Commons:Categories for discussion/2025/08/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)
- Also this category is ambiguous though the living thing may well be primary. Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:23, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
- 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)
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)
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)
- 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)
.svg/20px-Pictogram_voting_comment_(orange).svg.png)
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)
- @Enyavar: I had thought about suggesting going with "flora" for top level, more general categories but still using "plants" with more specific ones like Category:Potted plants. It seems like doing that would introduce it's own problems though and I'm not really sure how it would work anyway. But I'd be open to that if there's a reasonable way to do it that won't just lead to overlap or people renaming the categories for plants to "flora" later because that's how the parent cats are. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:32, 20 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Adamant1: Wouldn't using "Plants" as the parent cat of "Potted plants" solve that issue?
- I'm personally in favor of keeping "Plants" at the top level, and would prefer to see the location categories eventually renamed as well, seeing as these categories include all plant and plant-related media, including things that aren't flora. And doing so would create a category structure that is entirely consistent without sacrificing accuracy or accessibility. --ReneeWrites (talk) 23:36, 20 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Enyavar: I had thought about suggesting going with "flora" for top level, more general categories but still using "plants" with more specific ones like Category:Potted plants. It seems like doing that would introduce it's own problems though and I'm not really sure how it would work anyway. But I'd be open to that if there's a reasonable way to do it that won't just lead to overlap or people renaming the categories for plants to "flora" later because that's how the parent cats are. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:32, 20 August 2025 (UTC)
- @ReneeWrites: The way I was imaging it is something like a top level "flora" category. Then "Flora (plants)" or the reverse ---> Plants for media of plants that don't directly relate to plant flora because there's still things like Flora distribution maps that would need to be categorized. Or conversally we could just go with "plants" for everything and then have one "flora" category just for the maps. I don't know. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:46, 20 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Adamant1: I see what you mean, but I don't think "Flora distribution maps" requires a separate "Flora" parent. The parent category doesn't necessarily need to use the same wording, just cover the subject matter. Since the maps are about plant life, they'd still fit naturally under "Plants" (or a subcategory covering media about plants). That would keep things consistent while still leaving room for the more specific categories you mentioned. ReneeWrites (talk) 00:06, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
- I just noticed that the previous CfD:Flora called for the movement of all "flora" categories to "plant", and I intended to halt and properly discuss that renaming process before it gets fully applied. There are still some holdouts currently, with the "flora by location" and the "flora maps" being the important main parts that still mostly use "flora", as far as I am aware. I would argue that these two parts should not be renamed. Seeing now that many "plant" categories which are under the current "plant" main category now, have apparently not been moved previously, I would also want to ask which categories were actually moved/renamed so far, due to the previous CfD? --Enyavar (talk) 05:18, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Enyavar: I had started with the categories that seemed most in need of straightening out, which were the "Plants by month" (created in 2014, was not renamed) and "Plants by year" (created in 2023, was renamed) categories. Both of these intersect at various points, and both of these contain a mix of subcategories that use flora/plants seemingly interchangeably. For instance Category:Plants by year by month (not renamed) contains Category:Plants in January by year (not renamed), which contains subcategories such as Category:Flora in January 2005.
- This was true before the CfD. When Omphalographer mentioned in the previous CfD that these categories were a mess, he was right, but this mess was structural rather than the result of a temporary clean-up action. I would like to continue to straighten these out now that there is a consensus for which term to use. Doing this for the month/year categories won't take months but days, maybe a week. I could probably get either the month or year subcats done before the end of the weekend. Hopefully this will ease your mind somewhat as well on the volume of work we're looking at and how much time it would take. Does that sound good to you? --ReneeWrites (talk) 08:43, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
- I just noticed that the previous CfD:Flora called for the movement of all "flora" categories to "plant", and I intended to halt and properly discuss that renaming process before it gets fully applied. There are still some holdouts currently, with the "flora by location" and the "flora maps" being the important main parts that still mostly use "flora", as far as I am aware. I would argue that these two parts should not be renamed. Seeing now that many "plant" categories which are under the current "plant" main category now, have apparently not been moved previously, I would also want to ask which categories were actually moved/renamed so far, due to the previous CfD? --Enyavar (talk) 05:18, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Adamant1: I see what you mean, but I don't think "Flora distribution maps" requires a separate "Flora" parent. The parent category doesn't necessarily need to use the same wording, just cover the subject matter. Since the maps are about plant life, they'd still fit naturally under "Plants" (or a subcategory covering media about plants). That would keep things consistent while still leaving room for the more specific categories you mentioned. ReneeWrites (talk) 00:06, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
- Oppose changing "Plants" back to "Flora". On Commons, these categories are used in a broader way than the definition argued here suggests. "Flora of..." was treated as the parent category of all plants in a particular location, not just natural wildlife. But there was no "Plants of..." category to put files of cultivated plants into, because these categories all redirected back to "Flora of...".
- "Plants" is more inclusive, describes its contents more accurately, and to the layperson, it's the more recognizable term. With flora having a more narrow/specific meaning, it introduced problems with "Flora of [country/location]" being treated as the parent category of all plant life. Using the term "plants" for the parent fixes this problem, without introducing new problems in the process, other than that the remaining categories need to be renamed. --ReneeWrites (talk) 16:36, 20 August 2025 (UTC)