Template talk:Taxonomy/Blochius

Blochius as a billfish

@Peter coxhead The vast majority of scientific papers I can find from over the past 20 years place Blochius in its own family the Blochiidae (which recently had a second genus described), and classify the Blochiidae among the extant billfish in the suborder Xiphioidei (the ones that don't are usually going by the old classification of keeping billfish in the Scombroidei). The entry for Blochiidae on the IRMNG database hasn't been updated since 2011, so I don't think it can be considered to supersede all the papers both before and since then that consider it a billfish. Geekgecko (talk) 18:01, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

@Geekgecko: please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fishes#Taxonomy issues near Istiophoridae. I have absolutely no view on the taxonomy and no expertise in the area – I will leave that to others to sort out. I acted solely because about 20 pages were in the error tracking categories, either because the taxonomy template did not exist or because ranks were not in the right order. It's best to get consensus at the WikiProject before changing a taxonomy template that is used by multiple articles. Also it really helps if you fill in the refs field. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:22, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks; will classify in Istiophoriformes for now as a compromise. I didn't see any error when I made the change, so it might have been temporary or perhaps I just overlooked something? Will fill in the refs field. Geekgecko (talk) 23:59, 21 December 2023 (UTC)