Very little of what's on that page [i.e., Animalia] is taxonomy - it's mostly an overview of the group, a discussion of what distinguishes them, and some notes about their origin. I know it's a little technical but that's mainly because I wrote it in excitement over finding out what unites sponges and metazoa; I'm not sure what the purpose of dividing pages like this would be.
"Animal" is quite obviously a natural topic for biology! You might want to say something on the page called "animal," in less technical terms, and otherwise point to the Animalia page. Similarly, Wikipedia is not going to go through life never having a plant page. There is no good reason to use the Latin words exclusively, is there? If only to avoid redundancy, well, of course you can avoid redundancy by monitoring what is put on the animal page and what is on the animalia page. Maybe, you'll simply want the animal page point to animalia. --LMS
I think the last is probably the best. Or maybe animalia should point to animal, I'm having a tought time figuring that out. See Linnaean taxonomy/Talk...also note that a flat list of animals like this is going to die hard if more people ever take an interest in them.
I suggest that the biologists develop biology articles in whatever format they find most simpatico, and after that we can construct a page in ordinary English that points to the Latin pages. (You might want to state your intentions on
Animal in order to make this unconfusing to the casual reader.) --
LMS
I don't think animal is ever meant in the sense of mammal. Certainly when people give examples of animals, they choose them from that order, but that is no different than
aleph not coming to mind when you give an example of a letter. Certainly whenever non-mammals are at all considered the word animal is assumed to include them - for instance,
fish and animals is a construction which is just plain wrong.
This same sort of trouble seems to me to come up on Fish, too - the word is often used for things like jellyfish and shellfish, but if it ever came down to the question "are these fish?" the answer would be a definite no.
- Whilst I'd disagree with the exact wording of the entry, I'd also disagree with your statement. Most people would consider it, in the common sense of the word, to include fish, birds and reptiles, they'd probably not include insects quite so readily. Dave McKee
![[Home]](wikipedia.png)