Talk:Family (biology)

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I just restored this entry and also Class (biology) and Order (biology) to make them seperate pages instead of redirects to Scientific classification.

There are dozens, probably some hundreds of articles scattered around the place that link to them, and almost every link is obviously intended to go to the exact destination, rather than to a general-purpose scientific classification page. A great many pages have something more-or-less like this:

The Greater Soandso (Imaginus examplei) is one of several creatures belonging to the family XYZ and, together with the Spotted and Striped Thingamejigs, making up the order ABC.

(OK, it's a silly example, but you can see non-silly examples everywhere in the biology pages.) Tannin 00:40 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

The problem is that these pages have no content, really. They're all essentially duplications of part of the scientific classification article, and of each other. Moreover, they're almost certainly going to stay that way, since there is not much to say about orders except that they lie below classes and above families.

In short, when someone links to both family (biology) and order (biology), they are inevitably linking the same content twice. I don't believe people genuinely intended to point to separate articles, but were just wikiing and disambiguating technical terms. In any case, if they have to point to the same thing, they may as well both point to scientific classification. Here I think the linking articles are the problem, and we shouldn't come up with a cheap solution just because there are a lot of them. Redirects were designed for exactly this, to allow links to point to the correct place before they can all be corrected.

Josh

There is plenty of room to include some extra detail on each one, in particular a simple and direct definition of the term. These pages need to be as technically correct as we can make them, but they also need to be as accesible to the non-specialist as we can manage. Improving the "order" and "family" pages is on my "to-do" list. (But not tonight - it's way past my bedtime!) Tannin

Oh. I see. I guess this means I have to take time out from the other things I had planned and do it next up. Tannin

I don't think there's any hurry, unless you have an amazingly strong opinion on this, in which case I won't revert any changes you make, even if it's just to restore the old pages. I simply don't think any genuine content is possible, and whoever made the pages redirects originally seems to have agreed. Honestly, other than the dictionary definition of "rank in a scientific classification", what would you consider putting here?