Talk:Taxonomy

Difference between the use of classes or categories

Is a taxonomy used for classification or categorization or both? I dont seem to find an explicit difference between these two similar but different concepts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.64.5.162 (talk) 16:50, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

K students

PLz help me ! er ..fdfdfdfdf... i'm doing a project my eacher let me make a book by hand witch it's about biologcal taxonomy i have two question here what is the relationship between each level and can anybody give my examples of each five major kingdom!

Thanks !!!!! verymuch fo tha help —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.227.93.91 (talk) 08:26, 17 September 2008 (UTC) -/////-

Miscellaneous

♥ How do i make a taxonomic scheme using only kingdom and phylum? Its a report i have to do and i designed imaginary creatures and im supposed to make a taxonomic scheme using those two kingdoms.

I'm looking for a taxonomy to use for the basis of categorizing/sorting my on-line photo album. Does such a thing exist? Prefer a freely available or OSS source. -Speedeep 20:45, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

Web taxonomies

The Wikipedia does not mention the use of the word taxonomies to describe the hierarchically arranged information on Web pages. Vendors of content management systems offer the capability of producing a taxonomy for Web pages when designing a site. :3 lenguas 1/27/05

D :0 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.241.250.150 (talk) 14:23, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Taxonomy = naming?

In grad school I remember reading--I don't know where--that taxonomy was essentially involved with naming, and I assumed that the "nom" part of the word was from the latin for "name", literally "taxon naming" (and the root of "nomenclature", "nominal" etc). The argument was that phylogeny (and phenetic classification also I guess) was the subject that dealt with relationships between groups (in the biological world), and taxonomy was principally involved with the rules and regs involved in naming the resultant taxa. Thus, I'm unsure whether taxonomy is more related to the process of classification vs the process of naming the resulting taxa. Or does it, in common usage, generally imply both? Can we check on this.....Jeeb 1 July 2005 03:42 (UTC)

The "nom" is from νόμος (nomos, law, custom) and is thus related to words like economy. The greek root for name is ōnom- or ōnym- (usually with the y in English borrowings, unless initial, like onomastics). If 'name' was intended it probably would be taxonymy, like toponymy.

However it might help explain why we, or rather the French whose word taxonomie we borrowed, have it spelled with -onom- rather than -inom- as the etymology from 'taxis' requires. ('Taxon' though is a later back-formation from 'taxonomy'.) —Muke Tever talk (la.wiktionary) 01:04, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree, Muke, but only from The greek root for name is etc. on (though a mal-formation might also be possible). Yet

  Taxonomy (from Ancient Greek: τάξις taxis "arrangement" and Ancient Greek: νομία nomia "method")  is the practice and science of classification.

copied some minutes ago from the article itself

is not true in its underlined part: Liddell-Scott (νομία): [1]. as compounds like σιτονόμος derive from νέμω = "deal out/distribute", a ταξινόμος¹⁾ would simply be "one who deals out arrangement/order" - a perfect match to a taxonomist's doings. Thence, ταξινομία is nothing but the corresponding abstract noun, meaning "the dealing out of arrangement/order" - on the contrary, νόμος = "law etc." is a secondarily developed word - maybe from the fact that "dealing out something(food, and or whatever)" requires a "rule" or even a "law".

1) btw.: a ταξονόμος would be "one who deals out yews": [2] ;-))

be fine

217.252.101.217 (talk) 10:07, 19 June 2011 (UTC)ŪĒLN

slight improvements in language and links217.252.101.217 (talk) 12:06, 19 June 2011 (UTC)ŪĒLN

Scientific Taxonomies vs. Folk Taxonomies

While both definitions are clear and accurate; is there a middle ground? In a corporate environment, particularly for a corporate communications department, the taxonomy could be considered to semi-scientific. While there exists a scientific basis for elements of the taxonomy, hierarchical branches and specific terms, they are intermixed with 'how we think about information' perspective, incorporating the vocabulary of the organisation.

how many kingdoms?

I am doing a project for biology and am trying to figure out if there is really just five kingdoms and why scientist think this -(unsigned 16:13, 25 September 2006 by 68.103.97.77)

Beware clarification

30-October-2006: In recent years, revisions to the 5-year-old "taxonomy" article, for the reason of "clarification" (quote), have actually blanked or eliminated significant sections. Last year, on November 10 (2005), the link to "cladistics" was removed after years of use; I have added a small paragraph about "cladistic taxonomy" under the new header "Various taxonomies" to keep linking cladistics, since it is quite important IMHO to the original meaning of taxonomy in biological naming.

Beware any future "clarification" to the taxonomy article that seems to simplify the article to be little more than a dictionary definition of "taxonomy" as a synonym for "classification" which omits the importance to biology and other fields that treat "taxonomy" as a key issue. Per WP:NOT, Wikipedia is not [just] a dictionary, so definitely add brief historical and related information to be more than just a "definition" about taxonomy. -Wikid77 12:46, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Various taxonomies

NOTE: I don't know enough about how Wikipedia works to tell if the following is appropriate and *working* or not... :

TEXT FROM PAGE (look at "edit" if you can't see the hidden ref bit!)...

In alpha taxonomy, as the scientific classification of organisms, the system includes the root called "Organism" (as this applies to all living things, it is implied rather than stated explicitly), followed by the ranks: Kingdom, Phylum (plural, phyla), Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, with over 40 various other ranks sometimes inserted, such as subphylum, superorder, subfamily, subtribe, or subspecies to handle complex groups such as insects (more at: scientific classification or Linnaean taxonomy).

MY COMMENTS: Sorry, I don't know how to 'reveal' the code, as pasting it here has just reproduced the (for me) non-functional reference... In any case, it shows up with a [1] footnote, but clicking on it does nothing on my browsers (Safari, Firefox). In any case, it looks like a sneaky person slipped some obscenity in there... I "undid" the specific edit that changed "King Phillip Came Over For Good Sex" to "King Phillip Came Over For Good Penis", but frankly does this "ref" work for others?

Edit that inserted the obscenity (which I undid): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taxonomy&diff=next&oldid=101693248

WhyAskWhyNot 04:39, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Irrelevant part

The phrase "and commonly display parent-child relationships" seems to be irrelevant to the text and, therefore, I suggest that it be deleted. 194.27.68.137 09:43, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure it means what you think it means. I'm no taxonomy expert, but it might simply be expressing the relationship between parent (higher) taxonomic groupings and child (lower) groupings. Admittedly, it does sound like someone's cut-and-pasted from an article on the art of parenting, but I suspect that's not the case. If I'm correct, it would still be very useful to reword so that this (mis-?) interpretation of the statement isn't made again. Cheers, --Plumbago 09:52, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, "parent-child relationship" is a fairly generic way of referring to the relationship between hierarchichal entities, and is used in taxonomy in exactly this way by many. I'm not sure what wording would be appropriate, but it should not be excised.WhyAskWhyNot 02:11, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Unreferenced template

I never read the original article here and the first sentence of the article appears to be quite good, bringing in the Greek etymology. Then it starts to get highly abstract and very speculative, especially when it begins to speak of the classification of all things. Yet no theorists or philosophers are cited beyond the passing reference to a name or two. It often seems to me that the article is relying on the philosophic conjectures of modernist Wikipedia editors. That isn't right and the meaning of much of the article is lost in semantically overloaded words. The rest of us are not familiar with the overload. We need some theorists to be cited here.

FYI the Greek terms of the biological classification much precede the 14th century. That was an interesting guess, but don't guess. Your response should be "I'll find out (sir)." In fact they originate with the philosopher Aristotle. You need to read some Aristotle, whose works I am sure can be found on line. Now, he had his own biological classification, based on reproduction, with which Linnaeus, a classical scholar, was no doubt quite familiar. But, the classification that counts, the one that got passed on to taxonomy, is the metaphysical one. It divides everything (not just plants and animals) into categories, genera and species. Linnaeus got the whole thing from him. When you get into the top brackets certain problems with the category of everything start to happen and so ontology was born.

So you can see there is nothing de novo in this line of thinking. If you are going to become philosophers read some history of philosophy. Now, if you are introducing such terms as alpha taxonomy and the use of taxonomy outside biology and making all kinds of speculations then you need to state whose concepts and terms these are. We are all philosophers no doubt and we all slip into it unconsciously. However this is an encyclopedia covering basically the history of previous serious thought so you have to catch yourself up and get back to the published framework. I don't see any bibliography or any notes refering to any items in it. All I see are many links without specification beyond the name of what is to be found in what link. Go to work now.Dave 10:03, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Taxonomy has errors

I strongly believe that scientific taxonomy has many obvious errors and unnecessary groups. I think it would be much easier to classify organisms if the taxonomy system were simplified (but not over-simplified, as that would create more errors) into a system in which you can only go in one of two directions in a given group of organisms. This supports my hypothesis that a power of 2, organisms, have lived or existed ever since the beginning of living things.--Mathexpressions 05:31, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Fine, but this has nothing to do with Wikipedia. We're only interested in describing the subjects of our articles, not trying to embellish or improve them. --Plumbago (talk) 19:49, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

classification link

Why is the first link on classification redirect to biological classification if this is a general article? --Kupirijo (talk) 20:57, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

t34qt[q34t34[[y43qy5ytjstkjyssktdekuyedy]]] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.100.98.186 (talk) 20:32, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

ha

I can believe this is Wikipedia's entire article on this GIGANTIC subject. What a joke. -TILDETILDETILDETILDE —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.62.118.162 (talk) 00:19, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Paint?

I saw the see also section that there is (somehow) Paint under it. How is it related to taxonomy? (please see previous edit) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.4.13.48 (talk) 04:37, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

History

How about we discuss the history and development of modern taxonomy? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.84.211.112 (talk) 17:51, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Growing disaster

Folks, taxonomy is one of the most fundamental disciplines in either formal or informal human intellectual or material activity. It is too important to neglect, but we cannot compass it in a single article. What we have so far is inadequate, patchy, and becoming more of a disaster as it grows. Hardly anyone who has contributed so far (and all credit to everyone for the effort) seems to have a general view of the subject; practically everything is in the form of a few paragraphs on hierarchical classification in some field or other. There is no structure to speak of. little sign of structure, and little obvious appreciation of the fact that hierarchical classification is just one field of taxonomy, and by no means in every way the most important field of taxonomy; it certainly is nothing like the most universal. The nearest anyone comes to dealing with that problem is a mention of networks in taxonomy.

Now, I am not throwing stones, and I also am not saying I could do better, but this should not be an article, but rather a Wikiproject, or at the very least a cooperative collaboration. And I am not the one to run a project; that is a special skill. I do volunteer to assist as well as I can if a team gets together.

Should we have a go at discussing such a project, if only at first discussing a structure? JonRichfield (talk) 13:11, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Remove biological taxonomy to own article

I agree entirely that at present the article is a mess. Personally, I don't think it does need a project, but rather splitting up. "Scientific taxonomy" redirects to this article, but it's no longer about this subject (which it largely used to be) because of the random additions of other material. I strongly favour a separate article called "Biological taxonomy" or "Taxonomy (biology)", plus a more general article covering the use of the term in a wide range of disciplines. There are already projects (e.g. WP:TOL and subprojects like WP:PLANTS) which can handle biological taxonomy. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:30, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like we better make this a summary article with specific articles for each of the taxonomy fields. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 13:06, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I agree with something along the lines suggested by Peter Coxhead and Kim van der Linde. As a non-native English speaker, my usefulness to the project may be limited, but I'll help out in any way I can. Petter Bøckman (talk) 15:08, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I would favor this approach. Other uses of the term "taxonomy" are (1) as important to the people who use them as biological taxonomy is to those of us who are professional biological taxonomists, and (2) not really neologisms, since "taxonomy" has classically had a broad definition (to the extent that one could make a taxonomy of taxonomies). I, too, know little of these other fields, and am not comfortable taking on the larger topic, but if we were instead to shoo away the other uses of the term, they'd be back in a few years and we'd have to do it all over again. We'd have a lot less of that with an article about biological taxonomy.--Curtis Clark (talk) 22:30, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

The question here is how widely the terms are applied though. I'd really rather not have to dab links to taxonomy with [[Taxonomy (biology)|Taxonomy]] each and every time. The usage in other fields are just as significant of course, but rarely encountered by a rather large margin.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 20:08, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Admittedly, a "super-disambiguation page" might work, it's basically what this page already tries to be. Only thing I object to is rendering biological taxonomy to a mere hatnote at the top of the page.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 20:14, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Retain biological taxonomy and remove rest

Given the overwhelming application of the term to biology, I would propose retaining only biological taxonomy here, and split off all the others to their own articles.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 12:03, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I would 2nd the proposal that biological taxonomy be retained here, and split off the rest. I don't see a need for a specific project for this article. I will also reiterate how important taxonomy is to biology. It forms a basal science to any aspect of biology, no matter how remote it may be. Visit any zoo or botanic garden, the way animals and plants are presented to the public is by their taxonomy. At WP we need to do no less. Hence this page must be well written and well presented. I am a professional taxonomist and would be happy to assist in reviewing or writing this page. Maybe some sort of lock on the page would help with any irrelevant additions. Cheers, Faendalimas ^talk 14:36, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I've more or less done this (removing all non-biological taxonomy, except for small section). The page still needs work, but I think is in much better shape now. Feel free to add/edit anything I've missed, I only had a couple of hours free. I'm not sure how to set-up an "ambiguity page", so perhaps someone could help with that if they think it is necessary now. BC Myles (talk) 06:22, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

A good start thanks. Cheers, Faendalimas ^talk 14:23, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Comments

Just some comments for consideration. I honestly do not think it matters wether this is split one way or the other. My comment above was made before this got categorised. The usage of the term taxonomy since around 1750 has been restricted largely to the biological sciences. In recent years people have used it for other fields. However the concept of taxonomy goes back to c.350 BC with Aristotle. It is basically the naming of the units of groups of objects classified by what is referred to as Aristotelian Logic or hierarchical sets. First used for biology by Aristotle in 350 bc. He developed a nomenclature system for animals that would be very recognisable today, in fact Linnaeus himself used Aritotle's names where he could, eg Chelonia mydas and Testudo graeca though credited to Linnaeus are in fact Aritotle's names for these species. I think there is a valid case that the biological useage was the first practical application of Aristotelian Logic, however, modern expanded usage and avoidance of confusion may make for good arguments for splitting the biological section into another subject. I will go with either. However, the biological useage of taxonomy (named sets) goes back 2500 years and has been the primary use of the term. Cheers, Faendalimas ^talk 23:24, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

This is (or should be) a summary style article, which is suitable for such a high-level topic. That is, it is already "split up". The article should only give an overview of the topic of taxonomy—biological and otherwise—and leave details to more specific articles (such as "Biological classification"). I'm not saying the article is perfect, but I don't see splitting it up as helping anything if it's the content that needs to be improved. —Pengo 14:48, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

A few pointers

Further to the above conversation I would like to add some points.

• Alpha Taxonomy. This is the study of biological significant units generally referred to as species (though this is a generalisation). The term taxonomy refers to all levels of a species full identification.

• The seems to be confusion in this article between the terms taxonomy, nomenclature and systematics. Literally taxonomy is the study of taxa, ie the study of the ranks in which a species fits. It is primarily concerned with the identification of species. Nomenclature refers to the names of these ranks and is concerned with the study of names with respect to the ICZN code. Systematics is concerned with the relationships of taxa, ie the development of trees. It is important to keep these distinct as they are 3 separate studies.

• I will leave wether and how the article is split to the above discussion.

• Terms such as Biological Taxonomy and Linnaean Taxonomy are really bastardizations of other terms, both are actually called biological classification and linnaean classification. They refer to methods of classification used by taxonomy they are not taxonomy in themselves. The way these have been written and discussed are not accurate, there is also of course numerical classification. Biological Classification refers to the use of Mayrian species boundaries, ie the use of the Biological Species Concept of reproductive isolation, Linnaean classification means the usage of the binomial naming of species, numerical taxonomy follows the principals proposed by Willis of identifying relationships by statistical means.

Basically the section on taxonomy of the biological sphere, needs clarification and definition of terms and a rewrite. Cheers, Faendalimas ^talk 22:19, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Well, there's already an article on Alpha Taxonomy covering just that aspect. Petter Bøckman (talk) 09:07, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

As I'm not very happy with the way the Systematics article is written – it relies very heavily on a 1970 definition which isn't consistent with modern practice – I have been trying to source recent definitions and explanations of the terms "systematics", "nomenclature", "classification" and "taxonomy" (broadly, not just alpha taxonomy). Faendalimas: can you provide such source(s) for your definitions above? Peter coxhead (talk) 14:34, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I should be able to get the necessary references together. A number of text books cover this but I guess the journal literature would be better. These of course are methodology papers making them less main stream. But should be findable. Cheers, Faendalimas ^talk 21:14, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Textbook references are preferable over articles per WP policy. Besides being secondary, they are usually also a bit more pedagogically worded. The trick is finding one that's up to date. Petter Bøckman (talk) 18:12, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Root route

UNK!!! I pulled out the bottom apple, and the whole pile came down! Maybe that is just as well. I feel a bit overwhelmed by the standard of some of the responses, so I'll mainly reiterate that I'll help where it seems likely to be useful. My only approach to participation in the discussion at this stage is to remark that though I am first and foremost a biologist, I do not regard what we biologists call taxonomy (plus systematics, plus classification etc) as fundamental to the concept of taxonomic concepts. I grant that it is the largest scale of effort based on the discipline, but that is no more relevant to permitting biological aspects of taxonomy to effectively displace the rest, than permitting accountancy to evict the rest of mathematics because people do more of that than any other maths.

Therefore, I support the idea of retaining the current Taxonomy article, but as a sort of super-disambiguation page. I recently had my nose rubbed in the fact that the formal WP disambiguation page format and discipline are extremely limiting; I understand the reason, but IMO there is a most important function for what one might call an annotated signpost or root article dealing with the comprehensive field, topic by topic in separate sections at no more than a lede level (say 50 — 250 words), but each topic linking to a dedicated article (or a root article at another level). In some ways writing such a root article is extremely challenging, because though it might not require the depth of knowledge of the component disciplines, it does require a knowledge of the structure, the way the various fields are interrelated. Lack of such a structure is to my mind the main shortcoming of the current article; the other shortcomings are comparatively superficial and trivial. We cannot simply build up a root article by starting with one sub-discipline (such as biological taxonomy at some level) and having practitioners in other fields chime in in their separate keys as the mood takes some amateur when he gets the "me-too" feeling. Taxonomy has very little to do with taxonomies; it is larger than any. JonRichfield (talk) 19:58, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

It seems the majority here like the idea of making a "super disambiguation" page or "summary article". I suppose the two have some sort of common meeting ground. Petter Bøckman (talk) 21:17, 26 November 2011 (UTC)