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".

Template/Taxonomy for something about which very little is known?

I've recently been updating things to the automated system, and today I dealt with Mawsonites. It's a genus defined by a fossil from hundreds of millions of years ago, and apparently there's not even a remote consensus about what it is (jellyfish? trace fossil? microbial colony? etc. etc. etc.). There was no {{taxonomy}} template for it, so I created Template:Taxonomy/Mawsonites, but ran into a couple things that I'm not sure I did correctly, and don't know how to "really" handle.

1. The existing {{taxobox}} listed it as in Animalia, then incertae sedis from there down to the genus itself. I put the existing "Animalia/incertae sedis" claim in the new taxonomy template. However, some of the theorized possibilities listed in the main article for the genus are not actually animals. Should its parent perhaps be set to {{Taxonomy/Incertae sedis/Life}} instead? I should note here that some of the theorized possibilities aren't even organisms, e.g. "mud volcano or other sedimentary structure", but the article reads like those theories are now thought to be very unlikely.

2. I wasn't sure what to do about the taxonomy template's "extinct" field. I guess at least the species is almost certainly extinct, since we apparently haven't kept finding these things, but the genus? Again, I'd guess extinct, but... what if it's just some jellyfish (I know that's not a genus, but that doesn't mean that its genus would necessarily be extinct)? Or even some weird mark left by a jellyfish? But as far as I can see from the documentation, "extinct" is just yes/no; I'm not sure if it's appropriate or even possible to instead set it to "probably" or "unknown" or whatever.

For what it's worth, I'm thinking "Incertae sedis/Life" and "extinct=yes", but instead of making it that way, I decided to just keep things as close as possible to the way they were in the pre-automated article, and raise my questions here. - Rwv37 (talk) 18:21, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@Rwv37:, "Animalia/incertae sedis" seems appropriate. The Paleobiology Database lists the parent as Metazoa (i.e. Animalia) citing a 2004 paper. The 2004 paper actually discusses Mawsonites in the context of "medusoids". "Medusoids" does appear in quotation marks in the paper, suggesting that the authors are hedging their bets a bit; i.e., they are discussing fossils that have been classified as medusoids, but aren't definitively taking a position on whether the fossils mentioned are or are not actually medusoids. The source currently in the article for the statement "jellyfish (although this is considered unlikely)" actually says "not considered by Glaessner (1979) to be undoubtedly a jellyfish", which is not at all the same thing as "considered unlikely to be a jellyfish".

Based on what I've seen I think you could set the parent template to be Template:Taxonomy/Scyphozoa/? (questionably a jellyfish), but "Animalia/incertae sedis" works as well. The non-animal hypotheses for Mawsonites don't seem to be well supported.

For taxa known from fossils, you can pretty safely set "extinct=yes". If a genus is known from fossils as well as extant species a quick check on a search engine should turn up sources discussing the extant species. The absence of a † in a manual taxobox shouldn't be taken to indicate that extinct status is uncertain for a taxon that the article describes as being known from fossils. Plantdrew (talk) 21:10, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Edit request 9 September 2024

Hello, please apply this fix to the module in production. Od1n (talk) 18:22, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

 Completed. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. ^{put'er there} 20:19, 9 September 2024 (UTC)