Commons:Categories for discussion/2025/08/Category:Plants

Category:Plants

Yeah... No. THIS is not how CfDs should be held. I have repeatedly argued in the past about other large category trees, ("Georgia" --> "Georgia (country)", and "Historical images" --> void) that huge changes in the category tree should at some point of the discussion be linked in the Village Pump, to find a general consensus.

The process: Proposal by Sbb in January. First opinion by omphalographer in January. Closure by Sbb in February, exactly one month after proposal. That is NOT seeking a consensus by Sbb. I would not speak out against this abridged process for a niche category structure that can be easily reversed. But, this is now affecting all plant categories. With the aforementioned CfDs against "Georgia" and "Historical images", we had at least a few more voices (still not enough in my opinion) but this was a conspitorial and intransparent farce. Nothing bad would have come out of having this CfD open for a year or two; or maybe advertise for it somewhere central, so that there is broader participation.
The first argument for the move from "Flora" (a biological term coming from Latin, the preferred language in biology categories according to consensus on Commons, as far as I am aware) to "Plants (the colloquial term in English) were entirely unconvincing for me: "this is logical because of the 'Animals' category tree, which is in English and not Latin." Hello? Instead, you could have also have argued against the category tree of the "Animals", and clamored for its re-direction back into "Fauna" (or "Animalia")
The second argument : "The categories are a mess" is a non-starter, since renaming just creates even more of a mess at least in the short term. "We will sort this out eventually..." - oh yeah? It took half a year before you finally got to the parts of the category tree where I noticed these changes. This whole affait is just messy. "Sorting this out" will now take even longer.

--Enyavar (talk) 19:21, 16 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also this category is ambiguous though the living thing may well be primary. Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:23, 17 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We use binomial nomenclature for species categories because the common English names for plants and animals are often ambiguous, sometimes extremely so (e.g. "grass", "dolphin", "vulture"), and can be difficult to translate precisely to other languages. There is no such ambiguity which needs to be resolved here - English terms like "plant" or "animal" are perfectly acceptable. Moreover, the biological kingdoms are called Plantae and Animalia; "flora" and "fauna" refer to the set of species which are present in a particular biome, not to all plants and animals which exist. Omphalographer (talk) 22:53, 17 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Support 'Flora' is the correct term. It's almost always plants, yes, but this would be the common term on horticultural, and not more than a few common, literature. - The Bushranger (talk) 03:07, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Changing it to flora per Omphalographer. "Flora" is to ambiguous. As it usually, but not always, refers to ground level plants and/or ones of a particular region, habitat, or geological period. As well other things depending on the context, like bacteria and gut flora. Per Commons:Categories "we should not classify items which are related to different subjects in the same category....The category name should be unambiguous and not homonymous."

There's also the whole thing that category names should be based on the the most common term for things when possible to. Know one outside of academia looks for images of plants on the internet using the word "flora." Whereas, I'd argue they would search for the name of a specific plant species because it's relevant to things like gardening where people usually want to "plant" (not flora lmao) a specific type of rose or whatever. --Adamant1 (talk) 04:17, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, just looking at the numbers on here, there's 679471 results for "plant" and 584309. A good percentage of the results for the later seem to come from the same couple of sources to. And as side to that, it makes me wonder what the plural for flora would be since categories are suppose in plural form and there's obviously multiple types of flora. Floras? Or is flora actually plural? --Adamant1 (talk) 04:41, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Comment en:Flora is not really ambiguous. skin/gut flora need the prefix, if that prefix is not mentioned, "my flora" is more likely to mean my backyard garden rather than my entrails. The few mentions of Flora (dea) have to get that bracket-suffix. On the other side, factory-plants and spy-plants do also exist, so "plants" is also a bit ambiguous. Plantae (in Latin) is practically a duplicate of "Plants". Yet "Plants" is currently the parent category for not just "Plantae" (the biological species tree) and for all individual plants, but also as the collection of all plant life... i.e. "Flora" as the collective noun. ("Floras" is a plural form, but it would be used in "the floras of these two regions are different". Any single location has one flora, even if that means 300 species.)

I would agree that most categories currently under "Plants" should remain as they are, and not get renamed: "Mutations in plants", "Evolution of plants", "Plant collections" should not be artificially renamed... there is no "Potted flora", after all. We should mostly re-evaluate those categories that were moved (like "Flora"--> "Plants") or were intended to move (like "Flora by location).

At least all location-based categories should remain as "Flora", like "Flora of New Caledonia", since they refer to all plant life of a given region. The category tree requiring "flora" also includes "Flora distribution maps" (and arguably should also have consequences in reintroducing "Fauna distribution maps", but I think that should be considered in a different CfD). --Enyavar (talk) 07:44, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]