Talk:List of rodents

Where is Necromys?

The genus Necromys and its species appear to be missing.--Leptictidium (mt) 10:07, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

• Added.--Orenburg1 (talk) 07:52, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Article fails to be useful to a layperson

This article fails to be useful to a layperson, as it uses exclusively scientific names to identify species. This gives no context, and renders it unapproachable to anyone without knowledge of the subject. --Poppy Appletree (talk) 23:00, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

how about now ? Gimly24 (talk) 19:06, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Article size

Following the overhaul of the list, this article is currently the 5th largest article on Wikipedia and the largest list article. From section sizes, the main contributors are the Cricetidae, Muridae, and the references section, which is extremely repetitive. Are there any ideas on how to deal with this (other than ignoring it)? zsteve21 (talk) 10:43, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

The rodents are what they are (there's just too many types of mice!); the references however are currently about 150k out of the 670k size. For List of mammals I had to reference the IUCN per-family, rather than per-genus, to avoid having thousands of references, so condensing that way may help. I'll be taking this to FLC in a few months, so I'll see if people find using the same family-reference for multiple rows to be okay. --PresN 12:54, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

@PresN If we're including this much exhaustive detail for each species, we should be splitting the list by subfamily into separate pages. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:35, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

1) This isn't a list of species, so I'm not sure what you mean by that - the only species-level information is the names. 2) This list is comparable to that of other orders- List of primates, List of chiropterans, List of carnivorans, etc. 3) Split by subfamily? This is a list of genera for an entire order; that would be a hundred lists. Also, we already have lists of species per-family- this is the capstone list to 24 such lists. 4) Even if you meant split by suborder, that wouldn't solve the issue as most of the species/genera are in suborder Myomorpha. I suppose it would get it below an arbitrary line. 5) But I don't know what that arbitrary line is- I can't help but notice the empty talk pages of 2026 NSWRL Major Competitions and Opinion polling for the 2024 United Kingdom general election, which are comparable in length.

Ultimately, given that this list doesn't break the PEIS limit (or come close), meaning it loads fully and quickly, it appears that the issue is just... that it's on the Special:LongPages list? As I said above, about 22% of the page size is just the references, so condensing will get the kb down below whatever number. --PresN 23:40, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

I oppose any split since more specific subpages already exist (List of nesomyids, List of deomyines, List of murines, etc.). I think this page has to be long just because of what it is, and it's not really an issue. The page isn't so large that it takes a long time to load or anything, it's perfectly manageable. ArtemisiaGentileschiFan (talk) 08:15, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

It is unnavigable as to be not helpful to readers. That is a reason to split the article. Katzrockso (talk) 23:11, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

It's not unnavigable IMO, it's large but not too large. I think it's definitely helpful and the size doesn't impede its legibility. ArtemisiaGentileschiFan (talk) 01:47, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

WP:SIZERULE applies here for a number of reasons. Nobody is going to being able to effectively navigate to the information they are looking for.

I didn't find any subpages for e.g. anomalures. If there are subpages that perfectly duplicate the content, then there is no reason to have duplicative material that clogs up a massive unwieldy page. Katzrockso (talk) 02:07, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Alternatives to splitting include: removing images from the article (already exist in the wikilinked genus articles), cutting down on information least pertinent to readers (again: already exists in the wikilinked genus articles). Katzrockso (talk) 02:10, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

There isn't a list for anomalures because there are only 7 species in it. I only make mammal lists with there's more than 10 species, as below that the content/tables should probably be in the family article itself (or at least it would be hard to make the case given the size of most family articles). So the subarticle in that case would be Anomalure. And none of the sublists "perfectly duplicate" the content; this is a list of genera, and the per-family or per-subfamily lists are lists of species, which is why e.g. the "Heteromyidae" subsection is 5 rows with genus-level information, but List of heteromyids is 63 rows of species-level information.

Regardless, what exactly can you not navigate to? There's a table of contents right there. No one is scrolling through the whole list trying to find a specific genus instead of jumping straight to the family; you scroll through to see the variety of rodents in the world. And since you linked SIZERULE, the "readable prose" size of the page is 14257 words, which is not even in the "almost certainly" category. I'm also confused about your alternatives- removing the images wouldn't actually make the tables shorter, as the species or ecology columns are usually about the same height (which is actually why the images are no more than 140px tall, so that they're not the cause of the height). So then we're left with "cutting down on information least pertinent to readers", which... the whole point of this and every "list of species" list is to make a comparative table across a clade, because it's actually quite difficult to compare a bunch of species across articles as no, actually, many genera articles don't have the size/habitat/diet/location, and even when they do it's not in an easily comparable place in each article. It's all "pertinent to readers". Yes, the list would be physically shorter if we removed all information, but that's not helpful. --PresN 01:36, 6 May 2026 (UTC)