User talk:LinnaeusTaxonomy

List of Species described by Carl Linnaeus

Hi. I like the idea of listing Linnaeus' taxonomy, but I can't help feeling that the article will get way too big to be usable long before it gets close to the total of 11,000 or so species - and I wonder if you have had any thoughts about that? -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 21:37, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Actually yeah I did. I was originally going to split it up into "List of Animals described by Linnaeus" and "List of Plants described by Linnaeus", but I figured it would be simpler to merge it into one. Now that I think about it, yeah you're right, this thing will get pretty big pretty soon (plants are going to be a pain in the butt to list since I prefer to study animals). Do you think an article split up will benefit? --LinnaeusTaxonomy (talk) 21:47, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm really not sure what's best. I do think it needs to be broken up, but I'm not sure just animals and plants would be enough - we would still potentially have two extremely large articles. Maybe it would be worth starting a discussion on the article's talk page, and asking at Wikipedia:WikiProject Biology for some suggestions? (Btw, do you have any references for this so far? Someone is bound to ask for sources for the information you are adding - I see in the notes you refer to various editions of Systema Naturae, but a reference to the definitive edition would probably be good). -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:46, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea, I'll look into it. (Regarding sources and references, honestly the only sources I'm going by is looking up the individual species and my active research/translation of the 1735 Systema Naturae [[1]]. I have yet to locate the 1758 edition, which most of the current species names originated. If anything I'll list my links as a reference. --LinnaeusTaxonomy (talk) 16:31, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

If you are determined to carry on with this daunting task, my suggestion would be to split it by work initially, and then by taxonomic group for those works which introduced too many names to fit in one article comfortably. Note that while the mammals and birds are normally fairly clear-cut taxonomically, it's not always so simple for invertebrates; there are several nomina dubia, and several names which haven't been used because it's not clear what they refer to, but which we can't call nomina dubia without a citation. Also, because you're updating the list to current taxonomy, every scientific name will need a citation to demonstrate that it's based on the Linnean binomen. Have a look at Centuria Insectorum. That was a very small part of Linnaeus' output, but the article required a lot of work to find out what had become of all the described species, and even now there are a few gaps that I couldn't fill in. I suspect that even a "list of mammals described in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae" is going to be overwhelming, so the complete list of all Linnean species is going to be close to a lifetime's work. --Stemonitis (talk) 05:52, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

That is a major foil in my research... I didn't draw attention to the nomina dubia species he may have assigned, especially for insects and plants. You know, my research originally drew to the 1735 edition of Systema Naturae only. All I was doing was translating the latin names and studying the 1st system he used, simply because it is interesting that a man in a time without genetics or cladistics managed to pull it off and start a new branch of science. Not that I don't like effort, but I'm not planning to spend a lifetime on a list. Maybe it would be better to start what I started and make a list of species in the 1735 edition only. At least I'm ahead with all the animal genera translated... --LinnaeusTaxonomy (talk) 15:40, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

I think a more interesting task, and perhaps a more valuable one, would be to work through the 10th edition, rather than the first. The classification Linnaeus used in 1735 wasn't all that much better than anyone else's at the time (whales among the fish, for instance); his great innovation, and the reason that he's still important today, is the binomial system, which was only introduced in the 1753 Species Plantarum for plants, and the 1758 edition of Systema Naturae for animals. Names published before then are of historical, but not nomenclatural, interest. This also means that it may be less easy to find modern equivalents for Linnean names in the 1st edition: they won't be included in the synonymies, because they pre-date the starting point. If you really want to continue with the first edition, then please don't let me stop you, but if you're open to persuasion, then I think working on the animals in the 10th edition (probably broken up, at least eventually, into the six Linnean classes) would be a better option. --Stemonitis (talk) 17:00, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Yeah... those whales. The 10th edition huh? That could work too. You do have a point behind the whole "creation of the binomial system and it eventual impact". Yeah, alright. I just have to find it. Till then I'm closing down List of Species described by Carl Linnaeus... how do I delete my own article?