Forum:SH Archive/Sentience discussion

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This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. 1358 (Talk) 20:35, May 9, 2014 (UTC)

All right, I know I have brought up the topic of sentience before, but I think that we need to come up with some sort of conventions about what can be considered non-sentient without explicit confirmation. Right now, there does not seem to be any type of consensus in the comprehensive articles. Due to the recent EduCorps meeting, this issue was brought up again, so I am hoping that we can finally get this issue taken care of. So here are the main problem areas/issues that I have noticed:

  • At one point, I think I remember someone saying that all lower case species names were to be treated as non-sentient. Is there anything backing that up from a canon source?
  • If we treat everything that does not mention sentience as unspecified, then we will have to add every plant article (besides a few exceptions) to Category:Species of undefined sentience, which seems a little ridiculous to me.
  • There are species that are domesticated or used for food.
  • There are species that act non-sentient, but are not explicitly confirmed to be.
  • Is being referred to as a creature enough to assume non-sentience? Or does that classification still leave semi-sentient open?

While I'm not really an expert with species, I still hope that we can discuss this and hopefully agree on something.--Exiled Jedi Oldrepublic crest (Greetings) 23:33, September 7, 2013 (UTC)

    • From the top of my head, I can already tell you that there is at least one species with a lower-case name that is semi-sentient: the fftssfft a.k.a Dandelion Warriors. It also seems to me that the word "creature" can be ambiguous—it may be used as a derogatory term toward an alien life form—while "animal" clearly implies non-sentience, as with this Endorian mammal. --LelalMekha (talk) 23:48, September 7, 2013 (UTC)
    • If we want to be sticklers about it, I'd wager that at least 70 or 80% of our non-sentient species articles would need to be reclassified as "undefined sentience." Very, very rarely will you find a source that explicitly says "The [XYZ] was a non-sentient species." Instead, the in-house Star Wars style seems to be that things are non-sentient unless otherwise specified. There is no "rule" that this is so, but this is my impression after working on tons of species articles. ~SavageBOB sig 12:41, September 10, 2013 (UTC)