Talk:bdelloid rotifer

Sum of parts—a rotifer that is bdelloid. While rotifer is the most common noun that bdelloid is used to describe, it is by no means the only one, and bdelloid seems to have the same meaning in "bdelloid rotifer" as it does in "bdelloid animals", "bdelloid Rotifera", "bdelloid eurotifers", "bdelloid species", "bdelloid forms", and so on. No more idiomatic than "invertebrate animal", "prototherian mammal", or "monogonont rotifer".

(Incidentally, bdelloid rotifer claims that bdelloid simply means leechlike, but that sense is vanishingly uncommon in actual use, occurring almost exclusively in whimsical dictionaries of obscure words. The rotifer meaning is overwhelmingly the primary meaning of bdelloid.) —Caesura(t) 21:11, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
 * AFAICT it's a specific class of rotifer, therefore it should be kept, like a giant tortoise. A giant tortoise isn't just any tortoise that's giant, it's a named species. But, I actually no nothing about this, but the nomination doesn't convince me. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:21, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
 * It is not obvious that it is so. It is certainly not a taxonomic name. Rotifera are a phyllum. Two-part names are far below. The grouping is referred to a Bdelloids, Bdelloidae (a classus}, Bdelloida (a sub classus}, as well as bdelloid rotifers. It seems very much as if bdelloid is used as a way of narrowing down the topic for those who might have missed the mass of enthusiasm for finding a large group of apparently asexual (all-female) animals that have apparently lasted many millions of years. DCDuring TALK 01:51, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
 * To clarify the technical points, bdelloid is a specific class of rotifer, but the term is nothing like giant tortoise. (In fact, not a single one of the rationales in my nomination would apply to giant tortoise.) Giant means "big" (and a giant tortoise is not merely a tortoise that is big), but bdelloid means "belonging to the Bdelloidea" (and a bdelloid rotifer is merely a rotifer belonging to the Bdelloidea). Think "marsupial mammal" or "invertebrate animal", not "giant tortoise" or "Bengal tiger", which are clearly non-SoP. The definition at bdelloid rotifer could literally be replaced with "A rotifer that is bdelloid" and no information would be lost; it seems to me to be one of the clearest examples of SoP I can think of, and the debate here suggests to me that I haven't explained myself well enough. —Caesura(t) 14:27, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm no longer sure that I understand whether there is any argument that folks find convincing enough to lead to the deletion of a multi-word term, notwithstanding WT:CFI. I think it helps it the boundaries of the class are fuzzy and there are multiple terms that are used to refer the grouping. It would help if:
 * there were a synonym for each of "bdelloid" and "rotifers"/"rotifera" and
 * "bdelloid" and its synonym each appeared with both "rotifer" and its synonym.
 * Is "hirudinoid" a candidate for synonym for bdelloid? DCDuring TALK 16:17, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
 * No, because hirudinoid would refer to leeches and their kin (Hirudinea). --EncycloPetey 04:08, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep for serious wtf value. Actually, because if I came across a reference in print to a "bdelloid rotifer" I would have no idea (even with the space) that it was separable into parts, but would presume that it was the complete name of a distinct thing. bd2412 T 18:35, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
 * That is how I want my own personal wiktionary to work for me: I declare WTF and an answer appears, with translations, ety, pronunciation, etc. But that rationale sets a hell of a bad precedent for a shared resource. If we were to find one user who didn't know whether a given collocation was a "term" or not, then we would have to include the collocation. In principle, would any collocation be excluded? Or would we limit the users who get to declare WTF to admins, registered users, or people who can type intelligible English?
 * In the law, we use the standard of the "reasonable man". There is obviously a difference between this term and the weather in London. Most people know what weather is, and what London is. If either of the terms here was a matter of common parlance (say, a "bdelloid virus", or a "viral rotifer" then it could be guessed that the thing was a sum of parts discernible by looking up the parts. We need to be realistic, however, and acknowledge that the average reader is not going to have a clue as to either term. bd2412 T 21:15, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * If users don't know either term (as they don't know 80+% of the English lemmas), they can look each up and then know the meaning of the combination. That would make it SoP, non-idiomatic. The WTF rationale might be applicable for a term like "bottle glorifier" where one can know each term and not have a clue what the combination means.
 * How many, say, English noun lemmas does a "reasonable man" "know"? 60,000? That would leave 50,000 at en.Wikt that he didn't know. That would mean some 2.5 billion possible two-word noun entries. And why should this logic be limited to two-word noun phrases, or noun phrases, or even constituents? I wonder whether the "reasonable man" can reasonably expect that any combination of terms he might type in the search box can be found analyzed, defined, and translated for him. DCDuring TALK 02:37, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I suspect you are using the term "lemma" incorrectly to arrive at such an absurd conclusion. In any event, even if you could string together a billion random pairings of words of which it could be said that a non-expert might have no idea what either word means ("turquoise hiccup", "hypogaea magnetron", "vermiform butternut", "glycogen animadversion" etc.) the pairing would still have to meet the CFI to merit inclusion. bd2412 T 21:40, 15 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. As a biologist who has seen this term before on many occasions, I agree with the various reasons given above for keeping, and see no need to reiterate them. --EncycloPetey 04:07, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - I've seen this as well in my biology classes at school, so this should be kept. Razorflame 18:28, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't see a consensus for deletion here, and am inclined to close this as a "keep" if no one objects to that being the correct interpretation of the above discussion. <i style="background:lightgreen">bd2412</i> T 21:43, 15 February 2010 (UTC) Kept. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:46, 19 February 2010 (UTC)