Category talk:Systematics

RFM discussion: September 2014–April 2023

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Category:Systematics

This poorly maintained category should be combined with Category:Taxonomy. The poor maintenance arises from the overlap conceptually as well as the poor choice of name for this category. In addition, for some undocumented and unfathomable reason Category:Taxonomy was made a subcategory of Category:Systematics. I think this is symptomatic of the unmaintainablity of the category. DCDuring TALK 19:14, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Support. —CodeCat 20:25, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure if we should merge the two. In the English categories, at least, the members seem to be correctly apportioned between the two, with a handful of exceptions. I do think they should be made sister categories, rather than one being under the other. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:30, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I would support that too. —CodeCat 20:46, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

What are the criteria that distinguish membership in the categories? Many dictionaries have them as synonyms in one or more of the variously defined senses and subsenses, two of which BTW systematics lacks. DCDuring TALK 13:53, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz Do you understand the distinction you made here between the meaning of systematics and taxonomy? Would you now be opposed to merging them? I would like to be able to resolve this discussion one way or the other. — excarnateSojourner (talk · contrib) 03:48, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

@ExcarnateSojourner: There's overlap between the two, but they aren't the same thing. Taxonomy is all about naming things and placing them in groups. Systematics is about studying the development of differences between organisms and how to measure the similarity and difference between them. Since Darwin, taxonomy has adopted systematics as its theoretical underpinning, so there's a lot of systematics behind the decisions that taxonomist make- but the decisions themselves are definitely not part of systematics.

Determining whether two published descriptions are describing the same thing requires looking at the systematics, but once that's been determined, it's all about which one was published first, and whether anything disqualifies either from being considered validly published, and whether either name has to be corrected to meet the requirements of the taxonomic code. That part hasn't fundamentally changed since before evolution was accepted.

In Linnaeus' day, the focus was on discovering the organization that God had in mind when He created all living things. Now, it's all about discovering the evolutionary history of those same living things. Taxonomy wasn't the same thing as theology back then, and it isn't the same thing as systematics now. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:00, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

How could we operationalize the distinction between term-definitions that belong to (biological) taxonomy and those that belong to (biological) systematics? Could we include in a taxonomy category taxonomic terms used before Darwin and Spencer and add the terms used in the taxonomic naming process? Terms used before Darwinism swept the field probably need definitions using pre-Darwinian definiens. DCDuring (talk) 02:51, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Support. Here we have just various terms to denote the same affair, and “systematics” is a less expected and ambiguous one. With “systematics” I of course understand the systematic interpretation of law. Fay Freak (talk) 13:09, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Support merger. I don't see a difference worth preserving. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 13:28, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

An excellent job for a bot. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 21:32, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

I've edited the categorization and label modules so that the systematics category is no longer added by them. Once that change propagates out, all the language subcategories like Category:pl:Systematics should be empty and can be deleted, and "systematics" can be removed from the categorization module. - -sche (discuss) 08:03, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Merged. FWIW, for almost all of the ~77 language-specific "Systematics" categories, their only contents were "Category:Taxonomy"; only a handful of languages had between one and six words meaning things like polyphyletic or clade categorized manually or by label into "Systematics" rather than "Taxonomy". - -sche (discuss) 23:32, 20 April 2023 (UTC)