Jump to content

Talk:Tree

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Good articleTree has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Did You Know Article milestones
DateProcessResult
September 1, 2010Good article nomineeNot listed
September 14, 2012Good article nomineeNot listed
October 6, 2014Good article nomineeListed
Did You Know A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on October 29, 2014.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the tallest known tree is more than 115 meters tall?
Current status: Good article

Improving a few section names etc

[edit]

I'm planning on improving a few sections with the intention of making the names more sensible and consistent. Specifically:

1) Cleanup the Definition & Overview sections by:
1a) Rename "Definition" to "Definition and overview"
1b) Move first paragraph of existing Overview section (which - among other things - distinguishes trees from shrubs) into ""Definition and overview" section, which already includes "must be tall" discussion.
1c) Change name of remainder of the existing "Overview" section (four paragraphs) to "Classification", because that is what most its contents are: various ways to classify or categorize trees.
2) Create new section named "In culture" to contain: Trees in art; trees _as_ art; trees in literature; trees in worship; etc
2a) Put existing "Mythology" section into new "In culture" section
2b) Rename existing "Mythology" section to "Religion and mythology"
3) Ensure uniform subsection names under "Uses" section: in particular: subsections should be named after use, not tree part
3a) Change name of "Bark" section to be the use(s) of the individual paragraphs (may or may not require 2+ new subsections)
4) Split existing "trunk" section into "Trunk" section and "Bark" sections, because bark covers more than only the trunk (not clear yet if Bark should be subsection of Trunk or not; probably not)
5) Define "Threats" section to be limited to "threats to trees/forests etc"; excludes "threats to humans"
5a) Move "threats to humans" material from that section into some other TBS section

I'm not planning on changing any content of the above sections ... merely renaming & some simple re-organizing. I'm planning on doing this in the couple of days. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, let me know. Of course, any changes can be modified/undone. Noleander (talk) 23:08, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Classification" at least is a poor name as 99% of the time it means "Taxonomy", but there is no such implication here. I suppose we could call the section "Types" as long as it is clear this is not equivalent to "Taxa".
I'm not sure I agree, either, about the idea that the "Uses" s/sections can all be named after specific, often minor uses; in particular, "Bark" names a major source of products, but several of those products are way too minor to deserve s/sections of their own. The meaning "Uses of bark" is perfectly comprehensible and should stay, though I daresay "Bark products" would do as well. The search for strict uniformity always falls foul of nature's diversity and the range of human ingenuity, and that's true here.
Not keen on inserting "and" into any section heading.
"Threats" is perfectly plain, as the article's subject is "Tree"; just as "Uses" means "Uses of trees", so "Threats" means "Threats to trees"; there is no call whatsoever to bring humans in as subjects (that's anthropocentrism, of which Wikipedia has far too much already). If you're totally stuck on this one then "Conservation threats" would do as a circumlocution, but that is a movement in the direction of longer, weaker, and less tightly expressed, which isn't a good direction of travel. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:39, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]