Talk:Horsetail

Trim this plant's page

Do we really need to cover the Super Mario Bros. plants in this article?

For any of their appearances outside of the Paper Mario series, these plants seem to be mostly interchangeable with Trees, and in Mario Kart 8, they are replaced with them outright. I believe we should move the information about their Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart 7/Mario Kart Tour appearances to the Tree article, and refocus this page to exclusively focus on the recipe item from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Super Paper Mario. Any thoughts? Wandering Poplin (talk) 15:50, November 25, 2025 (EST)

I never considered these to be prototypical trees, but I guess it makes sense. It's a mostly dropped element that really only appears when imitating original Super Mario Bros. aesthetics, though I'd rather "field horsehair plant" be its own article separate from Tree and Horsetail. LinkTheLefty (talk) 16:05, November 25, 2025 (EST)

The thing is, the English manual outright states "field horsehair plants"] to be one of the things that the Toads have been transformed into, and the Japanese manual does mention つくし Tsukushi ("horsetail") instead; additionally, the background "trees'" stems are segmented, much like horsetail stems but very much unlike a typical tree trunk. rend (talk) (edits) 18:59, November 25, 2025 (EST)

A Paper Mario item is allowed to have lore significance. Anyways, this third-party guideMedia:HowToWin.png also explicitly treats the fuzzy segmented things as being the aforementioned plants. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk) 22:14, February 6, 2026 (UTC)

But the SMB1 "Horse-hair plants" and the PMTTYD/SPM "Horsetails" have basically nothing to do with each other.

• One is a minor background element of the first game with some very minor relevance to the plot (But otherwise seem to function as an early version of Trees).
• The other is a healing item/recipe ingredient which, aside from being the same type of plant, has virtually no relation to the transformed Toads from the first game.

Even the Japanese names for the two subjects appear to be different, so I don't see any good reason to lump them both in the same article. Wandering Poplin (talk) 22:54, February 6, 2026 (UTC)

Split the Horsetail item

This talk page proposal has already been settled. Please do not edit this section or its subsections. If you wish to discuss the article, please do so in a new section below the proposal.

Split scenery from this page 3-12-0
We'll try keep this one brief. This page is effectively about two subjects, between the heavily stylized, tree-like background objects that appear in Super Mario Bros. and games based on it, and have been used as a short-hand for part of its visual identity in games like Mario Kart 7... And a mild recovery item that's mostly used as a cooking ingredient in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Super Paper Mario. One of these is explicitly not meant to be interacted with whatsoever, one of these is a bog-standard healing item.

While it is true that other Paper Mario ingredient items, such as Apple, Melon, Egg, or Lemon, aren't split up across multiple pages like that, those are in part because they're already used as items in other games. Their role as an ingredient in Paper Mario is an extension of how they're an item in other titles. In this page's case, however, it kind of just interrupts a page that is otherwise exclusively a piece of scenery in level design, to talk about the one time you could cook it to create some zesty koopa cuisine.

What we want is fairly straightforward; split the Paper Mario version of the Horsetail off. Admittedly, we're not sure which one should get priority; one is far more ubiquitous but isn't interactible, one is only in two games (and a remaster) but is interactible. We've provided two split options for this purpose.

Proposer: Camwoodstock (talk)
Deadline: October 14, 2026, 23:59 (UTC) Closed Early on October 7, 2026, 23:59 (UTC)

Split item from this page, into Horsetail and Horsetail (item) (me want bite!)

1. The Real Color Splash Fan (talk) Sure. Primary option. Per proposal.
2. Rykitu (talk) Per proposal.
3. Wandering Poplin (talk) Secondary option. As noted in my previous discussion about this topic, these subjects are not the same, and we shouldn't have them merged just because they happen to be based on the same real-world entity. The SMB1 Horsehair plants have virtually no meaningful relation to the PM64 items, and are, for nearly all intents and purposes, merely early versions of the Trees. (To a certain extent).

#Mariuigi Khed (talk) Per all.
#Salmancer (talk) The way the votes are going, this page should be split in two. Since it should, one of these options has to win or nothing happens. While Thousand-Year Door is the Paper Mario game, Super Mario Bros. is the Super Mario game. I think in the long term, the content of Super Mario Bros. will be of more importance to the broader franchise than the contents of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
#Mr. Sorbetti (talk) Per Salmancer. #Camwoodstock (talk) Per proposal.

Split scenery from this page, into Horsetail and Horsetail (scenery) (what a tall tail!)

1. The Real Color Splash Fan (talk) Secondary option. Per proposal.
2. Wandering Poplin (talk) Primary option. Per proposal. Same reasoning as before. It's also worth noting that in both Japanese and English, these two subjects technically don't even share the same name.
3. Spencer PK (talk) I think the scenery should be split out, not the item. The item has a name easily readable within three games, one of which is a remake from two years ago. There is a better chance that someone arriving to the wiki and searching for Horsetail intends to find the recurring item, not recurring scenery. Giving recurring scenery only named in a 40-year-old instruction booklet higher naming priority than a recurring item with an in-game name from two years ago does not seem right to me.
4. Mariuigi Khed (talk) Changed my mind. While the scenery object has more prevalence in the series, the item has major importance.
5. Arend (talk) I would prefer if there was an option to split the scenery into "field horsehair plant" (since the original SMB manual call them by that name and never "horsetail"; see comments), bit given it's been over four days, that option can't be added anymore. This option would allow us to at least move the scenery to its correct name at a later point, while preserving the revision history of the Paper Mario item without any article moving knots that would require an admin to resolve.
6. Jdtendo (talk) Per Arend. If the scenery element has never been called just "horsetail", then the item that has actually been called "horsetail" should keep the identifier-less "horsetail" article.
7. Salmancer (talk) Oh, apparently I need to review MarioWiki:Article naming#Shared titles. Mariuigi Khed is correct in their interpretation of the rules. In addition to that, pretty much nothing except Super Mario Bros., History of the Toad species, History of Bowser, History of Princess Peach, Super Mario Maker, Super Mario Maker 2 and Piranha Plant Slide will link to Horsetail since the layout sections of level articles do not care about non interactive background objects. A ton of Paper Mario articles will link to Horsetail since its an item and part of the cooking mechanics. Number of incoming links is a factor in page titles.
8. Wilben (talk) Per all.
9. Cadrega86 (talk) Makes no sense to give higher priority to a background decoration rather than a reoccurring usable item that is also explicitly named in-game.
10. Illuminoid (talk) Per all.
11. Mr. Sorbetti (talk) Per all.
12. Camwoodstock (talk) Per our own proposal, and per Salmancer's reasoning for why it should be split this way... This also just makes it easier to split things off while preserving the page history, without requiring us to do that weird move. ;P

Comments (insert an uma musume joke here, we haven't played it)

Is the scenery version of the horsetail ever called simply "horsetail"? As I noted above, the original manual for Super Mario Bros. calls these things "field horsehair plants", and I'm not sure if these things appear in anything else besides rereleases. Might be a mistranslation of course, but if we can account these, then an identifier might not even be necessary. rend (talk) (edits) 10:20, October 1, 2026 (UTC)

Looking at the Super Mario Bros. instruction booklet, it does say "field horsehair plants", not "horsetails". This is suggesting that the only reason why we are calling the Super Mario Bros. subject "horsetail" in this discussion is because of the Paper Mario Horsetail. If the item gets split out per proposal, then Paper Mario would have its content move to "Horsetail (item)", then Super Mario "Horsetail" would be moved to "field horsehair plant" because that appears to be the most recent name, then nothing would be named simply "Horsetail" on the wiki, so Paper Mario "Horsetail (item)" would be moved to "Horsetail". This split seems like it will cause a confusing series of wiki decisions that will make the wiki history very confusing (because the Super Mario "field horsehair plant" article would still have the 20 year revision history of the current Super Mario+Paper Mario "Horsetail" article, while the Paper Mario "Horsetail" article would appear to not have any revision history because of the split despite the name), when splitting the scenery into field horsehair plant would not require an article name and revision history shuffle, but this is not an option in this proposal. --Spencer PK (talk) 01:12, October 6, 2026 (UTC)

I mean, Camwoodstock could have added a proposal option to split the scenery from this article into "field horsehair plant" back when I wrote my comment, since that would at least preserve the revision history for the Paper Mario item correctly. But it's been more than four days now, so they can't edit the proposal anymore.
As for now, I suppose voting for the second option makes sense, then after it's split, move "Horsetail (scenery)" to "Field horsehair plant". If article history is important anyway, the first option required one to move this article to "Horsetail (item)", then turn the "Horsetail" redirect into an article for the scenery, regardless. rend (talk) (edits) 05:04, October 6, 2026 (UTC)

We mean. If it helps with the page history, we could do the round-about play of moving this page to "Horsetail (item)", not leaving behind a redirect, and simply deploying the split page to "Horsetail". A little weird to explain it, but like. We can do that. It'll functionally be the same split while preserving the page history for the item's sake. No skin off our back. ;P ~Camwoodstock ( talk ☯ contribs ) 16:23, October 6, 2026 (UTC)

I wonder if a voting option to have Horsetail be a disambiguation option linking to horsetail (scenery) and Horsetail (item) would be able to stand alongside the current voting options. The current options raise the question of "what is the more prominent, likely to be searched subject?", which led to my vote. Also, from a wiki-history perspective, the first 10 years of this article was just Paper Mario, then the next 10 years had the non-Paper Mario content added until the present 2026. This mainly matters for people looking at the revision history; something is going to have its history be fragmented into two articles. --Spencer PK (talk) 07:59, October 3, 2026 (UTC)

If only there was a (clean) way to swap the names of two articles. Salmancer (talk) 18:11, October 5, 2026 (UTC)

@Salmancer True, but the identifier is not determined by the "main-ality" of a franchise/series, but from the prevalence of it (and searchability as Spencer said above). I think between an item and a background element... There's not really a competition. Mariuigi Khed 19:36, October 5, 2026 (UTC)

FYI, How to win at Super Mario Bros. labels them as just "horsehair plants" with a few other notable objects on page 6. LinkTheLefty (talk) 00:09, October 7, 2026 (UTC)

And in Japanese, the Paper Mario Horsetails are called "Tsukushinbo", rather than "Tsukushi", the name of the SMB1 object.

As previously noted, the only thing these two subjects have in common is that they are both based on the same real-world subject. Wandering Poplin (talk) 00:13, October 7, 2026 (UTC)

Well, I was at least able to find a vid that verifies the "Tsukushinbo" name, albeit from the Switch version of TTYD. rend (talk) (edits) 09:14, October 7, 2026 (UTC)

Really? That's excellent! The name being unsourced is the main reason behind why I hadn't create a proposal about this myself prior to now. I wanted to be certain that the name was fully legitimate before attempting to use it as part of my argument. Wandering Poplin (talk) 15:47, October 7, 2026 (UTC)

So...

...do we really have to make a new proprosal after a month? The proposal above was about splitting the Horsetail item, with the options being which object gets the main article; after it was found that the scenery did not have the same name, the option to give the item the primary name won naturally. This seems clear-cut enough to move without needing an override. LinkTheLefty (talk) 18:44, October 16, 2026 (UTC)

Honestly, considering "Horsehair plant" is the only name presently cited on Horsetail (scenery), we'd say it's fine to move that page without proposing it again, as the ones behind said proposal. ~Camwoodstock ( talk ☯ contribs ) 05:28, October 17, 2026 (UTC)