Talk:Octopus

Octopus is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on July 30, 2018.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
May 22, 2017	Good article nominee	Listed
June 24, 2017	Featured article candidate	Promoted

Current status: Featured article

Cephalopods (inactive)

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Cephalopods, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.CephalopodsWikipedia:WikiProject CephalopodsTemplate:WikiProject CephalopodsCephalopods articles

Marine life

This article is part of WikiProject Marine life, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative, comprehensive and easy-to-use resource on marine life. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit this article, or visit the project page where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. This project is an offshoot of the WikiProject Tree of Life.Marine lifeWikipedia:WikiProject Marine lifeTemplate:WikiProject Marine lifeMarine life articles

???

This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Marine life To do:

edit
history
watch
purge

Have a look at the Marine life WikiProject and sign up.

Here are some tasks you can do, as organized by The Marine life Wikiproject:

Collaboration of the week: Marine life article assessment
Other: See the projects page
Images: Upload any non-copyrighted marine life images to Wikimedia Commons
Featured Articles/Good Articles:
Other: Add {{Portal|Marine life}} to related articles

Fisheries and Fishing High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Fisheries and Fishing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of fisheries, aquaculture and fishing on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Fisheries and FishingWikipedia:WikiProject Fisheries and FishingTemplate:WikiProject Fisheries and FishingFishing articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

There is a request, submitted by Catfurball, for an audio version of this article to be created. For further information, see WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia.

The rationale behind the request is: "Important".

Daily pageviews of this article

A graph should have been displayed here but graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at pageviews.wmcloud.org

Archives

Archive 1

Archive 2

This page has archives. Sections older than 100 days may be automatically archived by when more than 4 sections are present.

Habitat & Taxonomy[edit]

You might want to borrow some of the text in Taxonomy and put it in Habitat. Also Cirrina is an article, you might want to borrow some of it, too. Siuenti (씨유엔티)

Playing with the article's talk about pluralization[edit]

There's an HTML comment at the top of the article saying not to change "octopuses" to "octopi". Whoever wrote it must note that someone might make an edit that not only changes all non-mention uses of "octopuses" to "octopi", but also changes:

The alternative plural "octopi" is considered grammatically incorrect because it wrongly assumes that octopus is a Latin second declension "-us" noun...

...to...

The alternative plural "octopuses" is considered grammatically incorrect because it wrongly assumes that octopus is a native English word...

Do you understand this as a valid edit?? (The ellipsis at the end suggests that I don't know what would follow it should the edit be.) For anyone who sees this talk page post, please try to look for a way to put something in this article that cannot be altered to reflect the "octopi is correct" point of view. This section shows that the main sentence talking about the plural "octopi" can. Georgia guy (talk) 11:35, 23 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No, not a valid edit, because (1) the vast majority of nouns English borrows from other languages have regular English plurals; and (2) those who oppose the plural octopi do so because they are educated enough to know that it is not one of that class of Latin borrowings that changes singular -us to plural -i. Koro Neil (talk) 02:09, 8 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Only way to prevent editing is RPP, and we'd need to demonstrate the need for that Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:30, 24 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Add a space before commas[edit]

At the start of the article, there isn’t a comma between octopuses and octopi Ediefalcopuppy (talk) 22:52, 28 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, fixed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:23, 29 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Neutrality of pluralization section[edit]

Came here after being told all my life to say octopi. Just easiest to wiki first. What have I become? Anyway, didn’t expect the section to be at the top. As I read, it felt less like Wikipedia and more like someone’s personal grief about the pluralization rules. It’s rather aggressive for these articles. Could it be wordsmithed to something a bit more neutral in tone? I don’t have the ability with all those citations linked in but I’m sure someone does. Quickstrike85 (talk) 13:55, 20 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Okay well you were told all your life incorrectly but now you know the linguistics here! And etymology/language sections are pretty much always at the top. Reywas92^Talk 14:39, 20 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Danger to Humans[edit]

In the Danger to Humans section it says all octopus are venomous but only a specific kind is lethal to humans. Then, in the same para, it goes on with sentences about "bites" doing this and that, and bites occurring here and there. But it's not clear if the topic has changed to the one lethal type of octo, or if it's discussing bites, in general, at that point. Probably needs sentences to either start with, "[type] octopus bites..." do this and that. Or it needs to just be a para, specifically, and only about that type. 142.196.240.158 (talk) 21:48, 17 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]