Talk:Difference between Indica and Sativa

This article was nominated for deletion on 18 February 2012 (UTC). The result of the discussion was merge to Cannabis.

"Indica" and "Sativa"

One of the reasons I'm in favour of getting rid of this page is because the usage of "indica" and "sativa" needs contextualizing first. It's doubtful that "Cannabis indica" and "Cannabis sativa" are actually species; the articles under these titles are not entirely consistent with Cannabis and need quite a bit of work on them to make them agree with reliable sources.

So although "Indica" and "Sativa" are indeed not meaningful by themselves, I'm not convinced that changing to "Cannabis indica" and "Cannabis sativa" is any better.

If it's decided not to delete this article, then it may be necessary to make such changes, but only when the meaningfulness of the names is discussed properly. ("Indica strains" and "sativa strains" might then be better.) Peter coxhead (talk) 23:40, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

According to the Cannabis article, more than a few researchers have concluded that C. indica and C. sativa are separate species. Those who disagree mostly at least agree they are distinguishable subspecies. An extensive discussion can be found in Section 2 of: Ethan B. Russo (2007), "History of cannabis and its preparations in saga, science, and sobriquet" (PDF), Chemistry & Biodiversity, 4: 1614–1648. Lacking firm objective criteria for drawing the line separating "very similar but distinct species" from "distinguishable subspecies", this may in the end be a matter of taste. A detailed discussion about the preferable taxonomic classification does not belong in this article and should not make a substantive difference in the presentation; if mentioned at all, it should suffice to point out that there are different opinions about the taxonomy. Using the existence of these different opinions as an argument to suppress the commonly used names Cannabis indica and Cannabis sativa in favour of the by-themselves-meaningless pseudo names "Indica" and "Sativa", which are not explained in the lead so that the reader has to guess what this is about (Caloria indica and Camelina sativa?), is a cop-out that does not address the issue at all. --Lambiam 10:33, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]