Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-84037-20161228193955/@comment-18014300-20170113021820

Vetinari wrote: Assuming the media appearances stay, can the fields not be adapted to suit the AC franchise better? Sentient species and creatures could just be one species category (plus looking at the movie's list, having a horse as sentient reads like they're all Mister Ed or something), and I'm sceptical that "vehicles and vessels" will have much to say on most pages to justify being there.

I also think Earth in the locations should be taken as a given. ;)

Yes of course they should be modified to suit the AC franchise. :) For example, I do want to point out that in real-life academia, sentient tends to describe any life form which has senses and can feel, not any organism with the intelligence level of a human being. Thus, an animal is almost invariably sentient in contrast to a plant. However, Star Wars messed this up by using the word sentient to refer specifically to species with the intelligence level of humans (i.e. any "aliens" as well). As a result, Wookieepedia is forced to used sentient incorrectly.

Though I should point out that the definition of sentience isn't universally agreed upon, but it has more to do with whether people think that non-human animals' suffering and feelings should be empathized with, and whether plants can technically suffer even without having any senses. The etymology behind sentience however indicates what it refers to: feeling.

This is why, in contrast, many science fiction works aside from Star Wars use sapience to denote a species intelligence level being functionally like humans. Sapience is technically more correct, but it's not widely accepted (or even known) by the real-life science community, partially because humans are the only sapient organisms we know of.

So just adding this here, though I think I'm getting ahead of myself :P, I think if canonical sources don't use sentience to refer to human-level intelligence like in Star Wars, we'd probably be describing horses as sentient but not sapient, and Isu as sapient.