Talk:Plant

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This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Plant has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
August 23, 2023	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on October 21, 2023.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that Aristotle classified living things based on whether they had a "sensitive soul" or, like plants, only a "vegetative soul"?

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Semi-protected edit request on 29 February 2024

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From the evolutionary history section, delete "However, evidence from carbon isotope ratios in Precambrian rocks suggests that complex plants developed over 1000 mya.[36]" This does not match with current scientific consensus of the evolution of plants. The source pointed to is a Nature article on "Earth's earliest non-marine eukaryotes", but there is no evidence in this article which supports the claim that complex plants developed over 1000 mya. The article does not make any claims about which eukaryotic kingdom these specimens come from (be they plant, fungus, or animal). Frunk10 (talk) 11:56, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In a separate article on plant evolutionary history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants), this article is cited saying "There is evidence that cyanobacteria and multicellular photosynthetic eukaryotes lived in freshwater communities on land as early as 1 billion years ago," which is more appropriate wording. Frunk10 (talk) 11:58, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Done, removed the sentence as they weren't claimed to be plants by the article and mentioning them in this context would be confusing more than anything else. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 23:48, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think we're swiftly reaching the wrong answer here. We (and the paper) don't need to assert that the fossils are "plants": they'd be parts of the stem group, and nobody is ever comfortable making the equation between the first fossil members of a stem group and the group itself, it just can't be done. However, the entire point of the mention is that they were "multicellular photosynthetic eukaryotes" (clang! ding! ring!! ding-dang-dong!!!) which should, er, ring a bell for anyone who ever did a basic biology class. I'll put the citation, which is plainly relevant, back into the article along with a more cautious wording. Even if those words don't, er, chime with absolutely everyone, they should. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:18, 3 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Condescending tone not necessary thank you! The citation might be relevant so leave it in if you wish, but my gripe was with the claim that complex plants evolved 1000 mya with a citation to a paper which does not prove or even claim to prove this. If you want to leave the citation in, you the wording needs to be more specific. Frunk10 (talk) 09:38, 3 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]