The bulk update request #5446 is active.

remove alias race_runner (0) -> tegu (40)
remove alias teiidae (0) -> tegu (40)
remove alias teiid (44) -> tegu (40)
remove alias racerunner_lizard (0) -> tegu (40)
remove alias racerunner (0) -> tegu (40)
remove alias whiptail_lizard (4) -> tegu (40)
remove alias race_runner_lizard (0) -> tegu (40)
remove alias whip_tail_lizard (0) -> tegu (40)
remove implication tegu (40) -> lizard (55419)

Reason: It appears that someone who shall not be named managed to completely mess up the aliases for the tegu species tag - so let's fix it!

According to Wikipedia, the lizard family Teiidae is comprised of both the whiptail lizards and the tegus. For some reason, both whiptail_lizard and teiid have been aliased to tegu. This is akin to aliasing corvus to crow, which would exclude the raven, jackdaw, and rook.

Not all teiids are tegus, and tegus are not generally called whiptails. "True" tegus seem to be limited to the genera tupinambis and salvator, though the other genera in the subfamily Tupinambinae seem to generally be be called tegus as well, as well as some species from entirely different families (such as the "sun tegus"). The whiptail lizards are limited to the subfamily Teiinae. Limiting the tegu tag to the "true tegus" would probably be preferable.

Therefore, I propose an intermediary tag, teiid, which would be implied by both whiptail_lizard and tegu in order to keep the two separate while recognizing the overlap. Once this is done, the whiptails that have been incorrectly labeled as tegus due to this alias will have to be moved over to the correct tag, but there are only a handful of posts with this tag in the first place, so that shouldn't be too difficult.

Part 2:
imply tegu -> teiid imply whiptail_lizard -> teiid imply teiid -> lizard alias teiidae -> teiid alias race_runner -> whiptail_lizard alias racerunner_lizard -> whiptail_lizard alias racerunner -> whiptail_lizard alias race_runner_lizard -> whiptail_lizard alias whip_tail_lizard -> whiptail_lizard alias teiinae -> whiptail_lizard

EDIT: The bulk update request #5446 (forum #375092) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

Is there any sort of cladistics policy on here? Tegus sensu stricto, separate from other whiptail lizards, don’t appear to constitute a clade (i.e. any and all descendants of a common ancestor). So is it worth splitting them up?

scaliespe said:
According to Wikipedia, the lizard family Teiidae is comprised of both the whiptail lizards and the tegus. For some reason, both whiptail_lizard and teiid have been aliased to tegu. This is akin to aliasing corvus to crow, which would exclude the raven, jackdaw, and rook.

Small off-topic nitpick but jackdaws probably shouldn't be included in the genus corvus anyway since the genetic distance between western jackdaws and the other members of corvus was greater than that within the rest of the genus. (I already made a request to remove the implication from jackdaw to corvus_genus to replace it with corvid: topic #39071)

As for the actual topic, a quick skim of wikipedia does seem to suggest that tegu doesn't refer to all members in the teiidae family and not all tegus are in the teiidae family either, so they probably should be unaliased. However that also means that tegu should not imply teiid since it isn't actually a scientific classification and contains species that belong to the families teiidae and gymnophthalmidae.

Tegu is probably still useful to have as a tag but may be better off only implying lizard as is the case now. but I have no idea what should actually be done about all the subfamilies and genera, whiptail lizard and racerunner lizard are probably better off being aliased to teiid rather than being an implication though, unless you find it necessary to have a tag for members of the teiidae family that are not tegus.

This also depends completely on which levels of taxonomy we want to include on e621 but even then I would suggest skipping levels of classification before making any inaccurate aliases or implications. It seems that tegu implications would have to be added to every species or genus that consists of only tegus.

The bulk update request #5446 (forum #375092) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

Okay.

themasterpotato said:

As for the actual topic, a quick skim of wikipedia does seem to suggest that tegu doesn't refer to all members in the teiidae family and not all tegus are in the teiidae family either, so they probably should be unaliased. However that also means that tegu should not imply teiid since it isn't actually a scientific classification and contains species that belong to the families teiidae and gymnophthalmidae.

Tegu is probably still useful to have as a tag but may be better off only implying lizard as is the case now. but I have no idea what should actually be done about all the subfamilies and genera, whiptail lizard and racerunner lizard are probably better off being aliased to teiid rather than being an implication though, unless you find it necessary to have a tag for members of the teiidae family that are not tegus.

This also depends completely on which levels of taxonomy we want to include on e621 but even then I would suggest skipping levels of classification before making any inaccurate aliases or implications. It seems that tegu implications would have to be added to every species or genus that consists of only tegus.

I would not keep tegu as a tag at all if it had to include such distantly related species. As I suggested in my original post, I want to exclude species like the 'sun tegu' from tegu entirely. It shares the name, yes, but is not immediately related to the species most commonly referred to as tegus, so I feel like including it would be pointless.

From the "tegu" Wikipedia page:

"Tegu" generally refers to species of lizard in the genus Tupinambis, which belongs to the family Teiidae. Not all lizards known as tegus belong to the same genus.

...however, the most widely known tegu species (the red tegu and the black and white tegu, which are widely known particularly because they are popular in the pet trade) have been split off from Tupinambis into the genus Salvator. Otherwise, Tupinambis would be the most recognizable genus of tegu. Visually, they are fairly distinct from other teiids, and as such are more visually recognizable as tegus.

Another quote from Wikipedia, from the teiid page (my additions in bold):

Subfamily Teiinae:

Ameiva – junglerunners (14 species)
Ameivula – (11 species)
Aspidoscelis – North American whiptail lizards (46 species)
Aurivela – (2 species)
Cnemidophorus – South American whiptail lizards (19 species)
Contomastix – (6 species)
Dicrodon – desert tegus (3 species)
Glaucomastix – (5 species)
Holcosus – (18 species)
Kentropyx – (9 species)
Medopheos – (1 species)
Pholidoscelis – (20 species)
Teius – (3 species)

Subfamily Tupinambinae:

Callopistes – false monitors (A.K.A. dwarf tegus) (4 species)
Crocodilurus – the crocodile tegu (1 species)
Dracaena – caiman lizards (A.K.A. water tegus) (3 species)
Salvator – (3 species)
Tupinambis – tegus (8 species)

Essentially, I want to treat the entire subfamily Tupinambinae as tegus, and the subfamily Teiinae as whiptails. Here's my reasoning:

• All lizards known as whiptails are included in the subfamily Teiinae, and the majority of the Teiinae subfamily are known as whiptails.
• The sole exceptions are the "desert tegus" (Dicrodon) and a single member of Teius - Teius teyou, the four-toed tegu.
• Regardless of some alternate names, all members of Tupinambinae are known as tegus, including the most recognizable tegu species.

The idea is to keep names simple and prioritize ease of use over strictly correct taxonomy. We could dispense with both tegu and whiptail as names entirely and simply use Tupinambinae and Teiinae instead, but we already have enough of a problem with unrecognizable taxonomic names in place of more recognizable common names. What I propose is not strictly scientific, but more practical. To keep the tegu tag used exclusively for species which are called tegus would mean that we would have to have implications from all of the species called tegu, most of which don't have any posts on the site to begin with, and to furthermore have each species imply either teiid or gymnophthalmid depending on which family that particular member belongs to. At that point we would be better off getting rid of tegu entirely. But most people likely know roughly what a tegu is (which is probably either Tupinambis or Salvator or both in their minds) and so simply being able to search tegu and find members of Tupinambinae as a result would probably be the best thing for usability. People searching for tegus are most likely not looking for gymnophthalmids. If they are that familiar with these species, they'll probably be looking for the specific species instead (of which there is only a single post on site that I can find, which is just a huge graph of various squamates). People searching for whiptails, on the other hand, are almost certainly looking specifically for non-tegu members of Teiidae - which is mostly just Teiinae.

Alternatively, tegu could be relegated to Tupinambis and Salvator, these being the genera regarded as "true" tegus, and the other members of Tupinambinae could be called whiptails or even just imply Teiid directly despite being commonly called tegus. They don't seem to be the "true" tegus alongside those more distantly related species such as the sun tegus, but these are at least within the same subfamily. However this is somewhat of a moot point, as none of the other genera of Tupinambinae outside of Salvator seem to have any posts on the site at the moment, so creating implications for them specifically wouldn't serve any present purpose. Without the specific genera implications, the current BUR would serve either goal, but it's also not relevant at the moment, at least not until any members of Tupinambinae that aren't Tupinambis or Salvator get uploaded here.

vulpes_artifex said:
Is there any sort of cladistics policy on here? Tegus sensu stricto, separate from other whiptail lizards, don’t appear to constitute a clade (i.e. any and all descendants of a common ancestor). So is it worth splitting them up?

My reply is somewhat just reiterating what I said above, but essentially:
There is a genus of "true" tegus which does form a clade, Tupinambis. However, the most commonly known tegu species (the red tegu and the black and white tegu) have somewhat recently been split off into a separate genus, Salvator. Both of these, however are within the subfamily Tupinambinae. All members of Tupinambinae are known as tegus, so this can also be considered a cladistic definition of tegu. There are some species outside of this subfamily which are called tegus, and some that are not even teiids at all (making the original teiid -> tegu alias quite invalid if we were to include them), but my idea is to exclude them and simply use the tegu tag for the broadest possible cladistic definition of tegu.

About e621 policy generally speaking, cladistic taxonomy is preferred in most cases, but is excluded in cases where it becomes impractical. The priority is always usability over strict scientific accuracy. The best example of this is the fact that bird does not imply dinosaur despite being members of the Dinosauria clade.

The bulk update request #5479 is active.

create implication tegu (40) -> teiid (44)
create implication whiptail_lizard (4) -> teiid (44)
create implication teiid (44) -> lizard (55419)
create alias teiidae (0) -> teiid (44)
create alias race_runner (0) -> whiptail_lizard (4)
create alias racerunner_lizard (0) -> whiptail_lizard (4)
create alias racerunner (0) -> whiptail_lizard (4)
create alias race_runner_lizard (0) -> whiptail_lizard (4)
create alias whip_tail_lizard (0) -> whiptail_lizard (4)
create alias teiinae (0) -> whiptail_lizard (4)

Reason: part 2

EDIT: The bulk update request #5479 (forum #375315) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

My main issue with this is just the fact that the tegu -> teiid implication could cause a headache if for some reason a non-teiid tegu character would blow up in popularity, because i know people would tag something called a "sun tegu" with tegu.
I think tag implications should be future proofed as much as possible to prevent having to do a lot of fixing in the future, so I really think tegu was better off implying lizard directly, especially since I don't know how common it would be for people to search teiid by itself anyway.

Personally I would prefer to go tegu -> lizard instead of tegu -> teiid -> lizard to reduce the risk of mistags, and to simply add both the teiid and tegu implications to the species that are on the site now and to continue to do so if more species appear on the site in the future. Generally, missing implications are a lot easier to fix than the aftermath of a wrong implication that has flown under the radar for a while.

I guess overall I also kinda fail to see the utility of the teiid tag because I am not sure how many people would actually search for both whiptail lizards and tegus at the same time, and if someone really wanted to they could just search ~whiptail_lizard ~tegu anyway.

themasterpotato said:
My main issue with this is just the fact that the tegu -> teiid implication could cause a headache if for some reason a non-teiid tegu character would blow up in popularity, because i know people would tag something called a "sun tegu" with tegu.
I think tag implications should be future proofed as much as possible to prevent having to do a lot of fixing in the future, so I really think tegu was better off implying lizard directly, especially since I don't know how common it would be for people to search teiid by itself anyway.

If this actually happened, I feel like our best bet would be to alias tegu to lizard instead, since they aren’t even directly related species. I’d prefer species tags directly point to an identifiable taxonomic entity rather than being used as a mess of taxonomically unrelated species that simply happen to share a name. Some gymnophthalmids are called tegus, but most are not, so using the tag for only those that happen to have ‘tegu’ as a common name while excluding some very nearly identical species just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. At this point we’d be better off using the scientific names only. It’s just that aliasing tegu to lizard would confuse people who are simply looking for what is most commonly recognized as a tegu (most likely genus Salvator), but including species that aren’t particularly closely related to Salvator (or Tupinambis) would similarly confuse people, especially if a sun tegu character became popular and flooded out the others.

To my point, if you look up “tegu” on Google images, the results are almost exclusively Argentine black and white tegus/blue tegus (Salvator), red tegus (Salvator), and gold tegus (Tupinambis). In the first several pages of results, I found only a single exception, one image of a water tegu (aka caiman lizard), which is also in the Tupinambinae subfamily, and thus could still be counted as a tegu in my system if we want to include species outside Salvator and Tupinambis. Although, they start to look fairly distinct from the “famous” tegu look at this point (look up water tegu/caiman lizard and compare to, say, red tegu to see what I mean), so leaving them as their own species to imply teiid directly might still make more sense (if they ever get a tag here). Regardless, it seems most likely that Salvator and Tupinambis are specifically what people using the tegu tag would be looking for, not so much these more distantly related species that share the name.

I guess overall I also kinda fail to see the utility of the teiid tag because I am not sure how many people would actually search for both whiptail lizards and tegus at the same time, and if someone really wanted to they could just search ~whiptail_lizard ~tegu anyway.

It’s more for categorization than strict utility, as it would mirror other lizard family tags like agamid and iguanid. They do at least look similar, so grouping them makes some sense.

The bulk update request #5479 (forum #375315) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.