User talk:This, that and the other/orphaned Translingual proper nouns

I'm working on it

The "easiest" ones to get off this list are species rank, but it still takes 15-30 minutes because of all the other problems with the entries. Arguably the synonyms don't belong on this list. DCDuring (talk) 01:13, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

For many of these I am at a loss for why they were added. Those added by Equinox were added from older dictionaries and did not include such basics as somewhat meaningful definitions or a clue as to the relevance of the term to normal humans. I have no idea about the motivation for the newer ones.

It is hard to be motivated to work on many of these, because of their obscurity. Many are not included in other dictionaries or in WP or Wikispecies, only have stub entries, or are redlinks in pages for taxa of higher rank. There is a very large supply of these and a smaller, but still large, supply of worthwhile taxonomic entries that have links. DCDuring (talk) 01:22, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Some classes of entries

1. Botanical authors: (low hundreds) not likely to be linked except in rare cases under current practice. We would only use these to disambiguate taxonomic names. Most cases of multiple descriptions of the same taxon are resolved in such a way that we do not have to deal with them. Same would apply to zoological names, possibly other classes of taxonomy authors.
2. Astronomy names. (<100) We have poor coverage of these so links among them will not be common and links from ordinary languages hay be scarce.

Strategies for getting taxonomic names adopted or connected with parents

1. Work on individual items from the orphans list.
2. Remove classes
3. Add comprehensive Hyponyms sections for families, subfamilies, tribes, possibly subtribes and genera. This doesn't work well for overpopulated taxa (say, >100 hyponyms) (in plants, insects, aquatic microfauna, etc.) as there are too many genera for some families and even subfamilies and we lack the infra-familial taxa that would leave more manageable lists. It also doesn't work well for taxa with few (say, 1-5) hyponyms as the yield of orphans is low.
4. Add infrafamilial taxa. Many of these are very unstable and have little linguistic value.
5. Selectively add selected orphans to a list of hypernyms for some higher taxon, preferably a family. This is a little tedious, especially as many recently entered taxa are shown as "within" taxa other than families, requiring that such entries be manually edited. This works well for orphaned species that are listed alphabetically.

I have tried 1 and 3-5, I started with 1, which helped me get a sense of the other "strategies". The list is much too long for that to be the best approach for rapid reduction of the list.

I am already working through the recently added taxa that have parameter 2 of {{taxon}} as something other than kingdom, phylum, class, order, or family. I had eliminated supertribe and subtribe quickly, but tribe and subfamily will be slower.

@This, that and the other One thing that might quickly reduce the length of the list would be to group by taxonomic rank where available and sort alphabetically within groups. This would yield lists of species that would allow strategy 5 to be implemented quickly, with very high yield of orphan elimination. Other ranks may have some commonalities. DCDuring (talk) 23:31, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

@DCDuring I generated you a new list. Let me know how you go. This, that and the other (talk) 00:27, 30 October 2024 (UTC)