) so I thought I'd start a discussion to gather some input from everyone.Currently, the English wiki has two articles for thorn vines, one called "Nettle" for those that appeared before Rayman Origins, and one called "Darkroot" for those found in the UbiArt games. On the French wiki, both articles are merged into one.
For the most part, plants in the first category are almost identical in every game they appear in: whether it's Rayman 2, Rayman M, Rayman 3 or its GBA version, they all protrude from walls, wiggle around and temporarily retreat when hit. The only exception is if you consider the "static" ones that entire walls are made of as part of the same category: this makes a lot of sense, as they usually appear together like different parts of the same plant, but this means that the behavior of the whole category is less homogenous now.
Plants in this category are currently referred to as "nettles", despite looking nothing like those. The name comes from some unused text in the Rayman 3 localization which was likely never proofread and which bears very little official value. The French wiki calls them "giant brambles", a name found in an official strategy guide for the game. The English equivalent of that would be the official strategy guide by Prima, which alternatively calls them "thorn vines", "thorned root tentacles" or just "tentacles" (maybe there's more? the guide can be found here). Those names are already better and "more official" as per RayWiki's policy due to the guide's official status.
An additional question to consider is how to approach the case of the skeletal and metallic clones of the above found in Rayman M. The French wiki has a separate article for those and calls them "tentacles", which sounds less than ideal considering that a tentacle is a non-articulated appendage.
The thorn vines found in the UbiArt games are integral to their level design and share a very similar behavior throughout the sub-series. Unlike the first category, they come in a bunch of different styles, sometimes very different from each other and likely belonging to different species. There's even the lavaroots, though those were given their own article due to not being plants and essentially streams of lava that only share their behavior.
Their name comes from the game files of Rayman Origins, though I'm not sure if "darkroot" refers to all varieties of UbiArt thorn vines or just some of them. Other names found in the game files are, according to the French wiki, just "root" and "spiky root".
Last but not least, the UbiArt games also feature non-spiky vines, but I'm not sure what they're called in the files and if they're even acknowledged on the wiki as of now.
On a side note, I also recommend reading this talk page where the situation was discussed in the past.
So, my question is, what are your thoughts on this? Should the articles be merged or not? What should they be called? Nettle, giant bramble, thorn vine, thorned root tentacle, root tentacle, tentacle, root, darkroot, spiky root? There's no shortage of options.
