Talk:List of chiropterans

Let's discuss the name change

@PresN: The name of this article was recently changed with the edit summary "Move to standard for mammal lists (scientific name)". It doesn't feel like the right choice to me, but I am open to persuasion. I am not aware of a standard for mammal lists and most of the examples I could think of use the common name unless there is some reason why the common name causes confusion. In this case the vast majority of people know what a bat is, but few could tell you what chiropterans (my spell check suggests chiropractors) are. I'm not feeling like reverting, but would like to get feedback from others. SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:02, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm curious what examples you're thinking of for mammal lists, as every single one uses the scientific name - see, well, every link in {{Mammal lists}}, including the 14 lists for bat families/subfamilies. The reasoning behind it is that while some orders/families have a standard common name in English - e.g. Chiroptera == bats - many/most do not- what's the common name for all of Canidae? (list of canids) Felidae? (list of felids) Mephitidae? (list of mephitids) Even restricting to just overall orders rather than individual families, Carnivora (list of carnivorans) / Diprotodontia (list of diprotodonts) / Lagomorpha (list of lagomorphs) all don't have a single, well-known common name for the entire order. Chiroptera is a bit of an outlier. And of course list of bats continues to point to here in any case. --PresN 22:42, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Glancing at that mammal list template I was struck by list of suines, as -ine is commonly used for as the vernacular term derived from a subfamily name, with irregular exceptions such as habiline or pithecanthropine. (I initially wondered if this was one of the older class where -ine is used as an adjective ("like an animal") rather than as a adjective/noun ("pertaining to/member of a taxon"), but porcine is the word which belongs to the older class.) Wiktionary gives two definitions for suine, corresponding to Suinae and Suina, and I interpret it as saying that the former is the primary meaning, and gives suilline as the term corresponding to Suina. Lavateraguy (talk) 21:10, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Hmm, Suina actually uses suines as well, not that that means much, though that's where I got the name from. Looks like wiktionary says suillines based on the OED doing so. When I do a books search for `suina suillines` I'm only seeing books from the early 1900s and earlier that use the term; `suina suines` gives me more recent results, including Evolution on Planet Earth: Impact of the Physical Environment (2003) and Evolution of Tertiary Mammals of North America: Volume 1 (1998). That's not conclusive, but it's enough that I'd chalk it up to latin (or at least scientific use of latin) being weird and making both -inae and -ina convert to -ines. --PresN 02:45, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

The naming of animal suborders is not standardised (except the modern fish suborders seem to consistently use -oidei) so I doubt that a productive rule is in play with Suina. I would have gone with suinans, and that is what mammal classification uses. Google Ngrams indicates that suilline has more or less gone out of use, and suinan has always been very rare; even now it's rarer than suilline. That ratio in Google Scholar for suines:suillines:suinans co-occuring with Suina is 82:5:2, though the first number can be expected to have false positives, in that articles on the subfamily may still refer to the suborder.

Bing Copilot claims that term for pigs and peccaries collectively is swine, but that is not the primary usage; wiktionary's definition is narrow (pig, but not explicitly Sus domesticus), while Merriam-Webster equates it with suid. There doesn't seem to be a good single word choice for this group; but suids and tayassuids is a possibility. Lavateraguy (talk) 08:35, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Bing Copilot is hardly a reliable source: check Wikipedia:Large language models. — 𝟷.𝟸𝟻𝚔𝚖 (𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚔) 19:53, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

That is what I thought I was implying. Lavateraguy (talk) 07:57, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

@PresN: Right you are. I was looking at articles about the topics rather than the lists. Keep up the good work. SchreiberBike | ⌨  14:07, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Authority and Species section of the tables

In the Authority and Species section of the tables in shows a link to a person called Benda (instead on a biologist), but it links to a basketball played and i think it is wrong. X4VIER.OneTap (talk) 12:16, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks! --PresN 12:30, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Article size

Any thoughts on what to do with the excessive size of this article? I am in no ways familiar with the subject matter, so I'd like to raise this concern first, especially as I don't believe it's been raised here before. Cheers, it's lio! | talk | work 06:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

It follows the same structure as List of carnivorans, List of artiodactyls, List of eulipotyphlans, List of lagomorphs, List of primates, and List of diprotodonts (the other large mammal orders), it's just that there's a lot of bats. Half the page is the references, and I would welcome any way to combine the IUCN refs into per-genus refs rather than per-species. --PresN 13:23, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Alright - just puzzled how this concern had never been raised before. Thank you for your work. Have a great day, it's lio! | talk | work 03:01, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

@PresN: It tops Special:LongPages. There are only two suborders so why not split into two lists? The smaller suborder would still be a large list by itself. Insects are often split by genus like List of Cicindela species. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:43, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

Replaced the stacked references with single references to the IUCN search results page for that genus, which pushes it out of the top 1000 longpages. --PresN 00:51, 3 July 2025 (UTC)