Template:taxon/documentation

Usage

# {{taxon|''current taxon''|''parent taxon''|''parent taxon name''|''colloquial name'' (can be omitted) or other lexical information such as location, importance, unusual features|t=''category template'' (can be omitted)}}

Example:

# {{taxon|genus|family|Elephantidae|[[mammoth]]s}}

produces

1. A taxonomic genus within the family Elephantidae — mammoths.

If italics are required for the proper display of the third parameter and are not produced automatically (as for genus and species), add i=1. This yields the proper presentation of virus orders, families, and subfamilies.

In the overwhelming majority of uses of this template the parent taxon is "family", "order', "class", or "phylum". The rationale for this is that these ranks are well-established and more stable than ranks such as "tribe" and the various "super-", "magna-", "sub-", "infra-", and "parv-" ranks, let alone "clades" and "groups" (which are unranked). These intermediate ranks can be inserted under the Hypernyms header for the entry.