Talk:List of miscellaneous fictional animals

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Comments from 2003-2004[edit]

What sort of fish is Nemo in Finding Nemo? -- Timwi 01:29 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)
P.S. please avoid spoilers, I've yet to see it... thanks -- Timwi 01:31 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Wow, learnt something new today. A sponge is an animal.
Thx Wiwaxia
~ender 2003-09-20 00:57:MST

Anyone got any information on TaoTao? (Panda) Mat-C 05:35, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

A clownfish. Also, the amount of fictional animals is infinite! Surely you jest!?

We have now decided to include only notable animals. I agree that this list is still potentially infinite, but at least it's more manageable. If you think the list should be deleted entirely then please visit WP:AfD. Frankly I think categories are a much better way to deal with a topic like this than a list. -Thibbs (talk) 13:41, 17 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Overall organization[edit]

I think that the organization of these fictional animals according to form of media is not the best. It is true that this is how the lists on other fictitious animals is organized, but structurally the form of subdivision used here is of a lesser order than a subdivision based on species (or genus, etc) of animal. If it were otherwise, I would expect articles on "list of fictional animals in video games" rather than "list of fictional dogs." Unless there are any reasons to keep things as they are currently, I will make the change to divide these animals by kind rather than by medium. This would also allow us the benefit of using main-tags. Any objections? -Thibbs (talk) 20:00, 25 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. This combines a list of types of animal with a list of specific animals. (I think both are ridiculous, but I'm not going to win that argument.) 86.131.89.40 (talk) 00:17, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Zoo Tycoon[edit]

Why the heck are there Zoo Tycoon animals here? They aren't fictitous! 78.148.111.226 (talk) 18:16, 20 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

List of Fictional Weasels[edit]

This is a separate article & it has now been deleted due to lack of notability. Is this siome kind of sniping campaign against this larger article? Because itr makes nom sense to have weasels unrepresented when there are categories for sponges, molluscs, wombats - even a bloody pangolin for god s sake. What has anyone got against weasels fer Chrissakes? Now we see the naked mustelidophobia. Its the "Wind in the Willows" fiasco allover again!--Streona (talk) 14:57, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I just cut out a lot of trivia[edit]

This article is in dreadful shape. I have removed all entries relating to speculative, imaginary, chimerical, legendary, etc. creatures based on User:Number36's argument that "Animals = Members of the taxonomic kingdom Animalia" and thus this article "List of fictional animals (other)" should cover only actual animals. For this reason I have also removed all robots, Pokémon, and creatures referred to as "something-likes" (e.g. Frank the shrewlike; or Jerry, a large llamalike). The article has also been tagged as suffering from lack of notability. To address this I have removed all entries referring to characters that are so minor in relation to the work they come from that they do not even have names. This includes animals like the spider that bit spiderman and all of the creatures from the vast Zoo Tycoon franchise. Referring to WP:LSC#Common selection criteria I think it is clear that we are in need of stricter inclusion criteria for this article. I would strongly favor only adding a new entry to this list if the subject of the entry can be linked as a stand-alone article or at least as a separate subsection of an article. I think this would go a long way to guarding this article from turning into nothing more than an indiscriminate collection of information. Does this sound like a good idea to everybody? -Thibbs (talk) 03:25, 5 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have now begun adding "citation needed" tags to red-linked entries that I cannot immediately discard as non-notable. These entries are presumed non-notable because there is no article on them, however I think it is most prudent to request that citations be added to demonstrate notability for the time being until an article (or at least a subsection in another article) can be written on the topic. Cheers. -Thibbs (talk) 14:35, 5 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well it's been a week now and although we have seen the addition of 43 new entries to this list in the last 7 days we have seen no attempts to find citations or article-work on the redlinked entries. I know a week isn't terribly long to wait for citations to emerge, however the notability problem this page faces is sufficiently grave that I think it works best at this point to simply remove all red-linked entries. Although I was willing to wait for a short period of time for citations to emerge covering the potentially non-notable entries, I don't think this policy should be followed in the future since this article is so given to non-notable bloating. I propose that in the future we should presume non-notability when no article on the character or subsection on the character exists. It is debatable whether links to subsections with names like "Characters from Cartoon X" should be considered sufficient. At present I have left these entries intact. If this proves unmanageable then I think we should go for a stricter inclusion criterion and require that the entries have articles associated or subsections with the character's name. Does this sound reasonable? -Thibbs (talk) 00:21, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone through the list again and have relinked all former links that failed to point to articles or subsectiosn about the character. If the character is notable enough to be listed on this list then the proof of this is that an article or a subsection exists on the character. This still leaves us with a hierarchy among the listed entries. From most notable to least:

Characters with articles devoted to them alone - e.g. Arthur Read
Characters with subsections devoted to them alone - e.g. Cerebus
Characters with subsections devoted to a class of characters of which they form a pseudo-subsection or are a major part - e.g. David L. Read

Of these three kinds of characters, the first category clearly has the presumption of notability as this is a requirement for stand-alone articles. The notability of the second category of characters is rather more debatable but at this point I'm willing to allow them to stay. The notability of the third category is quite suspect. If this article was to undergo another major de-bloating then I'd say that this is the first category to be removed.

The last project I want to undertake to repair the notability issues is to search through the redirects. Many of the redirects are malformed and they point to an article on the parent work from which the character comes when they should instead point to the subsection on the character itself. I will repair these and these entries should remain on the list as category 2 or 3 members (referring to the above hierarchy). For redirects that cannot be sublinked to a character or class of characters, however, they form a category 4 level of non-notability. I will list those entries here before removing them and then I think they should be removed. Cheers -Thibbs (talk) 13:37, 17 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was able to repair 4 of these redirects and I was able to relink a few more non-character links to their appropriate subsections, however there were a number of redirects that I could not attach to an article or subsection on the character and I have removed these. Here I will list them all so that this decision can be more easily reviewed:

Non-character redirects

All of these redirects actually point to the underlying work but not to the character member of this list ("List of fictional animals (other)"). Because there is an issue about whether or not the characters are notable and because these characters do not actually have articles or subsections devoted to them I think it's a fair presumption that they are not notable enough to support an independent article. -Thibbs (talk) 14:44, 19 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reworking organization[edit]

I have just reorganized this list to repair the strangely inconsistent approach whereby subsections listing animal phyla (e.g. arthropoda) were given equivalent subcategorization as subsections listing animal species (e.g. Aarvarks). I have now recategorized it such that the first level of subcategorization covers phyla, the second level covers classes, the third level covers orders, and the fourth level covers all lower groupings (families, genera, and species). I have altered the subsection titles where I felt that the average reader might not be familiar with the meaning of the term. The hope is that this will protect against the unnecessary addition of duplicative categories by editors who have not actually reviewed the article but have only used the TOC. I have also altered the TOC depth to show orders as the deepest level. I hope this tidies things up a bit and gives it an objective categorization which will allow much greater consistency. -Thibbs (talk) 17:31, 19 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I just merged all subsections that differentiated down to the species level. I think it makes good sense for this article to descend no deeper than genus considering that the more specific "List of fictional... Animal-X" articles (e.g. List of fictional cats, List of fictional dogs, etc.) would be the place where species-level differentiation occurs. If a family or genus becomes too populous here I think that we should consider splitting it out and creating its own article. This is the only way to ensure that this article doesn't become fragmented into hundreds of subsections each holding only 2-3 members. -Thibbs (talk) 15:35, 22 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Shrews[edit]

Where the shrew? --Ljrfnfvfhe (talk) 12:27, 19 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Cetaceans and sirenians[edit]

I feel like the cetaceans should be merged with the ungulates. Cetaceans are also classified as ungulates, despite the fact that they, similarly to pachyderms, lack hooves. I would also consider doing a similar thing to the sirenians, since sirenians are also classified as ungulates (and by a greater extent, they are also classified as pachyderms). Since the sirenians do not have as many notable fictional characters of their numerous species as the cetaceans, they can be merged with another list one of three ways; A. either merge both the cetaceans and the sirenians into the ungulates list, B. merge the cetaceans into the general ungulates list, then merge the sirenians into the pachyderms list, or C. give the cetaceans their own article with a list of fictional cetaceans, then incorporate the sirenians into it to make it a list of fictional cetaceans and sireneans. --Uptherial (talk) 02:52, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]