Talk:Dendriscocaulon

WP:Bold changes are welcome

I started this article with the aim of getting other editors to make WP:BOLD changes to it, so please contribute. FloraWilde (talk) 14:27, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

I'd comment that italics are appropriate because the name has been published as a genus name. A taxonomist would hesitate to do that because it would suggest that they are accepting that classification, but here we are explaining what the term means. This sort of thing is common with fungi other than lichens, see Teleomorph, anamorph and holomorph. We use italics here for any species or genus name that is now considered to be a synonym, for example in the taxobox at Sorghum bicolor there's a huge list that can be unhidden. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 15:46, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the links. I will stop editing for a while and spend some time reading, since I am starting to get lost. The lichen (and apparently fungus) classification conventions are like classifying humans by a bacteria that has been in everyone's intestine so far, then discovering an isolated tribe of people without the bacteria, and calling them a different species... only because of classification conventions. FloraWilde (talk) 16:39, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

:-) Well, we do also have mitochondria in each of our cells! I've made some drastic changes for you to consider. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 16:44, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

:-) :-) I was thinking "mitochondria", but I wrote intestinal bacteria because I am so far behind in reading the latest on mitochondria that I thought I might end up writing nonsense by ignorance. I was hoping for drastic changes, and hope for more to come. I tend to agree with those 19th century lichenologist (assuming lichens really are a symbiotic merging of two species into one), that Dendriscocaulon is a genus, that the described species in it are different species, and that there are different legitimate meanings of species for different purposes (species problem, all of them ultimately problematic at the extreme cases. FloraWilde (talk) 16:57, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

• Comment - Sminthopsis84 did a good job rewriting this article. FloraWilde (talk) 18:01, 2 October 2014 (UTC)