Talk:Glossary of plant morphology terms

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A new glossary has been created at Glossary of botanical terms that duplicates the effort of this one. The original author probably wasn't aware of this article. I propose the two are merged. --Rkitko ^(talk) 22:11, 17 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I put up the Glossary of Botanical Terms and must say that it was done in ignorance of the glossary here. There are a number of points: botanical glossaries are not usually split up into sub-categories like this one. It has advantages because, say, all the leaf terms are in together so you can discriminate what you are after quickly if it is leaf terms you are interested in. However, people generally use glossaries because they do not understand what a word means - so if they do not know what it refers to then they would have to look through each categories until they find the word they are after. In other words, in its present form it assumes you know roughly what the word means before you look it up. I think it is simpler and more useful to just provide an overall alphabetical listing. I would suggest that this list be merged into the Botanical Glossary which would be the "parent". Also the categories in this article here are rather arbitrary (e.g. ?embryo glossary), there are many blank entries and treatment variable on the different themes. I would be prepared to merge this article into the Botanical Glossary but it may not be for a few weeks.Granitethighs (talk) 01:59, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Part of the reason this is a "list" rather than a "glossary" is that, most often, alphabetically arranged glossaries get moved to Wiktionary. A thematic list is more likely to be viewed as worthy of inclusion in a dictionary; an alphabetical glossary is likely to be shunted off to another wikiproject. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:09, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I do not believe that we need to choose between an alphabetical listing and a listing by category. Glossaries for advanced readers are usually alphabetical, like the one by Benjamin D. Jackson (1928), or the one at the Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. But those for the average reader often have an alphabetical list with more elaboration or illustrations in categories for special terminology. Two good examples are Plant Identification Terminology (Harris and Harris, 1994) and The Cambridge Illustrated Glossary of Botanical Terms (Hickey and King, 2000). The double listing creates alot of duplication, but it makes the glossary easier to use, especially for comparing terms of similar meaning.

128.171.106.213 (talk) 02:27, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I urge that we merge the List of externally visible plant parts here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 13:12, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I see no difference in intended scope, and List of plant morphology terms is, I suppose, a better title. Kingdon (talk) 16:49, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Guettarda (talk) 12:03, 22 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The principle of incorporating technical terms into glossaries is eminently sound.

The principle of merging related glossaries to avoid either overlap or confusing conflict in terminology is also sound and will almost certainly save a great deal of work, a great deal of waste, and a great deal of confusion.

The principle of merging small glossaries into larger glossaries of larger scope also is sound in many information-technical respects, although there does come a point where a really large list becomes cumbersome. (I hesitate to say "too cumbersome" because there are advantages to large lists as well.)

I do however STRONGLY take issue with contributors who recommend that we conflate glossaries on general principles without considering the functional implications. The management of glossaries amounts to a branch of lexicography and as such is fraught with snares. We can avoid no end of problems if we take the trouble to get things right first.

Consider for example such remarks as: "I see no difference in intended scope, and List of plant morphology terms is, I suppose, a better title." The opinion is tempting and the attitude is constructive and praiseworthy, but the view is simplistic. Botany has a far greater scope than botanical morphology, even omitting say, terms peculiar to say, botanical physiology and molecular taxonomy, we would cripple the function and create a proliferation of glossaries if subsequently we discover that botanical terms unrelated to anatomical do not have a home in our "botanical" glossary. So we should be very cautious about the global name we choose for our merged glossary: not morphology if we are not to exclude non-morphological terms.

Conversely, we should be cautious of dumping every term with any botanical relevance into our "botanical" glossary. There is no clear distinction between botany and the rest of science. If we too obsessively police the inclusion of every term that someone considers to have too tenuous a connection with botany, we cripple the function of the facility by focussing it too narrowly. If we attempt to avoid hobbling the function in such ways we will find that other glossaries (there is more to science than botany) will overlap very, very messily. Furthermore, if we wind up with a proliferation of glossaries on Wikipedia, trying to find terms would become wasteful and difficult.

I recommend that we instead consider a totally different approach. There should be one single Wikipedia glossary. (Just possibly we cold have separate glossaries for say, science, politics, literature or something, but I suspect that a "glossary function" ("Wikiglossary"? I don't yet know) in Wikipedia would be the best approach.)

The principle would be that of a fairly simple normalised data base. Each incorporated "glossary" would look to the user like a normal glossary; a linear list of terms and definitions. However, each headword and each definition would have as many subject tags as necessary. Anyone looking anything up would simply enter the headword if he knew it, and select what he liked. If he found that a simple term gave him an avalanche, he could enter a few filter tags (such indeed as "botany" or "morphology") to narrow the field of retrievals to exclude terms in engineering or electronics or epistemology.

Now, I am sure that by broaching this subject here, I am preaching to the wrong congregation, so I intend taking the discussion to a more global level, but since it was a botanical situation that raised the concern, I should be grateful if you anyone interested would care to comment.

For a start, why should we not make sure that Wiktionary does not already cover all the glossary functions that we are thinking of? I went off to check it, and it already seems to include all the obvious terms. I have not yet checked to see how many of the terms in the glossary are already there, but I bet most of them are.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by JeanGeilland (talk • contribs) 10:41, 29 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Jean that's rather a lot to absorb. Could you briefly summarize and cite an example glossary of something along the lines you are proposing so that we can see what you are driving at please? If you go to the Glossary of botanical terms you will see the terms that are not covered in Wikipedia appear in red type. Granitethighs 11:56, 29 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the 2 larger suggestions are addressed with these 2 answers:

Regarding glossaries here vs at Wiktionary: See my reply to dab at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Glossaries#Wiktionary - copying

Regarding a proper semantic database of all terms, that could be mined and filtered and collated (wikiglossary as you called it), there is some work being done in that direction, that has been ongoing for years. Start off by reading through Wikipedia:OmegaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki. It's incredibly complicated work, and I'm not uptodate on where the various activities towards those goals are at, so can't help beyond these pointers. HTH. -- Quiddity (talk) 04:49, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding this specific glossary, and its name and contents: See m:Incrementalism and m:Eventualism. All good things, in time. Continual slow improvement is the only constant around here. :) -- Quiddity (talk) 04:49, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As most of you know, one of your earliest most well worn books was an illustrated glossary of plant morphology terms. Please make an illustration of your favorite term, upload it to WP:Commons, and put it in the glossary. PPdd (talk) 17:51, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please help create links by putting square brackets around the terms. PPdd (talk) 05:08, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The entries for bryophyte sporangia have been heavily moss-biased. For a nice example of how the sporangium develops in a liverwort see The life history of Ricciocarpus natans, by John F. Garber. Nadiatalent (talk) 18:39, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]