Category talk:Plants by year of formal description

Listing plants by year described

I recommend against making this kind of list. Nomenclature is an extremely complicated matter, trying to document every change in Wikipedia would be a major can of worms.

An example of the sort of "morass" that awaits is described at http://www.plantsystematics.org/reveal/pbio/LnC/dougfir.html, and this is far from an uncommon situation!
Nadiatalent (talk) 20:09, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. This is a useful category. I've been updating the categories with descriptions to facilitate a better understanding of what the categories contain (see Category:Plants described in 2009 for an example). The convention is to categorize the species by the first formal description date. In most cases, I think that will mean the only date of publication, but if the species has been moved, then the basionym date of publication is used. Certainly you can see how that reduces confusion and complication and that these categories are useful (it's nice to be able to browse the species new to science in a particular year, like say 2009). As for your example, there's a simple answer to that whole mess: The first valid publication was by Charles-François Brisseau de Mirbel in 1825, so the page would get categorized in Category:Plants described in 1825. All other earlier publications were invalid, just as all publications prior to the nomenclature system established by Linnaeus were invalid by our current nomenclature rules. Simple as that. Rkitko ^(talk) 20:13, 28 October 2009 (UTC)