Category talk:Dendrology

Category:Arboriculture
Each only had cacuminous as member. Category:Botany should suffice for now. DCDuring TALK 17:33, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I'd say delete, overcategorization. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:49, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep; given time, more entries would end up being added to these categories. Consider the very specific Category:Deltiology, whose only member for months was, but which now has four members, and warrants more. There is no need to delete these inchoate categories.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:28, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * The same can be said for in short entries. Perhaps, once someone takes the trouble to put a few entries into the category, there might be some value. Also, both of these should not have been uncategorized, but rather categorized within Category:Botany. Finally, a word such as "dendrology" with but one hit in COCA and none in BNC is a particularly poor choice for a category name that might be of some interest to someone other than the contributor. "Arboriculture" is little better at 11 combined. In contrast "horticulture" and "botany" get 384 and 507, respectively, in COCA alone. DCDuring TALK  18:44, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Why would a person add an entry to a category that did not exist, with the intention of leaving a red link? is the cultivation of gardens (loosely speaking) and  is the study of plants; neither of them specifically refer to trees.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:05, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I can't answer the "why" question. But apparently there are more than 5000 nonexistent categories that have entries (see Special:WantedCategories). My point about "dendrology" is that it is not a useful category because the term is not in common use compared to either of the others. I'm sure a person of your interest in classical languages could come up with a better name, not necessarily the best name from a user perspective, but in wider use than these. DCDuring TALK 23:36, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Judging from the first fifty, I'd say that the vast majority of those are autocategorised by templates like or by contags. So what if you can only find one hit in COCA for undefined:? undefined: doesn't turn up either and undefined: gets only fifteen. By contrast,  yields thirty-six thousand hits. The term is not in particularly common use because it isn't common for people to talk about the study of trees. undefined: as a term is not as obscurantic as you imply:  is fairly familiar to many people thanks to words like  and, whereas the familiarity of  is undeniable (it's why we have the derived word ; cf. ); of course, we could have the yet-more semantically transparent *undefined:, though that grotesquery has the disadvantages of being an uncommon and non-standard nonce word (in case you're wondering,  is a humorous portmanteau of  and ). You put far too much stock by sheer strength of numbers.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:31, 18 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I tried to amend Purpose to indicate that we use ourselves as models of the target user base, but that change was rejected. Apparently, we are supposed to care about the intelligibility of our content to users. The choice of words in explanations, categories, and even definitions is somewhat constrained by the needs of users other than ourselves. Perhaps we could reconstrue our mission as providing educational rabbit trails for users to try to follow to get answers to their questions. As soon as we get a reasonable population of terms in a given category, we can determine whether a term like silviculture: would be a useful category name. DCDuring TALK 00:22, 19 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Quit it with the veiled straw-man arguments. undefined: = undefined: whereas undefined: ≠ undefined:; they are not analogous.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:48, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
 * It obviously isn't veiled.
 * Even silviculture is more used and recognizable than these. DCDuring TALK 18:03, 20 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Looking at online glossaries of dendrology, I don't see a lot of unique terminology -- most/all of it will do just fine under Category:Botany. IMO we should be cautious about creating jargon cats for fields that don't demonstrably have "a language of their own".  We don't necessarily have to have a lot of entries in the category, but it has to be the sort of category for which there is a demonstrable need (I'm getting leery of some of our medical subcats as well).  Although arboriculture and forestry aren't quite the same thing, I have a hard time imagining many arboricultural terms that wouldn't fit adequately in at least one of Category:Forestry and Category:Horticulture.  So delete both, per nom. -- Visviva 18:50, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * What about the cultivation of bonsai trees? I'm sure those who grow them use a number of terms that could swell the membership of Category:Arboriculture.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:31, 18 June 2010 (UTC)


 * What would those terms be? cacuminous:, formerly the sole member of these categories, seems much too rare and, perhaps, literary, to be a likely member of any usage-based category. Even etymologically, it didn't seem to be much used in Latin in reference to trees. DCDuring TALK 00:22, 19 June 2010 (UTC)


 * According to the OED, (whence undefined: derives) means "tree-top"; however, our entry for it states that it just means "top". AFAICT, they took their two citations (which both use undefined: to describe trees) as evidence that the adjective can only be used "of a tree"; EncycloPetey's citation (which has the adjective describing mountains) proves them wrong, and that this term can more than likely be used to describe anything with a pyramidal top.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:48, 20 June 2010 (UTC)


 * No objection to a Category:Bonsai. However, from a quick look at the online glossaries, bonsai terms seem split between general horticultural terms like backbud and bonsai-specific terms like yamadori ... so there would still seem to be a want of material for Category:Arboriculture. -- Visviva 01:44, 20 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Huh? But surely Category:Bonsai would be a subcategory of Category:Arboriculture… There are other arboricultural arts, such as topiary cultivation.  — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:48, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
 * In principle I could see the value of "arboriculture" or "dendrology" as a category into which other categories might be placed, provided that no actual entry remained in the category for long (except possibly for entries including only words that were themselves rare). The words are only suitable for the most pedantic of our users. DCDuring TALK 18:03, 20 June 2010 (UTC)


 * There are, but unless there exist a suitable number of terms -- let's say, 10 -- that are used by topiarists, bonsai-ists, etc. that are not used by other horticulturists, the category would serve no purpose other than to add an extra click for anyone navigating the category tree. -- Visviva 19:11, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

deleted as the categories were empty anyway -- Liliana • 12:51, 28 September 2011 (UTC)