Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life - Article Titles

Article Titles

In cases where there is a formal common name (e.g. birds), or when common names are well-known and reasonably unique (e.g. "Cuvier's dwarf caiman"), they should be used for article titles. Scientific names should be used otherwise.

See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora) for article titles for plant names and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna) for article titles for animal names.

Note the following guidelines in using scientific names:

• Names of genera are always italicized and capitalized–Homo, Rosa, Saccharomyces.
• Species epithets are always italicized and preceded by the name of the genus or an abbreviation of it— Homo sapiens or H. sapiens, but never plain sapiens, since such identifiers need not be unique. They are never capitalized.
• Names of higher taxa are capitalized but not italicized— Hominidae, Mammalia, Animalia.

In cases where a group only contains a single subgroup, the two should not be separated (unless the higher-ranked group has had multiple circumscriptions, and an article is written to cover them all). If there is no common name, the article should generally go under the scientific name that is most often used when discussing the group, or under the scientific name of lowest rank if there is no clear preference. However, for a genus that contains a single species, the genus name should be used since it is included in the binomial nomenclature. For instance the order Amphionidacea, which has the single species Amphionides reynaudii, is discussed at Amphionides.

Not all species need have separate articles. The simplest (and probably best) rule is to have no rule: if you have the time and energy to write up some particularly obscure subspecies that most people have never even heard of, go for it! As a general guideline, though, it's best to combine separate species into a single entry whenever it seems likely that there won't be enough text to make more than a short, unsatisfying stub otherwise. If the entry grows large enough to deserve splitting, that can always be done later.

A useful heuristic is to create articles in a "downwards" order, that is, family articles first, then genus, then species. If you find that information is getting thin, or the family/genus is really small, just leave the species info inline in the family or genus article, don't try to force it down any further.