Thread:TheLostTreeDwellers/@comment-47205-20160423085100/@comment-47205-20160501072216

This seems to be a common concern that people have. I ought to write about it on the taxonomy page, since it's hardly been edited since I arrived here in late 2009.

The taxa on this wiki are not supposed to be accurate to real life. Not only is SporeWiki not intended to be a classification of Earth species (we have WikiSpecies for that), but the creatures here are variety of aliens from a huge number of planets: we simply can't have a phylogenetic taxonomy like the one used in real biology since most of the creatures are utterly unrelated to each other.

Making Cnidaria an phylum, amongst other changes, is certainly possible, and consists of little more than changing a parameter on the taxon page as well as making at least one new class and one new order that exist to stand between Cnidaria and the current Cnidarian families. This is the reason why we have such blatant violations of real taxonomy here: keeping it "realistic" would necessitate creating a multiplicity of taxa to hold a small number of creatures, solely for the purpose of making the taxonomy consistent with something that it has no reason to be consistent with in the first place!

(Incidentally, I have wondered about the number of taxa you've been making, which seem to be predicated on the idea that the taxonomy should be based on evolutionary relationships...)