Talk:Organ (biology)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 January 2021 and 14 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Samiha980. Peer reviewers: Stephnic103.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:49, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

7 Vital Organs of Antiquity

Some alchemists (e.g. Paracelsus) adopted the Hermetic Qabalah assignment between the 7 vital organs and the 7 Classical planets as follows:

Planet	Organ
Sun	Heart
Moon	Brain
Mercury	Lungs
Venus	Kidneys
Mars	Gall bladder
Jupiter	Liver
Saturn	Spleen

References

- Benjamin Franklin 75.74.130.115 (talk) 16:31, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

This may very well be relevant to the article, but I would need a proper source to add anything like this. Do you have a link to a secondary source? -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 18:10, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Should this page be moved to Organ

Currently a redirect to this page. See view stats: [1] Best, Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 19:51, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

The current arrangement makes sense to me. An article entitled "Organ" would be fine, except that the Organ (musical instrument) is fairly popular, and it shows respect for other uses of "Organ" to call this article "Organ (anatomy)."— Preceding unsigned comment added by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}#top|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|contribs]])

However it is far less popular (fixed link to page view count [2]) Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 05:18, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

• Support as CFCF states organ (anatomy) receives more views, which implies more readers would be searching for it. I also think the organ is the primary term rather than the instrument. That said before this is moved this may require wider participation via requested moves (Note - I mainly edit anatomy articles so may have a skewed view). --Tom (LT) (talk) 01:23, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

Requested move 15 October 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. Andrewa (talk) 01:26, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

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Organ (anatomy) → Organ – Primary topic as suggested by CFCF and and supported by Tom (LT). Link to pageviews in previous section. Iztwoz (talk) 16:57, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose, based on the "long-term significance" aspect of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, where Organ (music) also has a comparable long-term significance to Organ (anatomy). There is also probably a good reason reason why Organ (music) is currently listed first on Organ.[3] Several dictionaries also list the musical instrument definition first.[4][5] Furthermore, the page view counts could be heavily skewed due to recent news spikes, especially during disasters when there are pleas for organ donors, among other recent news. Or because more recent college students want to study anatomy/biology instead of music. But just like Apple (the example cited in WP:PRIMARYTOPIC), recent traffic due to recent trends may not neccarily override long-term significance. Zzyzx11 (talk) 17:49, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Per User:Zzyzx11._{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 01:10, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• Comment: as a frequent disambiguator of this term, a substantial majority of instances linked in Wikipedia are for the musical instrument. bd2412 T 02:02, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Note: A much stronger case could be made to move Cell (biology) to Cell; virtually all disambiguation fixes for "cell" are to the biological term. bd2412 T 17:41, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose – page views are not a compelling reason to determine a primary topic. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:13, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose – both uses go back to the Ancient Greek "that with which one works", as in a tool. The two chief uses were musical and surgical instruments, from the latter arose the anatomical meaning. See the OED second edition. Music therefore has a slight historical edge. In current usage I am certain that it depends upon an inquirer's background and recent experiences. There is no primary topic, keep the disambiguation page "Organ". What would be an improvement is adding the etymology on the "Organ" page given its use for two superficially unrelated meanings. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 11:50, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
  • @Martin of Sheffield makes a good point. I support retaining the disambiguation page.--Tom (LT) (talk) 10:52, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I would also like to point out that although the word for the musical instrument may (??) have preceded our English word for the structural unit, the concept of a localised functional unit (named, eaten, used for divination, etc.) far precedes our invention of the instrument. --Tom (LT) (talk) 10:52, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
    • Certainly the instrument in its modern form, but the ancient Greeks used ὄργανον for a musical instrument. See Wiktionary:organ. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 11:13, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - per Zzyzx11 and bd2412. I'm unconvinced that this is the primary topic. Guettarda (talk) 12:28, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. The instrument is just as primary. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:17, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Replace the picture?

An attempt at animating all the currently(as per 2024) known organs of the human body.

Hey, I tried to make a picture which contains all the organs in the human body, do you guys think that it is ready as it is here to replace the one which is currently beeing used as the main one in this article or is there something missing? I used: List of organs of the human body as a reference Claes Lindhardt (talk) 18:02, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

No, that image would not help to illustrate the article. It's indecipherable at any reasonable size we might use. MrOllie (talk) 18:09, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

What if I put it on a white background? Claes Lindhardt (talk) 08:31, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Still won't help. The picture is unorganized with no lables indicating which is which. The current one is better and I oppose this photo and any/all variations of it. _ZZ^Z'S 12:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Proposed splits

I came to this page while looking for a page on the innervation of the pelvic viscera. I'm surprised to find that not only is there no such page, but also that there isn't a page for the pelvic viscera. Terms such as visceral innervation redirect here. These are only granted a small blurb in a single small subsection here, and none of the information I was hoping for is available.

The human pelvic organs are part of several different systems, and their organization and innervation is a complicated matter that warrants separation from a page as broad as all organs in all biological life forms. As such I have proposed a split that would create 2 new pages: one for Innervation of the pelvic viscera and another page, a list, titled List of pelvic organs.

It is worth noting that this could mean a wider effort to create pages or lists based on human anatomical location (rather than just system) - I do think this would be worthwhile. The page List of organs of the human body does not include any location-based groupings; I think it would be more useful if separate pages were created for this, as your average curious person is more likely to look at a region of their own body and specifically look for the list of things within it, rather than looking for the broader list of everything. Just-a-can-of-beans (talk) 19:31, 28 April 2025 (UTC)