The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Black Kite (t) (c) 00:13, 22 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

List of families (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log  • AfD statistics)

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This unreferenced list is biologically meaningless, technically unfeasible and encyclopaedically undesirable.

1. The critical point is that there is no uniform definition of a family in different taxa, but is rather just a taxonomic convenience; a family in one group could represent a much larger taxon (in age, or genetic divergence, or whatever) than in another group. There are a [large] number of species concepts, but there is no such thing as a family concept, and there is no connection between a family of flies and a family of rodents, say, than the standard "-idae" suffix (and even that need no longer apply when comparing between different nomenclatural codes ICZN, ICBN, ICNB). There is therefore no justifiable reason to group these disparate items in a single list.
2. A complete list of all families across all kingdoms would be much too big for a single list, and there would rightly be pressure for it to be split up. It's already horribly unwieldy, and it's only got birds, mammals and vascular plants. The real diversity lies elsewhere, so this is only a tiny fraction of the eventual size. If the list is going to be split, then it might as well be split up into sections small enough to comfortably fit into the articles for the parent taxa. Indeed, such lists are already in place for most taxa, as they should be, rendering this behemoth redundant. According to Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists, "Lists that are too general or too broad in scope have little value, unless they are split into sections".
3. This list is unlikely to be maintained as individual taxonomies are updated, meaning that even if it could be accurately sourced once (which I doubt), it would rapidly deteriorate. Maintaining separate lists for each taxon (either as separate list articles, or within the confines of an article on the parent taxon) is much easier, because the attentions of the relevant project will be focussed on them already. I doubt that we can expect editors to also maintain another page outside their projects that they will probably be unaware of.
4. The current consensus on the talk page, particularly among the biologists who have contributed, is that this list is worthless.

For all these reasons, the list must go. --Stemonitis (talk) 07:10, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. -- Jclemens-public (talk) 07:21, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. -- Jclemens-public (talk) 07:21, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organisms-related deletion discussions. -- Jclemens-public (talk) 07:21, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep The size of a list is never a valid reason to delete it. If it gets too long, it can be divided into smaller list. Having list for each kingdom or other subgroup of course would be the most logical thing to do. And not everyone on the talk page agreed it should be deleted, only a few participating there anyway. As for the complaint about the list isn't complete or new things are created that no one has updated yet, so what? That can be said about any list out there. Popular culture things might have more fans viewing them and updating those articles than scientific ones, but that is certainly no reason to delete the educational ones. Rename it to be something that says what it is. Family is a scientific classification taught in all schools in America, and I assume probably everywhere, and when you look up detailed information about a species, it list "family" as a category there and then tells you what family it is in. Dream Focus 11:17, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I fear you have missed my point. Just because one can produce a list of families, that doesn't mean that it would be meaningful to do so. These different taxonomic entities have nothing in common. We might as well have a List of people called John, or a List of buildings with three storeys; they would be equivalent. --Stemonitis (talk) 11:25, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What they have in common is they are part of the Family (biology) classification. This serves as a useful reference for those searching for something. Hopefully additional information will be added over time to make it more useful. There is no reason to delete a valid scientific list. Please see WP:LIST and WP:ALMANAC. Dream Focus 11:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note that WP:ALMANAC gives an example of what are good list, in the biology section, including List of Anuran families and North American birds. Having an article for the various families of things, if they don't all already exist, is doable, with links to them from a main page here. Dream Focus 11:31, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"There is no reason to delete a valid scientific list." This is not a valid scientific list. That's my point. Families within a group are similar, so it makes sense to list them together (e.g. List of Anuran families). The only connection they have with families in other groups is an arbitrary rank. We should not be listing articles by an arbitrary criterion. I have read WP:LIST and WP:ALMANAC and see nothing which states that a list of this kind is desirable. --Stemonitis (talk) 11:43, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitrary rank? The scientific community has divided things into these "ranks", and certainly not for arbitrary reasons. List of everything the scientific community has decided for centuries now to divide into the category of families would be clearer name perhaps, but would be too long, and shouldn't be necessary. Dream Focus 11:49, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, arbitrary. A family is just the rank between the genus and the order. There is no further definition than that, certainly not that applies across the tree of life. It is very important that you understand this. The rank of family (just like every other rank except the species) is arbitrary. The suggestion that these things have been stable for centuries is also massively and demonstrably false and belies a lack of understanding of taxonomy. --Stemonitis (talk) 08:07, 15 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Note that at the top right box of this AFD it list a previous AFD for something related to a family on a television show, nothing to do with this here. Can someone please fix that? Dream Focus 11:17, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Dealt with. Mangoe (talk) 17:19, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• It turns out that a lot of lists already exist for some of the various subgroups. The bottom of the article had a link to the category:Lists of animals which has a lot of them there. I had searched Wikipedia for "List of" and "Families" and found some things biological related listed among the results. One master list showing everything else would be helpful though, and one of the reasons list exist is to aid in navigation, as well as to group information. Dream Focus 11:46, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• This article has been added to the Article Rescue Squadron list, to hopefully get help organizing the information, and finding all the list out there for a more complete article. Dream Focus 11:51, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete: Stemonitis' arguments are convincing enough. I am not myself a biologist, and am perfectly happy to credit that the biologists who consider this list fatally flawed know what they're talking about.  Ravenswing  17:24, 15 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• That is an argument from authority which is not policy-based. The comments of those who claim to be experts are, in fact, contrary to policy. What we require is evidence. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:12, 21 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak Keep - While I respect the opinions of the biology experts, I'm unsure if deletion is the answer here. It seems like this is an organizational problem. I was unable to find even an estimate for the number of families that exist, but I am sure the number is quite high; far too large for a single list. Perhaps it would make more sense to create smaller articles like List of families in Kingdom Animalia, List of families in Kingdom Plantae, etc. (assuming that even these would be manageable lists, perhaps you'd have to divide it by Phylum) and turn this article into a "list of lists" which points to the smaller, more manageable lists. SnottyWong ^confabulate 17:57, 15 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, you're only here to vote keep because it was listed at ARS. Inclusionist! 8-) Andy Dingley (talk) 12:25, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If I !voted keep on rescue-tagged articles 100% of the time, as some do, then you might have a point. SnottyWong ^yak 14:43, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. per nom. The notion of listing families across the larger groupings is just taxonomically meaningless. I'm sure we do already have family listings at the appropriate level, i.e. for Orders, possibly for some of the Classes. Although there could be scope for listing some disconnected families across relevant groups (Ganoid fish is the classic example), these are few and need to be handled separately - they'd be lost within a big list like this. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:25, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete as unmaintainable. The category system does this much better. Mangoe (talk) 13:32, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I disagree. Firstly there is no category for taxonomic families (that I could find, anyway). Secondly, the category system doesn't provide any hint as to what types of organisms are included in a family. If you were looking at a category and saw one of the entries was Meleagrididae, you'd probably have no idea that it included turkeys. This list, however, provides that minimum amount of information. We have hundreds if not thousands of articles on these families (see how many blue links there are in this list), it makes sense to have both categories and lists to serve as navigational aids. See WP:CLN. If the list is too long, then split it up. SnottyWong ^chatter 14:49, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I will defer to others on the splitting of the article, though I think at a level below phylum the divisions are going to be duplicative. As to giving some idea of what's in the various families, though, that's exactly why I think relying on the categories is a better idea. Turkeys may be in Meleagrididae today, but taxonomy remains fluid, and there are always genuses and species being moved from group to group. This list makes yet another place that has to be maintained along with the individual taxon articles. Mangoe (talk) 18:48, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - The nominator (as well as some users on the article talk page) have noted that taxonomic families are considered "useless" or "arbitrary" by experts. By this logic, should we then also delete all of the hundreds or thousands of articles on individual families? Whether or not you think that families are useful is not important. They exist, and they are documented. I happen to think that Britney Spears songs are useless, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have an article on it. SnottyWong ^{spill the beans} 14:55, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• No. That is entirely untrue. I have argued that the list is useless and that the rank is arbitrary, not that the taxa are arbitrary, or that an article on a family is useless. Please do not misrepresent my opinions. --Stemonitis (talk) 15:01, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• No-one here is claiming that families are useless (that's a separate rant against Linnaean taxonomy), or even that lists (plural) of families are useless. The problem is that taxonomy is a tree structure, and this article is attempting to take a great many disconnected sets of families (the sub-families of each Order) and to bundle all these sets together as if that made sense. It is pointless to list groups of families from different branches of the bigger tree - there's just no meaning to it.

The issue of list size is secondary to this. Even with the tools to handle it (and Fishbase or Tolweb are very good at this - go take a look) it's still meaningless to attempt to do this slice. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:28, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete There is no point having a list like this. If you want to help out with Biology articles, list the families in their respective Orders instead, if they are not already there. If this list would ever be completed, it would contain 1000s of family names without any context. I have seen something similar in the area i am working in, somethin like "list of moths". There are well over 100.000 species, why would we want them in one single list? Please spend your time on other things instead, there is an enormous amount of work to be done, dont waste it on these types of articles. Ruigeroeland (talk) 16:02, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Length is not a valid reason for deletion. If it gets too long, it'll be broken up into smaller articles. Dream Focus 19:30, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If it gets broken up into separate articles, in this case there seems to be no reason to have an omnibus list article in the first place. Mangoe (talk) 20:26, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It'll be divided into dozens of articles, all of which need to be listed somewhere, along with a description as to why they were grouped that way, be it species, or alphabetical order, or both, whatever. Dream Focus 20:37, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, sure. Is there a problem with that?  Ravenswing  21:31, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I suggest that the closing admin takes considerably more note of the biologists who have posted here than the non-experts. Dingo1729 (talk) 05:53, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Or just take note of the fact that this classification is used in every encyclopedia and biology textbook there is. If different groups debate what gets listed where, then just pick whichever encyclopedia is used by more universities, and trust their judgment. Every single species article on Wikipedia list what Family it belongs to. Do you want to go through and remove all of that from thousands of articles, simply because some of them might be in dispute somewhere? Dream Focus 12:13, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You are missing the point again. We are not arguing about the validity of families. We are arguing abut the validity of listing them all together (or trying to), as if they had something in common. --Stemonitis (talk) 12:19, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What they have in common is that they are already listed together everywhere that list them. Dream Focus 12:23, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry; I can't follow your logic here. "They are already listed together everywhere that list them." What does this mean? I can only parse it as a truism. --Stemonitis (talk) 12:27, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Don't encyclopedias and textbooks that list this sort of thing, list them in groups, based on families? Dream Focus 12:41, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Within limited groups, yes. They may I suppose provide a list of families of frogs and toads, or a list of families of birds, say, but I have never seen any printed work attempt to provide a list of all families, extinct and extant, across all kingdoms of life since Carl Linnaeus (and even he didn't use the term "family" in those lists). I have always maintained that within restricted groups, a list of families is entirely desirable (within existing articles, where appropriate). Frog families are never, to my knowledge, listed alongside families of cyanobacteria, slime moulds and ferns. --Stemonitis (talk) 13:07, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. We can thus split it into many different list, some of which already exist. List of frog families for all the frog stuff, etc. etc. And link to them from here, as a list of all Wikipedia articles on families. I'll go get started on that now. Dream Focus 13:55, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Now that's a case where categories really would be better than lists. Although listing the frog and toad families together (but not, I'd suggest even all the herps in one list) is of manageable size and to some useful extent encyclopedic, it's much better done by annotating each family article and then using automatic collation to make the lists or trees up from this dynamically (i.e. use categorization and category tree browsers). A manually updated list like this would be lots of work to build and would inevitably be of poor quality, owing to that difficulty. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:41, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• See what someone did with List of Canadian plants by family? It then has all of them in sublist in alphabetical order, there thousands of things listed, in a nice logical organized manner. Dream Focus 14:02, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

List of Canadian plants by family is not a good example to be followed. It is entirely unreferenced, avowedly incomplete, and ill-organised. --Stemonitis (talk) 14:15, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Incomplete is not a valid reason to eliminate a list. Never has been, never was. List of plants by family Dream Focus 14:18, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per reasoning of Stemonitis and Andy Dingley. This list would be a impossibility, in practice, to develop; categories are what is called for here. —innotata 02:55, 18 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Without wishing to speak for Stemonitis, this isn't what I meant at all and I don't think it's what they meant either. Volume would be a problem and there are technical solutions to that which might favour use of categories over lists. However that isn't the real issue - the problem is that it's simply nonsensical to take lists of families from one Order and to put them alongside lists of families from another Order. There is no meaning to this. They are not comparable. It is utterly pointless to do so. Andy Dingley (talk) 03:15, 18 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I know. I just think that the impossibility of the article is about enough, let alone the other problems pointed out. —innotata 16:05, 19 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete: (i) unsourced and unmaintainable (keeping it updated for reclassifications would be a nightmare), (ii) lack of formal definition for 'family' (iii) lack of a consistent informal definition across higher taxa (making a list across them a dog's breakfast) (iv) highly incomplete, with a complete list (should this be achievable) being of massive size. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 05:15, 19 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep List are as valid as categories per WP:CLS. Families are commonly used as a way for structuring taxonomic lists. For examples, see IUCN red list of threatened plants and Check list of the freshwater fishes. We have numerous taxonomic lists and there seems to be no good reason to discriminate against families when reliable sources such as these do not do so. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:12, 21 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Families are commonly used as a way for structuring taxonomic lists."

What's a "taxonomic list"? Taxonomy is, by definition, based around taxons or clades and these are assembled into tree structures, topologically more complex than lists (i.e. it rapidly becomes nonsensical to use "taxonomy" and "simple list" in the same sentence). This is the root problem here: not one of data volume, not one of biological classification, but one of theoretical knowledge management. When the underlying structure is more complex than a list, it's meaningless to extract large lists as arbitrary slices through it. Taking a 6th sub-level slice (of a classical structure where ranking is biologically somewhat arbitrary to begin with anyway) through the complete kingdom is nonsense.

The two lists you cite are an irrelevance here. Red lists are themselves arbitrary. Rather than being based on the taxonomy, they're an externally judged list (those which are threatened), i.e. an arbitrary set imposed by some external arbiter. This is an additional definition of "list membership" added from outside the taxonomy, something we're lacking in this article. The point of the Red list is "those species that are threatened", but this article has no such point. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:39, 21 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• The listing of items in alphabetical order is commonly done in works of reference such as encyclopedia. The use of lists as indexes is well established in Wikipedia and their purpose includes browsing, content creation and lookup. Your insistence that this be done in a particular way does not seem supported by policy. One of the points of WP:CLS is to explain that we derive some synergy by approaching such matters of structure from different angles. Colonel Warden (talk) 11:10, 21 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete It's the wrong way to present taxonomy. A rank like family requires context, since it doesn't have any info on divergence in itself: a family of insects are much more divergent than a family of birds. We already have families listed where they belong: under their respective orders or other groups. Narayanese (talk) 17:48, 21 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Universally recognized scientific category. The variation in the use of the term in different phyla is irrelevant, especially since the list is divided by phyla. The fact that no taxonomic ranks except species in sexually reproducing organisms have an exact definition is irrelevant--most mental concepts, even scientific ones, have a similarly non-exact definition, and there are 100s of thousands of papers on the grouping of particular taxa into families. Since unquestionably RSs for what valid family names are accepted exist, it is much better defined that most Wikipedia lists. That actual taxonomic structures are trees does not prevent scientists (and others) for listing them alphabetically--because such lists serve in essence as an index to the position in the tree. (Otherwise you have to previously know the classification before you can find where it is in the tree, which rather defeats the purpose), There is no reason not to duplicate lists if both versions are useful--lists are navigational devices, and iuseful is a valid criterion. And no list that people maintain is unmaintainable. (There is a scientific school of thought within cladistics that deprecates the use of traditional named groups, but essentially all practical biologists and indexes use them nonetheless. Wikipedia reflects what is generally used, not what theorists believe ought to be used. ) DGG ( talk ) 22:30, 21 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.