguation is from homonyms is simply because it makes for predictability and consistency. I don't think this is written down anywhere. (For categories, there is explicit guidance that the same disambiguation should be applied to the article and any eponymous category – see the fourth bullet point at Wikipedia:Categorization/Naming.)

So, do please feel free to propose what documentation you think would be helpful. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:41, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead Thanks for the more detailed explanation and history, it helps a lot. I do apologize for the degree to which my frustration leaks out in some of these responses.

I'll take a look at the plant-related bits you mention. I have generally not looked at botany-related things as I know there are differences from zoology, and my interests are narrow: I pretty much only work on Paleozoic/Ediacaran deuterostomes (primarily echinoderms, stem ambulacrarians, and stem chordates) as that's where I've found a combination of interest and less-than-thorough/up-to-date pages.

So, do please feel free to propose what documentation you think would be helpful.

My hesitance to do so comes from being roundly rejected the last time I tried. Even though it's now clear that that the documentation I added matches what is briefly documented for stem groups at Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system/advanced taxonomy#Taxon variants- if I try again with that one to expand on that guidance, will it be allowed to stand or will you delete it again? BTW I was not and am not upset over the past deletion- it was appropriate under the circumstances, which is why I "thanked" the edit when it appeared in my watchlist. But I don't want to make a second effort and have it deleted, plus now Template:Taxonomy/Ctenophora/stem-group violates what's documented.

Back to this topic: I'd be perfectly happy to find a place to add a line regarding the naming (and I think what you propose makes sense, although I am a bit hesitant to rename taxon templates myself as I'm not quite sure how much breakage would be involved and the system doesn't show downward links so finding everything with Stylophora as a parent seems complex- I'm probably missing something there). In any event, that at least solves my immediate problem with Rhombifera.

Anyway, documentation is always hard in complex systems. That's why I like to focus on improving docs before just doing stuff.

Ixat totep (talk) 17:08, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

There's (complex) guidance on searching here. If you search for Template:Taxonomy/ insource:"parent Stylophora" you'll find all the pages with names starting "Template:Taxonomy/" containing "parent Stylophora". There appear to be two. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:33, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

I have a script that allows you to browse the taxonomy templates downwards. Just install importScript('User:Jts1882/taxonomybrowser.js'); in your commons.js file and look for "Taxonomy browser" in the tools menu and enter "Stylophora (classis)" in the taxon name box. It uses searches like those just mentioned. Unfortunately it doesn't handle taxonomy templates with suffixes or |same_as= very well. It was designed as a tool to help organise the taxonomy templates and I didn't think handling edge cases was worth the extra effort. You'll also be disappointed by a lack of documentation.  —  Jts1882 | talk  18:12, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead @Jts1882 thanks! As much as I love documentation, things have to get started somehow, and having a thing is better than not having one :-)

And yeah, I guess it would be hard to seach for suffixes like "(classis)" without knowing they are there. For the "/whatever" variant suffixes (if that's what they should be called, idk), I found Category:Taxonomy templates with qualified names and Category:Taxonomy templates with query.

Ixat totep (talk) 18:26, 28 December 2024 (UTC)