Talk:Milk thistle
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Hey, Iorsh, where did you get the claim that there are 11 spp in this genus? I can only trace two, and several authoritative sources say that's all there are. The IPNI search you reference lists a whole lot of others, but if open them up, you find they are tagged as synonyms of other species, or have been moved to other genera. So I've changed it, but by all means put it back if you have a good source for a longer list. seglea 02:20, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Oops, I didn't care to see what's inside the list. There is only one species in Israel. By the way, I'm not really familiar with IPNI - can't it be that two species each reference another one as synonim, and thus one can miss by ruling out both? --Iorsh 11:49, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Yes, I think that can happen. When I realised that you had probably got your 11 from IPNI, I did a bit of digging around it - I'm not familiar with it either. I found that its FAQs explicitly say that it's not a good database for determining how many species there are in a taxon - it's fundamentally a list of names not of species. So I reckon that it is probably best used for finding possible species which one might have missed, but they then need checking elsewhere. ITIS is much better at listing whether names are currently valid or not, but unfortunately it often lists mainly the North American species - plus a lot of its taxonomic judgements seem to be old-fashioned or just plain odd.
- BTW, I liked the list of Israeli wild flowers on your user page - might it be worth making that an article in itself? It inspired me to start a List of San Francisco Bay Area wildflowers - the Bay Area being my temporary home, I have been doing articles on flowers whenever I manage to ID one and get a decent picture. seglea 17:52, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)
We probably need to create a page on the Blessed Milk Thistle to take the species-specific information about that one - most information out there on the net about milk thistles turns out to be abou S. marianum rather than the genus as a whole. I'll do it eventually if no-one does it first. seglea 18:30, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)