Talk:Truncatelloidea

Marine?

Family Bithyniidae are freshwater, so if they belong in this superfamily, it can't be marine as the opening says. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:45, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

I made the changes, according to WoRMS. JoJan (talk) 15:13, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

@JoJan: thanks! Well outside any area of expertise of mine! The taxonomy of gastropods seems especially confusing at present. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:33, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: I struggle with this taxonomy every day. I even discovered mistakes, sometimes made 150 years ago and no one ever noticed. All in all, I already made more than 100 remarks to WoRMS and they were all accepted. But I have no academic degree in this matter. We're lucky to dispose now of all these databases and publications on the internet. In the past, taxonomists must have had a difficult time finding out if they were actually describing a new species or if it had already been done before. JoJan (talk) 12:44, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

@JoJan: I can't claim anything like as many corrections as you, but I have had changes made to both plant and spider online databases. As you say, we have the great advantage of publications online, including scans of very old ones.

I was actually looking up the classification of some new mollusc records for the local National Nature Reserve for which I maintain an online checklist. I hadn't then realized that WoRMS covers non-marine taxa so well, hence I was trying to use information in Wikipedia. What I found is that mollusc taxonomy here seems a bit of a mess. For example, look at Aplysiomorpha (not an article I needed to use but one I came across). Setting up a taxobox with line breaks not only looks ugly, it makes some kinds of checking and processing difficult (e.g. automatically determining the taxobox colour, which expects every "rank" to be a parameter value.) The talk page says that "Project Gastropods uses the taxonomy in the online database WoRMS". But WoRMS says "Aplysiomorpha" is "unaccepted". We do have Bithynia in our checklist. The classification of the genus and family here are different, and neither exactly matches WoRMS.

Personally I would make more use of automated taxoboxes. They've certainly helped with making spider taxoboxes more consistent. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:16, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: I couldn't agree more about automated taxoboxes. The problem is, in this project we have already more than 31,000 articles. Some of these already have automated taxoboxes, most don't. I create them manually when creating new articles or editing existing articles. The aim in this project is to contain about 100,000 articles (= assumed number of still existing and already described gastropod species; probably ⅓ of the existing but undiscovered species; number of extinct species unknown but probably very, very large). Without a bot, creating all these automed taxoboxes can never be done during my lifetime. Thanks for hinting about Aplysiomorpha. I moved the article to Anaspidea. The problem is, the daily changes and additions in WoRMS about gastropods are numerous. One can follow these by an RSS feed. One would need several volunteers just to keep abreast of all these changes. It's too much for one person. As a result, many articles are left unattended. JoJan (talk) 13:57, 31 March 2017 (UTC)