The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Delete: the partial title argument holds sway and there is no need to leave a mere dictionary entry. ˉˉ^anetode╦╩ 01:15, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Canus[edit]

Canus (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

No disambiguation called for Wloveral (talk) 01:03, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This page Canus redirects to different species through only the species epithets. These are not unique in biological taxonomy. Only the full scientific name of an animal or plant species is unique. There is no ambiguity here since the partial names are not used by themselves. This page opens a bad example, as did the page Miserabilis. In both cases, the search function should be used, not a disambiguation page. I made the first nomination for deletion of this page Canus but did not understand how complete the process until now.--Wloveral (talk) 00:55, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete not needed, unlikely search term.  Atyndall93 | talk  03:43, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong delete disambig pages are never used for every word in an article title. Ditto for scientific names. Shyamal (talk) 06:26, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Should probably be a redirect to canis as an easy misspelling. Zetawoof_(ζ) 07:32, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - It seems fairly reasonable that a readers may type in Canus when looking for any of the entries on this page, if they had half remembered the name. Indeed they may even think that the bird or rodent they are seeking is actually called "canus". IMHO this is an acceptable, if slightly marginal, use of a disambiguation page. Abtract (talk) 11:37, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• note - this should be considered together with miserabilis and the same decision made for both. Abtract (talk) 09:01, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Seems a clear violation of WP:DAB#Partial title matches. Deor (talk) 12:30, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • note - Partial title matches reads thus: "Do not add links that merely contain part of the page title, or links that include the page title in a longer proper name, where there is no significant risk of confusion. Only add links to articles that could use essentially the same title as the disambiguated term. Disambiguation pages are not search indices." Abtract (talk) 12:43, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. At worst this does no harm. At best, it is not that unusual to refer to the species name only when the context is clear--and considering how communications are so rapidly transmuted, it is quite easy for the original context to not be so clear. older ≠ wiser 12:48, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. This is not a case of a partial title match. Species epithets can be used by themselves, as has been pointed out. As such, species epithet disambiguation pages are valid disambiguation pages. Neelix (talk) 15:02, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Canus is merely a Latin adjective meaning "hoary" (as miserabilis is one meaning "wretched"); it has no scientific significance in itself. We don't have articles with adjectival titles, and we shouldn't have such dab pages either. I've never seen species names "used by themselves", except perhaps in a journal article discussing multiple species of only one genus, and even then the almost invariable practice is to abbreviate, rather than omit, the genus name (as, for example, "L. canus" for Larus canus). Organisms' binomial names are, in effect, inseparable compounds. Deor (talk) 19:03, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete as violation of WP:DAB#Partial title matches. Binomial nomeclature says that the species name is a two-part name. As Deor says, species names are meaningless on their own--Lenticel ^(talk) 05:17, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. It's not uncommon for species in specialized literature to be referred to as "X. species", where X. is the first letter of the genus name and species is the species name (cf. "T. rex", "D. melanogaster"), but this would suggest that it would be useful to have a DAB page for, e.g., L. canus or S. canus, but not for "canus" alone. Doing it this way seems to violate WP:DAB#Partial title matches. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 07:51, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. I agree that this seems a clear violation of the "partial title matches" rule, and that species names are "inseparable" from the genus name. However, I was wondering if one could draw an analogy to people's names. We have probably thousands of disambiguation pages for "partial matches" on people's names, both for surnames and given names. For example, see Maxwell. I think no one would suggest deleting those. So, is it fair to say that people's names are "separable", unlike species names? Probably, as it is common to use just the surname (or sometimes the given name) of a person when writing about them when there's no ambiguity due to the context. This all leads me to believe that deletion is the most appropriate choice, unless it can be shown convincingly that species names are indeed commonly used separately from the genus name. I doubt it. Has anyone seen writings that refer to humans as "sapiens"? --Itub (talk) 12:05, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep I think this article should be kept. It is possible to write in the word Canus for time. --LAAFan 21:50, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak delete May be a little useful, but I don't think any of these species are actually referred to as "canus", and thus this is merely a page on a latin word. And Wikipedia is not a dictionary, or a latin dictionary, for that matter. Danski14^(talk) 19:43, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Note to closing admin. See the related AfDs Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vulgaris‎ and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Miserabilis‎, both closed as "delete". Deor (talk) 07:49, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.