Visviva

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Please sign your comments on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username (if you're logged in) and the date. Please also read the Wikispecies policy What Wikispecies is not. If you need help, ask me on my talk page, or in the Village Pump. Again, welcome! Lycaon 17:41, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Lithobates catesbeianus

Please see these changes to Lithobates catesbeianus - mainly the change of {{aut|Shaw}} to [[Shaw]] - where I followed the Help:Name section guidelines. Thanks for all the contributions! --Georgeryp 17:01, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Liverworts

I've been holding off on revising the high-level liverwort taxonomy because I didn't have access to a couple of my key references (such as the one that lists all the authorities for families and genera). I don't want to hold off any longer, though, because the liverwort classification here is abyssmally bad -- it follows no major system and the divisional name "Hepatophyta" is a typo for Hepaticophyta (albeit one that was published in a nomenclature article without anyone noticing the typo until it had proliferated in the literature). I've noticed this name is being followed on several WP now in several languages, and of course they all prohibit editing without the creation of an account, so I am frustrated at that end. The easiest way to fix it all is to get Wikispecies fixed, so that all the WP articles that link here (especially to "Hepatophyta") will gradually notice the error and (hopefully) correct it.

The problem is not easy to fix because, as I say, it affects everything up to and including the rank of division, so all those pages and links and templates at every lower rank have to be corrected. What is the best way to go about this? Is there a bot that can help to at least get the division and class ranks corrected? It's going to require a lot of hand editing anyway because of odd intra-divisional and intra-class levels (which no one uses and may not have been published), which also appear on countless liverwort pages.

To get a small sense of what I mean, look at the Wikispecies page for Metzgeriineae and compare it side-by-side with the Wikipedia article w:Metzgeriales (no, not the same rank, but on purpose). Compare the nice, simple classification on Wikpedia with the mess of invalid and incorrect names we have here. Everything between kingdom and order is wrong on our page, even looking at conservative systems used over the past 30 years. There are a few new systems (still not matching ours in any way), but they are not generally accepted yet, and given the rate at which new phylogenetic information is appearing, they are likely to undergo significant revision before settling down. I prefer to stick with the more widely accepted system in use since 1977 for now, since it's the one used in the majority of bryophyte literature.

Any ideas on how to start the enormous move/corrections? I'm not even sure how to start, because on the one hand our information is hopelessly wrong, but on the other hand the edit histories probably should be preserved somehow. There will be massive deletions involved as well, because of the bizarre intervening ranks. This process will require the help of an admin, preferrably one well-informed on this situation and who can dedicate a few months of patient assistance so that things don't get overlooked in the cleanup. --EncycloPetey 20:09, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I can't really comment on the detailed taxonomic issues here, as I know even less about liverworts than I do about the areas of wisp where I spend my time... In general, though, I hope that the problems will be less severe than they appear. For example, in response to your point above, I have edited Template:Hepatophyta and also moved it to Template:Hepaticophyta. I believe -- though I haven't checked in detail -- that this will have fixed that aspect of the taxonomy on all liverwort pages; any exceptions will be cases where the proper template nesting was not used, and which are in need of structural readjustment in any case. Fixing whatever other systematic errors there are should likewise be a matter of relatively few edits. Or so I hope. Anyway, good luck, and let me know if there's anything a botanically-challenged fella like myself can do to help. -- Visviva 05:32, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Nicely done. Shall I delete the 'Hepatophyta' pages now? Lycaon 05:40, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

I would favor keeping Hepatophyta as a redirect (this being a fairly common practice for synonyms); Template:Hepatophyta has no real reason for existing, but can't be deleted until it has been orphaned. -- Visviva 14:14, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

The issue is trickier than that, since Hepatica is actually a flowering plant. Hepaticophyta is an character-based name for the liverworts, not a taxon-based name, which is Marchantiophyta. I'm not sure that "Hepatophyta" can be called a synonym, since it's an incorrectly constructed name resulting from a typo, but a redirect of some kind should exist because of its frequency in biological literature (mainly in textbooks and non-bryological works that mention bryophytes). --EncycloPetey 18:28, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

• I think of disambiguation pages as being for the exact same spelling but since this seems to be a pervasive problem, would it make sense to have a disambiguation somewhere instead of a redirect? Wikipedia's Liverwort disambiguation suggests this.
• If Marchantiophyta is "the" taxon-based name then shouldn't that be the main article name here, like it is on Wikipedia (instead of Hepaticophyta)? I have no taxonomic knowledge here, just a suggestion based on what I've read here and on Wikipedia.
• I attempted to get Template:Hepatophyta orphaned as mentioned above. I changed {{Hepatophyta}} to {{Hepaticophyta}} inside Template:Hepaticae and I also changed the template call on the article page "Hepaticophyta". Since Hepaticae is currently the only direct child of Hepaticophyta, these two changes should've orphaned "Template:Hepatophyta" but the "What links here" still shows 115 pages linked to Template:Hepatophyta for some reason. My two changes didn't even seem to reduce the number of links given on "What links here", (update: The system needed probably over 30min. to catch up but these changes did successfully orphan the template) ... so I tried temporarily breaking the redirect of Template:Hepatophyta to Template:Hepaticophyta to see if that would help. (update: breaking the redirect wasn't necessary for orphaning) Once the system has enough time to catch up to these changes, hopefully I can get Template:Hepatophyta orphaned. --Georgeryp 19:50, 8 August 2007 (UTC)