Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Insects/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Photinus pyralis

Hi! I tagged a page, Photinus pyralis, as B-class. I am still not sure whether it qualifies as B or C. Please tell me so that I could change the rank if necessary. Also please use the ping feature (ex. @Example:) when replying. Gug01 (talk) 23:37, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

@Gug01: I'm pretty reluctant to tag articles as B-class, so I usually look for reasons why an article might fail to be B-class. The assessment guidelines for B-class at Wikipedia:WikiProject Arthropods/Article Classification (which are linked by the Insect and Beetle project banners) are quite a bit more liberal than the general ones at Template:Grading scheme. Arthropod B-class says article can be missing an important section, while the Grading scheme says B-class shouldn't have any "obvious omissions". I'd call P. pyralis C-class as it lacks a couple important sections. There really should be some discussion of its geographic distribution and habitat. A physical description of the species would also be helpful (although it can be very difficult to write a description at a level appropriate to a general audience; technical jargon should be avoided). And what about their larval stage? Adults don't feed, so what do the larvae eat and where do they live? Plantdrew (talk) 00:14, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your advice, Plantdrew. I will tag it back as C-class. Do you think that after a section on their larval stage and geographic distrubition and habitat are created, it could be a B-class article? Gug01 (talk) 21:00, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

B-class might indeed be appropriate at that point. I've got a couple more thoughts. Maybe larva could be covered in a Life Cycle section? That would also give a place to talk about what time of year the adults are active. The Light Production section is really more appropriate to Photinus; nothing wrong with discussing it at the species level as well, but the genus article should certainly have something on physiology of light production. The second paragraph in the Defense describes the results of a single study in greater detail than is necessary. Predation of Photinus by Photuris is certainly an important topic to cover (which again, should also be mentioned on the Photinus genus page). However, Photuris using lucibufagin to protect against jumping spiders is marginally relevant to the P. pyralis article, and would be more appropriate in Photuris. My impression is that Photuris females attack Photinus males primarily for food/nutrition, but as the article is written, it convenys the impression that obtaining lucibufagin for defense is the primary driver of predation by Photuris. Plantdrew (talk) 16:27, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Pageview stats

After a recent request, I added WikiProject Insects to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Insects/Popular pages.

The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. You can view more results, request a new project be added to the list, or request a configuration change for this project using the Tool Labs tool. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! Mr.Z-man 04:38, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Primary host for cimex antennatus

If someone has a chance to take a look at the question on Talk:Cimex antennatus, it would be much appreciated!--CaroleHenson (talk) 15:36, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Help Identifying this beetle

Longhorn beetle, France, Loire Valley

I saw this beauty in France, Loire Valley region whilst on holiday last year, about 4 to 5cm long in the body. I've looked at various on-line gallery resources but can't find an exact match. Any ideas? Pahazzard (talk) 11:39, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

please try to check at insecte.org

Hello, you might try to check at www.insecte.org (specialized forum on insects from France) or check directly on their picture gallery at www.galerie-insecte.org/

best regards User:Tonton Bernardo I'm so tired (talk) 15:24, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Seems to be correctly identified as Aegosoma scabricorne (User:Vitalfranz is a cerambycid specialist who runs http://www.cerambycoidea.com/ and sometimes checks ids on commons) Shyamal (talk) 15:37, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Many thanks to you both! Pahazzard (talk) 19:05, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Cochineal FAR

I have nominated Cochineal for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:28, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Copyedit

Hello all, I have requested one of the articles I have been editing on to undergo a copyedit, but it seems that the article I have edited substantially hasn't had any response to its request for a copyedit. I will mention that many other articles requested have not had any response, but I am sure someone here will be able to copyedit my request in a reasonable amount of time. Burklemore1 (talk) 05:16, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

10 days probably isn't a very reasonable amount of time, but I took a stab at copy editing the first half of the article. I'll try to get back to the second half, but I'm going to be pretty busy for the next few hours. Plantdrew (talk) 22:02, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Tagging projects

I've been seeing some people removing the WikiProject Insect tag from article talk pages and replacing with the specific order (e.g., [1]). I would think that this project should be included on all insect pages to link to a central project, but am I missing some conversation related to this? I'm a bit concerned we're getting too specific in Wikiprojects we list on the talk page otherwise, so I'm just curious what others think. Kingofaces43 (talk) 15:59, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

I think it would be better to include both project tags (Insects and Beetles). Part of the point of having the projects is to enable collaboration, and it doesn't help when the pool of potential collaborators is narrowed. Collaboration is probably more effective when more narrowly focused, so subprojects like Beetles, Vespidae and the Ants task-force are a good thing, but people who are interested in working on insects in general are presumably still interested in beetles, vespids and ants.

In practice though, there are quite a few narrowly focused organismal biology projects on Wikipedia that have kept "their" talk pages free of the parent project's banner. Most Lepidoptera articles don't have a WikiProject Insects banner. Turtles aren't tagged for the Amphibian and Reptile project. Sharks aren't tagged for the Fish project.

Mammals were recently segregated among six subprojects: Cats, Dogs, Cetaceans, Equines, Primates and Rodents. A few months ago I went through cats, dogs, cetaceans and equines and added the mammal banner to all the species articles. I did catch some flak from somebody who apparently thought I intended to tag all articles under the scope of WikiProject:Equine with the mammal banner (I had no intention of tagging stuff like "saddle" or "reins" as relevant to mammals).

On the other hand, I don't think all insects should tagged for WikiProject Arthropods (which is effectively pretty much WikiProject Crustaceans) or WIkiProject Animals, but I don't really have any logical justification for that stance. Plantdrew (talk) 21:04, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

I definitely see the a various ways of approaching this. For us, insects in general are really the unifying factor, so I think we are diluting ourselves too much as well if we starting removing the Insects banner. Kingofaces43 (talk) 01:43, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: and @Plantdrew: I don't see anyone being diluted here, and nobody will. Look at various moths and butterflies from WikiProject Lepidoptera. All of the species are marked with WikiProject Lepidoptera only, not both. So, in short I will suggest to remove WikiProject Insects from those that are either Butterly/Moths or Beetles. There is no reason for keeping it, since users will sign up for whatever project there is (or sub project for that matter). Look at it this way, we have roughly 85,000 articles on butterflies and moths. We also have 40,000 Insect related articles. Why we need to keep them as insects if we don't do it for Lepidoptera? Infact, the smaller the category the easier it will to find anything. Honestly, even alphabetically its sometimes hard to find what you need. Plus, we don't add WikiProject Sports to every athlete even though that they are related. Now, I don't completely removing it, I live it for ants, leafhoppers, bugs, and other insects that are not butterflies/moths or beetles. Is that fair?--Mishae (talk) 01:47, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

I'd actually look to add the Insect tag to the Lep articles as well for the reasons listed above. We generally don't make decisions in articles because others do the same (there's a guideline on that somewhere), so we can't really argue that because Lep articles don't have the tag that that should be the standard. I'm also concerned about the Statistics section here as we can use that to track the status of insect related articles. When it comes to these articles, people are generally going to be interested in insects in general, so we should try to maintain that overarching connection. I don't see any reason to exclude the insect banner from any insect page since that's where the community really lies. Any less than that and we're specializing a bit too much in an already specialized topic. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:14, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Also, WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN is helpful here. Essentially, we don't remove banners when a Wikiproject claims it's within its scope. I don't see any danger of overtagging here either, so it seems best to mesh with our Wikiproject guidelines by just including both. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:21, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: O' yeah, how about you will read this, where it clearly says that over tagging is disruptive, which means screw WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN!--Mishae (talk) 02:28, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Like WikiProject Insects, just like Lepidoptera is huge. So my suggestion would be to change WikiProject Insect to WikiProject Beetles for beetles, and then we can create beetle task forces, like it is with ants. I think this sounds like a good plan. Maybe users @Ruigeroeland:, @Oculi:, @Ser Amantio di Nicolao:, @Dawynn:, and @Notafly: have something to add?--Mishae (talk) 02:24, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to exclude the insect banner from any insect page since that's where the community really lies. Any less than that and we're specializing a bit too much in an already specialized topic. - You don't see a reason but I do. WikiProject Insects is too broad already and therefore for the ease of navigating I will remove that project banner from butterflies/moths and beetles. Really, how would you find a beetle in a WikiProject Insects? I would suggest a vote. Some users already started adding WikiProject Greece to the animals that are endemic to it, I don't think there was consensus on that.--Mishae (talk) 02:33, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I referenced that overtagging wouldn't be a problem (it'd likely only be two tags at most for most). If the beetle people want to tag the article and do things within their own project that's perfectly fine, but we should be following the guidelines for Wikiprojects and not removing other's banners. That's all. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:38, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: Some editors are not even a part of those project, so why should you care? The other reason I do it (and will continue), is because majority of them were written before WikiProject Beetles became active again. As for it'd likely only be two tags at most for most, that's right, most not all. As I stated above some editors already started to tag insect articles for endemism, so in this case it will be 3 tags, and it will be too much.--Mishae (talk) 02:48, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

WP:PROJSCOPE is very clear on this, "if a WikiProject says that an article is within their scope, then do not edit-war to remove the banner." Saying you will continue to remove the banner is not the way to approach this at this time. The rest of that page indicates how to handle multiple projects with interest in an article, so I highly suggest reading that. Kingofaces43 (talk) 03:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: Am I edit warring? If so where? Either way, I will wait till other folks will come here. I already read that pile of foo, and I am well aware of it. However, while it applies well to biographies because a lot of people do have multiple professions and origins, insects are different. Insects have only order/family and distribution. Because really if lets say an athlete is a football player should we add both Football and Sports template, just because some folks might want to join Sports project rather then its subprojects? I think I stated a reason for it removal very clear on top We have zillions of articles on insects and its hard to find in this template what you are looking for even alphabetically Is that CLEAR?--Mishae (talk) 03:19, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

The point is not to remove banners when you've been made aware there is opposition to it. The issues you are bringing up now are fixed by simply adding the Beetle template rather than replacing the Insect one. Kingofaces43 (talk) 03:44, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: The opposition is one (you). Either way, I already stated my point. Lets wait till other folks will join this discussion. Sounds fair?--Mishae (talk) 05:11, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Stepping back from what has been said so far, there are several purposes or functions to a WikiProject. Wikipedia:WikiProject lists a few:

• "as resources to help coordinate and organize the group's efforts at creating and improving articles"
• "[to give] advice for editors, use bots to track what is happening at articles of interest to the group, and create lists of tools and templates their members commonly use"
• "[to provide] a convenient forum for those involved in that project to talk about what they are doing, to ask questions, and to receive advice from other people interested in the group's work"

The question, really, is how are these aims best served. In the case of WP:Beetles, I can't see much on the project page that wouldn't apply to all insects, and certainly not so much that it couldn't be accommodated in a larger project. Similarly, I doubt that WT:Insects would be swamped by all the discussions that currently occur at WT:Beetles. I'm sure the split was well-intentioned, but I think it was probably unnecessary. I think my personal view is that for the discussions that matter, it's best to have as many voices as possible from a wide range of relevant backgrounds, and for that, a more inclusive project is a better project.

One final point: I would argue that article count is a very poor guide to the amount of quality that a project covers. WP:LEP may have 88,839 articles, but only 1.2% of them are rated above stub-class. This is very, very low for a WikiProject, even a large one. WikiProject History is large, and more than a third of its articles are above stub-class. WikiProject Biography is enormous, and just under a third (c. 32%) of its articles are above stub-class. Even the neonate WikiProject Beetles manages 2.6%. WikiProject Lepidoptera does not seem to have had great success in improving the quality of articles, and I am unconvinced that WikiProject Beetles will be any different in the longer term. Just because WikiProject Lepidoptera exists, that does not make it a model to be aspired to. Editors are free to create any WikiProject they like, of course, but that doesn't mean it's always a good idea, and they are not free to disrupt other WikiProjects. If the people at WikiProject Insects want to keep track of the beetle articles (or the lep. articles, for that matter), then they should be allowed to. The people to ask, then, are those who are members or active participants at WikiProject Insects and not members or active participants of the subproject(s). --Stemonitis (talk) 07:05, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Stemonitis: For the first time ever, I need to agree with you. However, the split was necessary. Both Lepidoptera and Beetles have over 10,000 articles. Yes, most of them are stubs, but so it goes with the Insect project as well. Lets focus on Insects, Beetles, and Lepidoptera, not biography and Sports, which, and you are right, have over 32% of articles that are above stub class. As for Editors are free to create any WikiProject they like, of course, but that doesn't mean it's always a good idea, and they are not free to disrupt other WikiProjects., this disruption is only concerns Kingofaces43, because prior to his issue of a concern everything was going well. I hope you are not trying to side with him and accuse me of disruption? I doubt that WT:Insects would be swamped by all the discussions that currently occur at WT:Beetles. - O' there shouldn't be any doubt about that. Every concern about a butterfly or moth is being taken care of at WikiProject Lepidoptera, not Insects. My suggestion, we should continue on removing this project from beetle related articles because beetle project is a s huge as Lepidoptera. Just because it only have 4 participants, doesn't mean that it should be scoffed and ignored. Lets see what user @Shyamal:, @The Earwig:, @AshLin:, @Burklemore1:, and @Gug01:, have to say about the whole thing.--Mishae (talk) 08:57, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

To clarify, I didn't accuse anyone of disruption, and only meant that it might occur inadvertently. Apologies if that wasn't apparent. --Stemonitis (talk)

@Stemonitis: So in this case, the sooner we will rename beetle articles from WikiProject Insects to WikiProject Beetles the sooner the apparent disruption will end. If not for this debate, I would have finished it and began editing the articles so that wouldn't be a one-sentence stubs.--Mishae (talk) 09:19, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Mishae, you don't appear to be hearing what we're saying, but you need to stop removing the banners at this time. You seem to be plowing ahead with this regardless. It is up to this Wikiproject where their banner goes. The existence of Wikiproject Beetles does change that. Seriously, just add the Beetles tag without deleting the old one. It's as simple as that. Kingofaces43 (talk) 09:54, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: I wont listen to an ultimatum. I said why the tag should be changed, and you are the only one who object this. I see that people issued an opinion not an ultimatum like you did. WikiProject Lepidoptera doesn't use it, why should this? And why should I listen to you if other editors might have different opinion. Either way, yes, I will stop, because its past my bed time, but tomorrow I will read what consensus came too. Sounds fair? Also, please sign your name. Thank you.--Mishae (talk) 09:53, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

• @Mishae: Imho, in what way is an article in particular and the encyclopedia in general served best by adding both tags of the mother & daughter projects? I do feel that the WikiProject Insects tag by itself may not add value to the article in all cases of articles of WikiProject Lepidoptera. However, WikiProject Insects would be definitely concerned with systematics, so at least down to family level could bear the tag of WikiProject Insects where an entomologist doing a taxonomic sweep could find these conveniently & add value to these articles. Similarly articles on physiology, ecology, ethology and general topics would benefit from having both tags. The species pages, tens of thousands of them may not get any tangible benefit from being counted as an article under WikiProject. AshLin (talk) 13:09, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
• @AshLin: To answer your first question, I believe that using both sister and moth projects is redundant and I believe that we should follow WikiProject Lepidoptera example: just use WikiProject Lepidoptera and that's it. It was like that for centuries so why change it? Because of it, I decided to change WikiProject Insects to WikiProject Beetles for beetle related articles. I don't do anything against the rules when I do so, yet user Kingofaces43 finds my edits undesirable and find me undesirable as an editor as well.--Mishae (talk) 13:21, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

The way you are pursuing this is what I've been calling out on your talk page. Please refrain from taking this way too seriously as the "undesirable as an editor" comment is not appropriate here nor anything I said. It looks like you're reading way too much into this. We need focus on the issue at hand here following WP:TPG to tackle this calmly. When someone reverts an edit or calls it out, that's the time to stop making the edits and discuss to reach consensus. That's Wikipedia 101. Right now, a fair number of folks here are concerned about removing the Insects banner, while some are ok with it. We don't have a clear consensus to be removing the Insect banner right now, so if we are going to be removing the Insects banner, this project simply needs to reach consensus on that. Kingofaces43 (talk) 15:04, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: I responded on my talkpage why I sometimes behave like this, but if you don't get it, bare in mind that my native language is Russian I sometimes think one thing and write something completely else. To be honest this is my first discussion where consensus plays a key role, so bare with me, I am new to this. Just because I was here for a while doesn't mean that I was engaged in every activity. a fair number of folks here are concerned about removing the Insects banner - there is one person who is concerned and that's you and @Plantdrew: (who didn't bothered to show up after I pinged him). Users Stemonitis and AshLin are neutral from my stance (although they are closer to agree with removing it). I might be wrong though. As for consensus, I maybe don't understand its function. What I know is that we have an editor here who thinks that WP:ILIKEIT is appropriate here and ignores the proposed suggestions until I need to write it all caps, and then it turns out that I am a bad guy? Wow. Look, here is another reason why we should remove this template: Both {{WikiProject Beetles}} and {{WikiProject Insects}} use Insects portal therefore a daughter project should be enough.--Mishae (talk) 18:28, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Not helpful to refer to others when they give actual reasons as WP:ILIKEIT. This is looking like a very adversarial approach you're taking, so I'm going to let the ANI on your behavior wrap up first. Kingofaces43 (talk) 13:01, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: Saying that When it comes to these articles, people are generally going to be interested in insects in general, so we should try to maintain that overarching connection and I don't see any reason to exclude the insect banner from any insect page since that's where the community really lies. is to me looks a lot like WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Furthermore, an entomologist like yourself should know that entomology is divided in numerous fields (that's why some entomologists do beetles only, while some do only Lepidoptera). Yes, early entomologists like Linnaeus and Illiger did both and more but that's because they were very first entomologists. The scientific department is better organized nova days. :) To be honest with you, community lies everywhere, some folks edit aricles of beetles, other do butterflies, etc. Why we should offer them an option to join this or that project if they both have insect portal? I think you are so determined to keep it is because your project have almost 30 active members (I checked the participants section in the project). WikiProejct Lepidoptera have 17 to 19 active members, while beetles as you know have 4. Now, since no one arrived for a discussion I am wondering if you just told them not to come? No, I am not saying that you bribed them, although I fear that you might have, since as I said above no one came (and its already 2nd day of the debate). Lets call the above users again: @Phil Northing:, @Shyamal:, @The Earwig:, @Burklemore1:, @Ruigeroeland:, @Oculi:, @Ser Amantio di Nicolao:, @Dawynn:, and @Notafly:, and @Gug01:. Because really, what kind of discussion is this when only you, me, Stemonitis, AshLin, and Plantdrew are here, and only me and you are discussing it while the rest just said their opinion on the matter and left. I imagined discussion differently. :(--Mishae (talk) 01:05, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Your above comments are not helpful (again) when you are taking this adversarial approach, especially when you ignore legitimate points brought up just as "I don't like it". That's why your behavior is at ANI right now. The points I've brought up are based on Wikipedia guidelines, so we can't just blow them off when it comes to removing tags. Also, there's no need to re-ping people. Either they decided not to reply, or haven't been online yet.

The core reason I keep bringing up for maintaining the Insects tag is because this is the core Wikiproject where we are about as specialized as we can get while still having a decent number of people where we know the project will be active or attract more insect interested people in the future. The more order specialized projects like leps and beetles are more likely to come and go like many descendent projects do, but we know that the Insects project will be a fallback. Generally, taxonomists are the ones who remain focused on certain groups of insects, but many entomologists actually do work with different orders of insects rather than just one. When it comes to Wikiprojects, there's not an inherent need to split every order into its own project, so our default here should be to include the articles we want, and Beetles can include what they want per our Wikiproject guidelines. There's no need to delegate that only one project gets the article (the portal doesn't really do anything for these purposes). If we start decentralizing projects, we lose the ability to track the stats of the articles that would interest this project, especially if the watchlist tool returns. A lot of people just want to work on insects in general, and this is the place for that. I for one don't care what order an insect is in terms of keeping track of articles as an editor. If taxonomy is our concern, that's already in the species box of each article. Any issues you've brought up are easily addressed by having both tags with no clear benefit of removing the Insects tag, but there some potential disadvantages to removing it that I've mentioned. Kingofaces43 (talk) 04:37, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I reckon Wikiproject Insects should be the central project, resulting it to be tagged in all insect related articles. I weirdly picture it as "the mothership" since these orders are below and united under the Insecta class, if that makes sense. Because of that, I think it would work out fine if a beetle or moth article would incorporate the Wikiproject Insects tag. Burklemore1 (talk) 10:23, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Burklemore1: No it doesn't make sense, because WikiProject Insects have over 40,000 articles already and its difficult to find an article even in the alphabetical order. Plus, if WikiProject Beetles and WikiProject Lepidoptera will use this template why would WikiProject Football be off its WikiProject Sports, or that project is a exception? I believe that WikiProject Insects should disappear from WikiProject Beetles because:

1. It still can be accessed via Portal talk:Insects since both templates have connection toward that portal
2. WikiProject Insects is overused on every Insect related article (that's why WikiProject Lepidoptera decided not to use it, since it already have 88,839 articles).
3. If we will use 2-3 tags (plus 1 for articles where species are endemic to a specific nation or territory), we will violate WP:OVERTAGGING especially Redundant tags section.

Unfortunately, user Kingofaces43 listens to only one side (his own), and convinces other editors to follow his suit blindly which in my opinion is misleading.--Mishae (talk) 20:06, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't understand why you're looking through 40,000 pages to find a specific article. What is the situation where this needs to be done? If you want to find an article, put the title in the search box. If you want to find a set of articles meeting particular criteria (i.e., those that are about beetles) this is best accomplished through CatScan (the tool I've linked below) rather than browsing through a list of articles by WikiProject (especially since articles are more likely to be categorized than tagged for a Wikiproject; 289 beetles and coleopterists are tagged for neither project). Plantdrew (talk) 20:26, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I'd like to point out there while are now 9,943 pages tagged for WikiProject Beetles, there are 17,675 pages (warning, link is slow to load) in Category:Beetles and its subcategories that are tagged for WikiProject Insects and not for WikiProject Beetles. And there are 289 pages (slow) that don't have either project's tag. We are still a long way from having all beetle articles tagged for the beetle project, and this task might be better accomplished by employing a bot. Plantdrew (talk) 19:42, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree. It would be very helpful if there could be a bot to help for this, but I've asked several owners of bots and they either outright refuse or just don't reply. Gug01 (talk) 19:53, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I've been meaning to check into how Wikipedia bots work, so I'm happy to look into this at some point. I've done quite a bit of script coding in the past, so I'll see what (if anything) I could do. Kingofaces43 (talk) 20:18, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

• @Plantdrew:, @Mishae:, @Stemonitis:, @Kingofaces43:, @Ashlin:, @Burklemore1: I believe that WikiProject Beetles articles and WikiProject Lepidoptera articles should be tagged as only that project, not as WikiProject Insects too. Although WikiProject Beetles and WikiProject Lepidoptera may not be good at improving articles, really, really, WikiProject Insects is not that good either. I do not deny the hard work of WikiProject Insects editors to promote several GAs and even an FA. However, WikiProject Insects only makes a few GAs and does not seem to bring stubs to C-class, for instance. In the long run, I think there is no real reason to tag beetle or moth-related articles with the WikiProject Insects banner. Besides, WikiProject Insects covers a huge scope, and if it were up to me, I would split WikiProject Beetles and WikiProject Lepidoptera even further. Gug01 (talk) 20:01, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
  • @Gug01: Was about to go to your talkpage for it. Either way, thank you for your input. You see, what you said above its exactly what I am trying to achieve but no one listens. My proposition of splitting both WikiProject Beetles and WikiProject Lepidoptera even further is in the subsection.--Mishae (talk) 20:13, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

The main reason you bring up for the beetle and leps projects is improving stub articles. That's definitely justification for adding the Beetles tag in this case (or designating it as a task force), but I don't see a reason for removing the Insects tag. The latter is ultimately the question here (not removing the Beetles tag). I haven't seen anything beyond not wanting to have multiple tags brought up to address that, but that's not a problem looking at the Wikiproject guidelines I mentioned earlier. Are you just addressing keeping the beetles tag more or actually removing the insects tag? Kingofaces43 (talk) 20:18, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: I'm addressing the former. Personally, I think that for now the Wikiproject Insects tag should be added, but if WikiProject Beetles substantially grows, then it should be removed. Only if. I am also saying that there should be no WikiProject Insects tag in the WikiProject Lepidoptera articles since WikiProject Lepidoptera is pretty big. Is that clear? Gug01 (talk) 22:53, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Gug01: I think that WikiProject Beetles is big enough, ranging at over 10,000 articles now, with possibility of it becoming more if not for this debate.--Mishae (talk) 00:10, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

@Mishae: I didn't mean size of articles. I meant the number of contributing editors. Gug01 (talk) 12:44, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Cleared up indeed. Those are my thoughts too for this moment at least. I have no problem with Leps remaining as is for now as they've got enough of a community going and are pretty well established. Beetles would need to establish itself as a community and have more people first before reaching the same point. At that point in time I still wouldn't be 100% on replacing the tag, but I for one would definitely be more open to it then. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:49, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: How many editors do we need in order to form a project? As for my ignorance on consensus those edits help me to keep cool with you guys, otherwise reading your comments and calling most stuff that I say is irrelevant makes me quite angry. Its my first long debate, and since I don't know how and when the agreement will be reached. Plus, I will be blocked sooner or later because of your meat puppetry.--Mishae (talk) 03:41, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals suggests 6-12 editors as a minimum for forming a new project. Plantdrew (talk) 16:04, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

• Summarizing the general consensus just for beetle articles so far, it seems folks would prefer to leave the Insects tag. Wikiproject Beetles can add their own tag if they want, but that's up to their own project and not us here. If Wikiproject Beetles obtains a fair number of editors to establish a good sized community to sustain itself, we could revisit the situation someday where Beetles would be considered a similar situation to what we have with Wikiproject Lepidoptera right now. There might be other options to consider than splitting off new Wikiprojects, but that's a topic for another day. Does that sound like a fair summary and course of action? Kingofaces43 (talk) 19:24, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I've articulated my views yet but I agree with this course of action Kingofaces43 summarized above, for the time being: add Beetle banners if one wishes, but leave Insect banners in place: I don't see substantial harm in having both tags, and I don't see any net benefits to removing Insect tags. My take-away is that Mishae's main motivation is that having beetle articles associated with insect articles make it "hard to find" articles (although not specifying exactly where he was looking, or what), and that may be an issue, but I'd like to see WP Beetles become more established and self-sustaining before replacing Insect banners. In any case, if WP Beetles is to prosper, it will have to foster close interaction with other insect projects and editors. --Animalparty-- (talk) 20:20, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: I agree exactly with what you are saying. If WikiProject Beetles prospers, then we can revisit. For now, I agree with the course of action. Gug01 (talk) 13:44, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Task forces

As an additional note, I think it would be better to have task forces for the specific orders within Wikiproject Insects as taskforces. This all isn't something I'm going to pursue right now, and I'm not interested in deconstructing their Wikiprojects, but it's an idea that's been getting more traction for me as I've read our guidelines for Wikiprojects. This project already is very species focused in how we describe how articles should be written within the project, so we already say our scope is to the species level. The descendent projects are largely editor interest based rather than unique article structure or topics. WP:TASKFORCE describes this situation as the orders being good candidates to turn into task forces given the number of articles and the relatively limited number of editors we have. We might even be able to get a statistics page for each taskforce, but I'd have to look into how that table sets itself up. Articles would be listed with the Insects banner, but we'd include the task force within that template. Maybe something to consider in the future. Kingofaces43 (talk) 04:40, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I think this is an interesting idea, and could well be a good way to organise things in the future. Obviously, entomology is a potentially vast topic ("an inordinate fondness for beetles" and so on), but the project is intended to organise editors, not articles, and there aren't so many of those. --Stemonitis (talk) 07:47, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Stemonitis: and @Kingofaces43: The idea is good, but I had a different one. Lets create task forces for WikiProject Beetles and WiikiProject Lepidoptera individually. What I am saying is that for example an article on ground beetle will be marked with WikiProject Beetles template ^{|ground beetle=yes}. An example will be WikiProject Medicine.--Mishae (talk) 19:31, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Well for one that's not really relevant here since Wikiprojects are independent of each other. We're discussing primarily what Wikiproject Insects should do, while discussion about what other projects should do generally belongs at those respective projects. Given what's been discussed above though, we wouldn't want to set up too specialized of task forces here. Generally, they could be by order or groups of smaller orders with some like Hymenoptera that have distinct groups as common names as their own task force (e.g., ants, bees & wasps [or maybe separate those last two]. Regardless of the project, we don't need to drill down to further taxonomic levels for additional subgroups within the project just because they exist. Kingofaces43 (talk) 20:08, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: I agree with you. However, some large or notable task forces should be made. For instance, maybe an Ichneumonidae task force (come on, it is the largest animal family, how can it not have a taskforce), bees taskforce and maybe Mantodea taskforce. Gug01 (talk) 22:57, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree entirely on that front too. I just wouldn't want to see indiscriminate task forces. But to keep them focused exactly as you laid out. Kingofaces43 (talk) 23:36, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Gug01: You should come and read this so that you will know that user Kingofaces43 wants to be his way only. Furthermore, I am now being accused of not being competent which is ridiculous because I wrote so many articles and did so many constructive edits, and now the whole community accuse me of vandalism and disruptive edits??!!--Mishae (talk) 20:21, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I highly suggest rereading what I said and not misrepresent what I said in such an adversarial manner. Again, please follow the talk page guidelines. This drama is not going to help the community at all. Kingofaces43 (talk) 20:36, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Kingofaces43: You know, I am not the one who is being adversarial, but you are. It is you who don't want the Insect tag to be removed. If you so like it, then why can't you hang it on your own talkpage and be proud of it? Furthermore, I am not creating drama, I just want user @Gug01: to know that you have adversarial behavior toward me, and that's the truth.--Mishae (talk) 20:44, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I think there is some merit in creating some broad level task-forces within WP Insects that lack the broad editor base of Lepidoptera, although not every order needs a task-force (Stepsiptera?). The Ant task force seems to be a convenient way to organize articles, although it also has limited participation. Certainly in most cases a task-force should be proposed before a new dedicated sub-project. However, I feel the creation of any new projects or task forces within existing projects should be largely determined by the actual or potential size of the relevant editing community, not merely the number of articles (existing or expected) to be dealt with. Like articles, a project is only as good as the editors who participate and stick around. There are currently only 4 active editors on WikiProject Beetles, and the proposed sub-projects at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Beetles#Possible_descendant_projects seems like a tremendous amount of needless hair-splitting. What benefit is served by dividing that project into sub-projects or work-groups? The 4 editors would presumably still be talking to each other! It would also increasingly narrow and compartmentalize resources. Check out Wikipedia:WikiProject Vespidae for a project that failed to generate much buzz after the classes ended, but that project at least has the benefit of occasional faculty (and/or grad student) oversight. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Oligochaetes for an example of not-so well thought out WikiProject: one editor being interested in an obscure group of animals (at least among the general pool of Wikipedia editors likely to contribute) is not enough to get a project going. Drawbacks of too small or narrowly focused projects include too much self-assessment, loss of editor interest, increased administrative load, and less efficient communication between users. Honestly, if stub creation of every beetle species (and genus, subgenus, tribe, subtribe...) is a goal, then maybe just get a bot to do it once and for all (how many stubs are essentially fleshed out data points from say Carabidae.org?), so that editors can focus on expanding and improving articles. I feel that splitting or dividing projects, makes it more difficult to coordinate efforts between editors. It would be great if we had a team of professional Ichneumonidae specialists dedicated to improving Icheunomidae articles, but realistically we likely never will, and until that happens, keeping all wasps articles visible to a general insect project and perhaps a Hymenoptera task force would be most prudent. --Animalparty-- (talk) 00:28, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Lastly, to Mishae's claims that having large amounts of articles impedes maintenance or location of articles, let's work on those issues first, lest in our haste we create more serious ones. What exactly are you seeking, and where are you looking? --Animalparty-- (talk) 00:28, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

@Animalparty: Well for one, you are right about Wikipedia:WikiProject Oligochaetes to be a bad example of a project. But, the beetles is a huge order. It have millions of species equaling to Lepidoptera. What am I seeking is to change WikiProject Insects to WikiProject Beetles because a smaller subproject still have alphabetical order, but is not so impeding. For example WikiProject Beetles as of now have 10,266 articles while Lepidoptera have 86,000 and Insects have 40,000+. But, its pointless for me to say anything since no one here will listen, and I already violated WP:CONSENSUS since I don't know when the debate will end. :(--Mishae (talk) 03:08, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

@Mishae: are you saying one of the reasons you want to divide articles into new projects is so that categories like Category:WikiProject Beetles articles or Category:WikiProject Insects articles have fewer entries? They are already navigable by alphabetical order due to {{Category TOC}} or {{large category TOC}}, and sub-sorted by, for instance, Category:Ant task force articles. A handy trick for narrowing even further is to modify the url to include the word you're seeking, e.g. to go straight to Carabus simply modify the url to https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Category:WikiProject_Beetles_articles&from=Carabus. --Animalparty-- (talk) 21:59, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

@Animalparty: Have you read what I said above? Even alphabetically it is hard to navigate through a vast list of insects. I also said that WP:OVERTAGGING will be a problem because users who want to look and update beetle articles will have 2 banners to choose from (one short and one long), which will be redundant. I don't see a reason for both tags present to ensure confusion. As for url, that should be the last resort. Beetles is a huge order that's why templating it as a separate project is a must. After this we can create task forces, such as Ground beetle task force for example. I think I gave plenty reasonable explanations even repeated them serveral times, yet no one here listens to it either way. :(--Mishae (talk) 22:34, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

@Mishae: Difficulty in navigation, if indeed a widely held view, might be solved by sorting project articles into more stub categories and/or (a reasonable number of) task-force categories, or perhaps there are more advanced templates, tools, and navigational aids we can employ to aid in finding articles (e.g. Wikipedia:CatScan). I personally don't think that large categories are inherently bad, and we certainly shouldn't make large, far-reaching, or controversial changes simply to appease, or make life more convenient for, any single user. WP:OVERTAGGING, and the entire WP:TAGGING essay, concerns maintenance templates like {{refimprove}} or {{POV}}, and so not really pertinent to Wiki Projects, although note that it also alludes to Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, which can apply to either removal or addition of any template. You may be referring to "Overtagging is disruptive" section of WP:PROJSCOPE, but in the case of tagging WP Beetles And vs Or WP Insects, where consensus is currently undecided (hopefully this discussion will help that), I don't think a small amount of redundancy on Talk pages is inherently bad or disruptive; that project overtagging guideline concerns tangentially related projects. I disagree with your view that "Beetles is a huge order that's why templating it as a separate project is a must", but please don't confuse disagreement with refusal to listen; your views may or not be shared by others, but consensus means we may not always get what we want. --Animalparty-- (talk) 00:07, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

I am in agreement with Animalparty on the one key issue that keeps getting missed here (especially, but not exclusively, by Mishae). I will stress the important concepts to avoid any misunderstanding. A WikiProject is a means of organising editors. If, for instance, exactly the same group of editors were to work on two related sets of articles, then there would be no point in setting up a second project for the second group, because those editors already have a site where they can talk to each other freely. The number of articles involved (either existing or potential) is entirely irrelevant. Is WikiProject Beetles so busy with all manner of varied discussions that it's impossible for a set of Carabidae specialists to discuss their particular issues? No? Then you don't need to split the project in order to facilitate their work. I don't think there's even a very strong argument for splitting WP:Beetles from WP:Insects – WT:Insects is not so chaotic that coleopterists can't have a beetle-specific discussion there. (Of the 6 topics higher up this page at the time of writing, one is exclusively about beetles and one is a list of missing articles that includes beetles alongside the other orders.) Splitting WP:Beetles further would be extremely unwise. --Stemonitis (talk) 07:48, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

@Stemonitis: I personally don't know from where you got those A WikiProject is a means of organising editors and The number of articles involved (either existing or potential) is entirely irrelevant but then explain to me why WikiProject Sports for example have subprojects like Football, Baseball, Basketball, etc, and non of them are task forces, but rather independent projects? Either way, this discussion will be closed without my input, since I will be blocked for a month. I'm proposing to live it as it is now (half like this, half like that), until I will be back.--Mishae (talk) 22:34, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

There are lots of editors who edit within the field of football, but are not so interested in other sports. The same for baseball, basketball and the others. If all discussions of sport-related articles occurred in a single place, it would be chaotic indeed. --Stemonitis (talk) 06:56, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

@Stemonitis: That's exactly why I am removing tags from WikiProject Insects. If we will put every article in a single place (and insects have far more variety then just beetles (which is actually a half of the whole project mind you)) we will get chaos. If you are so reasonable, why are you still agreeing with not removing the tag. I maybe don't know how consensus works, but in my opinion it should never be one sided.--Mishae (talk) 23:39, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

There's a bit that went off topic specifically to task forces in Wikiproject Insects. Just commenting on the topic of this section, I agree with Animalparty and Stemonitis with considering a specific task force when appropriate. I'm only looking at this as a method to organize people where we feel we need it rather than starting one for every order, etc. If someone wants to start a new task force, probably best to ask here first if the group thinks it would be worthwhile to avoid unneeded projects. Doing so would also show if there is a decent sized community involved in that area of work first to justify splitting off into their own Wikiproject if they are so inclined as well. Kingofaces43 (talk) 19:45, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

I totally agree with that. I really think its a pity there are so few editors for such a vast topic (I know there are about 50, but for a topic that covers 1,000,000 articles, that's underserved). I propose that recruiting should be a priority. Gug01 (talk) 22:00, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

@Gug01: Its a pity that you sided with Kingofaces43. I was thinking of you as a good editor instead... ...You just like to side with older folks. Wondering if you did the siding out of fear? :(--Mishae (talk) 23:30, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@Mishae: In case I was unclear, the only statement I agreed with is that we should not just create family taskforces for the sake of creating taskforces. I wasn't saying anything else. Does that make me a bad editor? Gug01 (talk) 19:34, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

FYI Gug01, Mishae has been blocked, this time indefinitely. Kingofaces43 (talk) 20:03, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Also, even were the block not in place, it's best not to respond to condescending comments that are worded to enflame or guilt. Don't take that bait. --Animalparty-- (talk) 23:36, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

I have been tagged somewhere on this discussion and have tried giving this a reading but forgive my tiredness when it comes to such disputes. I can only look forward to seeing a day when Mediawiki search allows one to search by (taxobox) template parameters and their contents. Shyamal (talk) 05:15, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Crickets

We have been working on improving the article Cricket (insect) for some time, trying to make sure that all the information is relevant to the family Gryllidae, the true crickets. I proposed about ten days ago on the talk page of Cricket (insect) that the article should be renamed to Gryllidae. If you look at the article Ensifera, the suborder to which crickets belong, you will see that there are many species in various families that have the word "cricket" in their common names and that makes the present name "Cricket (insect)" problematic. No one having objected to the change, I thought I would proceed with the move but find that the article "Cricket (insect)" is move protected. The reason for this is presumably because of a historic discussion on the primacy of the sport and the insect which sport won. That decision has no bearing on my proposed move. Would someone with appropriate authority like to either remove the move protection or do the move themselves? Cwmhiraeth (talk) 09:49, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

List of ant subfamilies

What would it take to to get this to FL level? It was nominated last year and the concerns were of close paraphrasing, which was eventually "solved" as it did not violate any policy and it was reasonable for incorporation. Overall, the list technically did not fail; instead it was archived (probably because of inactivity?), but it was in review for a long time. Infact, there were zero opposes (except for one, but the user later withdrew this) and had two supports, one of which was myself. I might go and post this to the FL talk page so I can get more responses. Burklemore1 (talk) 08:05, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Carpomya wiedemanni listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Carpomya wiedemanni to be moved to Goniglossum wiedemanni. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 23:18, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Copyright Violation Detection - EranBot Project

A new copy-paste detection bot is now in general use on English Wikipedia. Come check it out at the EranBot reporting page. This bot utilizes the Turnitin software (ithenticate), unlike User:CorenSearchBot that relies on a web search API from Yahoo. It checks individual edits rather than just new articles. Please take 15 seconds to visit the EranBot reporting page and check a few of the flagged concerns. Comments welcome regarding potential improvements. These likely copyright violations can be searched by WikiProject categories. Use "control-f" to jump to your area of interest (if such a copyvio is present).--Lucas559 (talk) 16:20, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Asian predatory wasp

Can some of the specialists review this page, please? I've noted comments on the Talk page reporting two UK DEFRA presentations which clearly stated they view this as the #1short-term threat to UK biodiversity: I cannot post because this is first-hand reporting on my part. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.199.240.137 (talk • contribs)

Signing with date so this thread will archive. Plantdrew (talk) 03:54, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

Resources for entomologist bibliographies

Just thought I'd share these for anyone seeking to expand articles on entomologists. Some are biographical, while others don't contain much or any biographical data per se, but rather directories of biographical content for those seeking sources. Some freely available online, others at JSTOR, paywalls or books, but feel free to add other general references, freely accessible or not. --Animalparty-- (talk) 03:56, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

• Wade, J. S. (1928). "A Bibliography of Biographies of Entomologists, with Special Reference to North American Workers". Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 21 (3): 489–520. doi:10.1093/aesa/21.3.489.
• Carpenter, Mathilde M. (1945). "Bibliography of Biographies of Entomologists" (PDF). American Midland Naturalist. 33 (1): 1–116. JSTOR 2421325.
• Carpenter, Mathilde M. (1953). "Bibliography of Biographies of Entomologists (Supplement)". American Midland Naturalist. 50 (2): 257–348. JSTOR 2422093.
• Mallis, Arnold (1971). American Entomologists. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 9780813506869.
• Gilbert, Pamela (1977). A compendium of the biographical literature on deceased entomologists. London: British Museum (Natural History). ISBN 9780565007867.
• Eidt, Douglas C.; Riegert, Paul W.; Becker, Edward C. Biography of Entomologists in Canadian Publications (PDF). Ottawa: Entomological Society of Canada.

File:Megistocera of Kadavoor.jpg

Any help on ID is highly appreciated. Shyamal, Dyanega, Dysmachus..., please have a look. Jee 12:01, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Leptotarsus of Kadavoor

Myrmecia at peer review

The Myrmecia article has been submitted for a peer review, just in case any of you guys would like to comment or give your thoughts. All criticism and recommendations will be greatly appreciated. Burklemore1 (talk) 05:27, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Help with taxonomy (insects mating)

I would like to identify this two insects mating, photographed in Slovenia, Europe. Thanx --PetarM (talk) 21:14, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Insects mating... help to identify.

Solved. --PetarM (talk) 14:51, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Hymenoptera task forces

@Agelaia: studies social insects and teaches a course on behavioral ecology. Students in the course created/expanded articles on social insects under Wikipedia:WikiProject Vespidae last year, and will be working on Apidae this year (with a recently created page Wikipedia:WikiProject Apidae). I welcome contributions on social insects, and hope to support Agelaia's course, but it seems to me that taskforces under WikiProjects Insects would be more appropriate than largely independent subprojects. As far as hymenoptera go, ants are covered as a task force rather than a subproject.

Should hymenoptera families be covered as subprojects, or as taskforces? I don't have the template editing privileges to make new task forces for WikiProject Insects, but I'd be happy to do some of the rote assessment work if Vespidae and Apidae are enabled as task forces. Plantdrew (talk) 03:58, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm in favor of task forces over sub-projects, since the editor pool of almost any group of insects is likely to be nearly the same as that of WikiProject Insects, unlike say, the editor pool and relevant interests of Mammals or Bird projects. As WP:TASKFORCE concludes, "If the scope is too closely related to an existing project, then having separate projects is usually inefficient and counterproductive, because you wind up dividing the few interested editors across multiple projects." Perhaps Jonkerz, who set up the Ant task force, could offer some guidance or suggestions. --Animalparty! (talk) 04:27, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

I'd also highly prefer task forces over sub projects for the reasons you mentioned. Seperate projects can get unwieldy with separate talk page banners, splitting up editors, etc. this could especially be the case of this project is really mainly for a class that's going to be done at the end of the semester. Probably better to make sure they are using the appropriate course pages instead while starting a task force here. Kingofaces43 (talk) 13:12, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

+1 for course pages and +1 for task forces. Echoing what's already been said: setting up a task force subpage under WP:INSECTS is reversible, dirt cheap and doesn't split editors as long as the talk page is redirected here. A list of external resources, a todo list and a few guidelines goes a long way. About task force tagging: we waited more than a year before setting this up for the ant task force, mostly because there have been far too many projects that set up tagging in low-activity topic areas and then nothing happened. At the time, the task force had four "signed up members"; this was very much a border-line case, and I'm not sure how useful this has been so far (but that will most definitely improve with time). jonkerz ♠talk 16:38, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

New monograph on ants

Just came across this CC-licensed article- could be useful in improving Ant and subfamily articles: Boudinot, Brendon E. (2015). "Contributions to the knowledge of Formicidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata): a new diagnosis of the family, the first global male-based key to subfamilies, and a treatment of early branching lineages". European Journal of Taxonomy (120). doi:10.5852/ejt.2015.120. Pinging some editors off the top of my head. @Kevmin: @Burklemore1: @Jonkerz: enjoy! --Animalparty! (talk) 07:07, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Cheers, I'll go read it now. I see that plenty of new and useful information is available, so I'll see what I can incorporate from the source. The images and diagrams will be beneficial too! Burklemore1 (talk) 07:40, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

That's the kind of source I like to see. Seems like ants are always a group needing more taxonomic commentary for how often some naming is changing. Kingofaces43 (talk) 00:02, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Great find, Animalparty! Our subfamily articles are in dire need of expansion. jonkerz ♠talk 16:43, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

File:Libélula (Tramea sp), Cerro Brujo, isla de San Cristóbal, islas Galápagos, Ecuador, 2015-07-24, DD 147.jpg

Pantala hymenaea or Tramea calverti, female?

Is this Pantala hymenaea as author claimed or a Tramea calverti, female? It is from Galápagos, Ecuador. I don't expect a Pantala perch this way. Long anal appendages also favours ''Tramea. Jee 01:18, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

A draft article about bees

Dear insect experts: This draft article: User:Apismell2015/sandbox will soon be deleted as stale unless someone takes an interest in it. Is this a notable topic? —Anne Delong (talk) 18:43, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

It looks like a copyvio. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 19:23, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

I love that writer of the copyvio tool is named earwig. I don't think it would be noteworthy for its own article since any information would go to the relevant species article if anything was going to be included. Kingofaces43 (talk) 19:40, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Anna Frodesiak, thanks for finding the copyvio. I tried several phrases in Google, but maybe because of the format it didn't pick it up. It's gone now.—Anne Delong (talk) 11:11, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi Anne Delong. Happy to see it end well. ) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 12:06, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Erysichton elaborata

Could some editors with background in this kind of thing join us here? We're discussing whether or not a particular butterfly species which is the subject of an article actually exists or has been misidentified. Thanks. Gamaliel (talk) 16:40, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Pageview stats

After a recent request, I added WikiProject Insects/ant task force to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Insects/ant task force/Popular pages.

The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. You can view more results, request a new project be added to the list, or request a configuration change for this project using the Tool Labs tool. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! Mr.Z-man 23:39, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, Mr.Z-man! jonkerz ♠talk 19:40, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

The wrong grasshopper

Please hop over to this talk page, and quickly if you can. Thank you. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 09:09, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

FWIW, I made a side by side comparison with the pic and images of specimens from the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. (They also have articles on the species: Aiolopus strepens - [2], Dociostaurus maroccanus - [3]). They look identical to my untrained eye though. LOL.-- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 08:35, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

While I would not be surprised by misidentifications among featured images, I think this alternate id suggestion needs justification. Some of these can only be identified reliably by genitalic dissections, the coloration can vary widely and some of the structural features used in identification may not be visible in the image. Shyamal (talk) 09:06, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

A butterfly feeding on the tears of a turtle in Ecuador

Original – Two Julia Butterflies (Dryas iulia) drinking the tears of turtles in Ecuador

I've nominated A butterfly feeding on the tears of a turtle in Ecuador for Featured Picture consideration.

Discussion is ongoing, at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/A butterfly feeding on the tears of a turtle in Ecuador.

— Cirt (talk) 02:34, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Replicative editing of Leaf-cutter bee articles

User:Thine Antique Pen has made a replicate expansion of almost all Megachile species articles from August 28. He seems to have concocted general information about the genus Megachile together with specific information about a single species, and copied them over many species articles in the genus. The result is simply a devastating amount of misinformation in hundreds of articles. I opt for immediate reversal of all these edits. Gidip (talk) 15:51, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

@Gidip: Could you give us some idea of what the "general information" part is, and whether it is correct and cited? Could you also clarify what "copied them" means exactly - does this mean that information that rightly applies to one species has been copied wrongly to other species? It would help also if you could provide some links and statistics on what has happened. I looked at 3 Megachile sp. articles and found a sizeable edit by Thine Antique Pen in only one of them, and that wasn't obvious nonsense at first glance (of course, perhaps that's part of the problem). To save everyone else from a similar search, some directions would be useful so we can assess what has actually happened and decide what to do about it. With many thanks, Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:09, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Here is a link to the list of edits (it continues on the next pages), and here is an example page.

The added text contains three paragraphs, and cites five references, all at the genus level. The first paragraph includes a morphological description that is obviously at the species level and doesn't apply to so many species at once; it has no reference given. The rest of the text gives genus-level information but presents it as if it were studied for the specific species discussed, which is absolutely wrong. "The species creates its nests in soil, in stems of plants, in twigs, or will tunnel through rotting wood to create nests." - no it doesn't. Each species has its own preference. It sounds as if a single species can exploit all these different options. The same applies to the rest of the text. We can discuss the details for ages; the wisest thing to do would be simply to delete it all and leave it on the genus page where it belongs.

Thanks, that's very helpful (and alarming). So that other editors can be clear on what has happened, the text has effectively been parameterized so that it says

"A female Megachile xxxxxxx takes pollen and nectar to its nest to create a "bee loaf" (saliva, pollen and nectar).<ref name="ForestService"/> ... etc etc ..."

which makes it look as if the reference applies specifically to M. xxxxxxxx, which it doesn't. Therefore all 3 paragraphs of material added to all the species articles are misleading nonsense.Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:27, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

It seems that the editor skipped those few articles of better known species which already had some content, and focused on the majority of empty articles.

"Could you also clarify what "copied them" means exactly - does this mean that information that rightly applies to one species has been copied wrongly to other species?" - as I already said, he/she mixed genus and species-level information. I don't know what was the original species. Gidip (talk) 18:31, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Thankyou. I agree that we should revert all the additions. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:27, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Gidip is entirely correct and all the additions should be reverted Notafly (talk) 19:51, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for raising this concern. Implying a variety of behaviours was undertaken by each individual species, when they might actually only use one, was definitely a serious mistake on my part. I will remove this material or will re-phrase it based on the individual species rather than the genus, where such information is available. If you feel it is more urgent, please feel free to remove it immediately anyway.

The morphology information, on the other hand, is described in the source as relating to the genus not a specific species, as far as I can see. (It is not unsourced.) If this description is incorrect - for example if the source is wrong or if some species have different morphology in these respects to the rest of the genus as a whole - then we should of course correct it. Can you point to any sources that contradict it, please? Thine Antique Pen (talk) 20:05, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

If you have information only at the genus level, you should write it as such. All the text needs to be rephrased as relating to the genus, and the species name should be totally removed from the section. What is the source for the morphology part? Gidip (talk) 20:41, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

And please save us and yourself more trouble and don't change anything until we reach some consensus here. Unless you decide to revert which I think will be OK with everyone. Gidip (talk) 20:42, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

I think [4] is an acceptable source for the morphology of all the species in the genus. But we may be quibbling over details. I'm willing to revert all of the edits myself - which will take me a while - and will then add back any specifics later, where applicable, after leaving a notification here. Does that seem good? Thine Antique Pen (talk) 20:59, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

This source deals with bees of the Eastern United States only. While the description may hold for other species too, we cannot be sure. Michener's book would be better for this purpose. In any case, at the very least, the mentioning of black color has to be deleted. Gidip (talk) 21:09, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

What do you mean "add back any specifics later, where applicable"? You should revert your edits and then you can edit each species separately, as much as you have time and will, with specific information validated at the species level. If that's what you mean, OK. Gidip (talk) 21:12, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

That's fine. Thank you. Thine Antique Pen (talk) 21:15, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

All articles are now as they were before the August changes, but with intervening edits restored. Please let me know if you notice anything that looks awry. Thine Antique Pen (talk) 00:23, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Well now it turns out that the articles were edited as part of an edit contest. No reason to keep this, it needs to appear once at the genus page and that's it. Gidip (talk) 20:53, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Good call, thanks to ThineAntiquePen for reverting.-- Elmidae 06:29, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

HotArticlesBot subscription

The HotArticlesBot subscription for your project is now active. I went ahead and added the chart to your task force page. Feel free to move it wherever you like. Cheers. Kaldari (talk) 02:02, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Kaldari! Really cool feature. Here's the page, for anyone reading this. jonkerz ♠talk 12:09, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Anopheles albimanus

Hello! I just wanted to give a heads up that I am adding to the Anopheles albimanus page (which is/was a stub) for a university project. I left most of the text that had already been contributed but I will be adding quite a bit. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vowela (talk • contribs) 00:34, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Tagging

Just a heads up that from this conversation [5] awhile back, I'm going through and automatically adding Insect tags to articles currently listed at Wikiproject Beetles. I originally started just going through articles listed at Wikiproject Beetles, but I found a better way to focus just an articles that were affected by the user in the previous discussion. This might potentially blow up some watchlists, so I just wanted to let people know. Kingofaces43 (talk) 03:34, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

It looks like I got all the articles re-tagged that we part of the previous conversation at least. I have a decent system set up with AutoWikiBrowser, so if in the future we want to add taskforces or delete inactive daughter projects, just let me know. Kingofaces43 (talk) 15:25, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

There are still 3042 articles with a WikiProject Beetles tag and no WikiProject Insects (go here and click the "Do it" button at the bottom to see them). Plantdrew (talk) 16:37, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, I was just going off of Mishae's contribution list, so I didn't know about that tool. I'll take up those articles too in a bit. Kingofaces43 (talk) 16:40, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

If you're happy to work on tagging stuff for WikiProject Insects, poke around a bit more with CatScan. There are a fair number of articles that have no tags whatsoever. Pick a category for an insect order, set search depth to a decent number (I usually go for 6 which is probably overkill to get from order down to species), exclude any subcategories that bring in irrelevant stuff (e.g. fictional characters). And maybe set a minimum article size of ~200 bytes to keep from getting redirects. It looks like there about 200 Hymenoptera articles that haven't been tagged (see this search) Plantdrew (talk) 17:06, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

I went through and tagged everything relevant above. The Hymenoptera articles will still need class and importance categorizations eventually. Kingofaces43 (talk) 00:50, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Wow, good work on the beetles. I've been leaving some Hymenoptera articles that are being actively worked on for university assignments without class and importance categories. I'll wait until the students are done with them. Plantdrew (talk) 01:30, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

And thanks for the inspiration. I was energized to go through all the smaller orders and tag articles with WikiProject Insects. Between Category:Flies, Category:Hemiptera, and Category:Odonata there are around 500 insect taxon articles that don't have an insect project tag yet. Category:Lepidoptera has maybe a hundred more that don't have the lep project tag (but many of those have the broader insect tag) I've tagged all the taxa in every other order (except Diptera, Hemiptera, Lepidoptera and Odonta, but there are likely other insect articles that haven't been categorized by taxon. Tagging all remaining insect taxa is on my to-do list, but a low priority at present. Plantdrew (talk) 05:22, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

I've no gone through the remaining Diptera, Hemiptera and Odonota. Every insect taxon article should now have a banner for WikiProject Insects or WikiProject Lepidoptera (provided the article had a taxon category in the first place). Plantdrew (talk) 00:43, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Great! I thought you mean all species for a second there. Someday I'd like to consider task forces by order for the project so people can go into their taxon of interest a little easier, but that's a task for another day by far. Kingofaces43 (talk) 04:04, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

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Discussion about moving Antenna (biology)

There is currently a discussion at the antenna talk page about potentially moving "Antenna (biology)" to another page (such as "Arthropod antenna" or similar) to avoid confusion. Please comment if you have opinions on the matter. M. A. Broussard (talk) 09:20, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Hymenoptera task force tagging

After a discussion with some of the veteran insect folks, I'm making a bot request to add {{Hymenoptera=yes}} to the non-ant Hymenoptera pages already having the WikiProject Insects tag. If anyone has any objections, please let me know! M. A. Broussard (talk) 22:30, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Apidae/Apoidea?

I'm interested in setting up a better page for a bee and bee allies project than that currently had by Project Apidae. There don't seem to be any articles tagged for this WikiProject, so it wouldn't necessarily be bad to start over (current group seems inactive after their class finished). Are there opinions about having it be a subset of Project Insects, like the ants team, or should it remain its own WikiProject? M. A. Broussard (talk) 01:49, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm generally in favor of turning an inactive project like this into a taskforce instead if it seems like it might get enough interest. I'd generally rather stick to mainly having orders as task forces, but if others think there would be enough support for a task force at this level, I think it's fine. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:02, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Ants is already a task force, meaning that a task force Hymenoptera would overlap. Is this fine? Otherwise it could be broken up into ants, bees, and wasps. Since two of the other "big five" orders are under a single project, having all Hymenoptera together would make sense procedurally. Anyone on the Ant Task Force want to comment? M. A. Broussard (talk) 02:17, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

I'll admit I'm iffy on having overlapping task forces. I admit I'd have a slight preference for Hymentopera, but ants is also something distinct enough that people would come together to specifically edit about. Same could go for separate bees and wasps taskforces, so it's going to depend on if there are enough people (and work) to make the task force worthwhile instead of creating taskforces for the sake of taxonomy too. Kingofaces43 (talk) 03:37, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Task forces seems to be generally favored over wikiprojects (see /Archive_3#Hymenoptera_task_forces), which leaves us to the name and scope. I think this is very true: "distinct enough that people would come together to specifically edit ... instead of creating taskforces for the sake of taxonomy". What is the common denominator of your "target audience"? Are people interested in Apoidea taxa interested in bees in general? That would make a good task force name, because everyone knows what a bee is. I think Apidae is too exclusive -- Wikipedia:WikiProject Apidae should probably had been set up as a course page in the first place -- but if presumptive task force editors are interested in this family only, go for that. At the end of the day, the name is not that important (unless you intend to start tagging articles right away); subpages can be moved. I'd say start with the area you are active in and take it from there.

The reason I prefer to keep ants separate from a shared Hymentopera task force is because "ant people" tend to be interested in ants only, and only tangentially interested in our friends the bees (and termites). jonkerz ♠talk 11:46, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

The implicit criterion is simply, are there enough people who want to work in the task force? The smaller the taxon, the less likely that is. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:57, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you all for your comments, and linking to the archive (which I did not know existed!) I think that having a subproject Hymenoptera would be good given the relatively small number of people working on the task. It would also give teachers and others interested in improving specific groups (bees, vespids, etc) a place to start from--this is what is so nice about the Ant Task Force's pages, they tell you what needs to be done. I have found myself contributing there despite being having a broader interest in Hymenoptera simply because there is no organization for the rest of the order. A Task Force Hymenoptera could explicitly exclude (or link to) Formicidae, rather than encompassing it. Given that ants are a fairly unique offshoot of Hymenoptera (wheras there's more gray area with the bee/wasp divide, and much diversity within wasps), could this be an acceptable solution? M. A. Broussard (talk) 01:10, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

@Jonkerz:@Kevmin:@Cwmhiraeth:@Burklemore1: - Hello Ant Task Force! I have been working on getting Hymenoptera Task Force up and running and have been trialing some changes to the WikiProject Insects template. Very few other WikiProjects have the differential attention/needs-image categories that WikiProject Insects has, and it's making it challenging to add a second task force. Would you guys mind if the ants articles needing attention or needing images were cross-listed in Category:Insects articles needing attention? As it is now, that category only contains beetles from Wikipedia:WikiProject_Beetles. Since the attention category is used relatively sparingly, this should be fine. What do you guys think about Category:Wikipedia requested images of insecta, though? It's a huge category already, but perhaps having everything in one place would be fine if they are cross-listed, as the only way to go through such a massive category is to divide it into smaller pieces. The other article categories (ratings/importance) would remain as they are. Any comments would be welcome! M. A. Broussard (talk) 23:11, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I would be okay with a overarching Hymenoptera task force, given that I tend to write on fossil Hymenopterans, neuropterans, mecopterans, and Okanagan highlands taxa. The articles needing images will always be a hard one to tackle due to the sheer number of species described. Thankfully for ants at least, antweb is creative commons released so finding images is much easier.--Kevmin § 14:12, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

@M. A. Broussard: I'm late to the party, but by "cross-listed", do you mean categorizing eg ant articles needing attention in both Category:Insects articles needing attention and Category:Ant articles needing attention? That would't be an issue at all, more likely a good thing. Regarding Category:Wikipedia requested images of insecta: yes, this category is way too crowded, and excluding pages already listed in the more specific categories would make it easier to find eg dragonfly articles without images. But actually making the main category browsable would require splitting it into even more subcategories. jonkerz ♠talk 22:30, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, the ant articles needing attention are now being listed in both categories. The images issue you mentioned (not being able to find minor groups) is already the case, with such a huge number of articles in Category:Wikipedia requested images of insecta. When Redrose and I were going through potential changes to the WikiProject Insects template, we found that there was a way to get the needs-image articles sorted into only one category (eg. ants or insecta), but this somehow prevented the "needs image" icon and text from displaying on the template of the talk page itself. We looked at dozens of other WikiProjects and couldn't find an example of a successful implementation of differential task-force tagging, so it may just be a limitation to the Wiki markup language. M. A. Broussard (talk) 23:40, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Template:Insects in culture

I've made and started to populate Template:Insects in culture. There is certainly scope for expansion, suggestions welcomed. There is currently no good parent article: Economic entomology covers only a part of the area; Cultural entomology is a disaster area (undergoing surgery) and Ethnoentomology might be a merge candidate with Cultural entomology, or might be distinct - there is a stalled merge discussion which it would be nice to restart and close one way or the other. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:32, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I tried to restart the conversation a few weeks ago (see notice), but didn't get any new comments. I'm for a merger. If you want to merge the two, I'm happy to put my !vote on either discussion page in support. M. A. Broussard (talk) 00:53, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

I see. Let's go ahead and merge to Ethnoentomology then. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:14, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Categorizing insects drafts via the banner

Anyone know how to make this work with the insect banner? Here's a tagged draft. Not categorizing per task force would also work, because we're not likely to have too many of these at the same time, but per task force would be really cool.

Looks like someone got it to work with {{WikiProject United States|SATF=yes}} (Category:Draft-Class San Antonio task force articles). Pinging a known template wizard: Redrose64. jonkerz ♠talk 23:05, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

At the moment {{WikiProject Insects}} does not have a |QUALITY_SCALE= parameter, so the 'standard' quality scale (FA, A, GA, B, C, Start, Stub, FL, List, NA) is in use. There are two ways that Draft-class can be added to this. If the WikiProject wants to add seven more values including Draft (Category, Disambig, Draft, File, Portal, Project and Template), add |QUALITY_SCALE=extended. But if the WikiProject just wants to add Draft and no others, add |QUALITY_SCALE=subpage and create Template:WikiProject Insects/class containing:

{{class mask<noinclude>/templatepage</noinclude>|{{{class|}}}
 |topic=Insects
 |draft=yes
}}

BTW when either of these are done, it won't be necessary to put |class=Draft on pages that are in Draft talk: space - it'll be detected automatically, see e.g. Draft talk:Asaki --Redrose64 (talk) 23:25, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I like the idea of having the rest of the seven article types for the WikiProject. It's difficult to find templates or project pages amongst the >2,000 NA-class articles! M. A. Broussard (talk) 23:40, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Consider adding another custom class for redirects? There are a few hundred redirects with an insects banner. Plantdrew (talk) 01:53, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

And many more without one! I've run across quite a number while trying to tag Hymenoptera task force articles, and I imagine I've only skimmed the surface. I think a redirect class would be a great idea. M. A. Broussard (talk) 06:11, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

If you want redirs too you need to go the subpage route, but you still have two broad choices, governed by what you put in Template:WikiProject Insects/class:

{{class mask<noinclude>/templatepage</noinclude>|{{{class|}}}
 |topic=Insects
 |draft=yes
 |redirect=yes
}}

will allow two extra classes, Draft and Redirect; whilst

{{class mask<noinclude>/templatepage</noinclude>|{{{class|}}}
 |topic=Insects
 |FQS=yes
 |redirect=yes
}}

will allow eight extra classes: Category, Disambig, Draft, File, Portal, Project, Redirect and Template. Of course, any combination of these eight can be set up by including the appropriate parameters as described at Template:Class mask#Optional parameters. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:36, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh, so that's why we have less classes. Adding all of them plus redirects seems like the best option. jonkerz ♠talk 10:37, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

@M. A. Broussard: Edits like this are unnecessary: until Project-class is actually added, it's converted to NA-class; and when Project-class does get added (by any of the above methods), the banner will auto-detect the namespace (in this case Wikipedia talk:) in order to set the class. So you don't need to go round adding |class=project - but conversely, if somebody has added |class=na, those should be removed. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:49, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I guess I got a bit over-excited. I'll undo the ones I've put in, and take out |class=na as I run across them (where appropriate) M. A. Broussard (talk) 00:39, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Help! It's not working with ants articles, see Talk:Paraneuretus dubovikoffi, which is categorized in Category:Redirect-Class Insects articles and Category:NA-Class Ant task force articles. Anyone knows why? jonkerz ♠talk 06:51, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Yep, we forgot to do this. I also created Category:Redirect-Class Ant task force articles which is populating e'en now. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:56, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

LOL, Damn, it looks like my fossil ants are causing a lot of problems!!--Kevmin § 13:02, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! :) jonkerz ♠talk 14:24, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Numerous genus-level templates?

Now that our project pages are being categorized better, I have taken the time to look through WikiProject Insects' templates. Most of them (283/350) are stub templates, which leaves [67 others]. Many of these are templates for species in an insect genus. By the nature of Wikipedia and insect diversity, these species lists are woefully incomplete (eg. Template:Navbox_Bombus). The issue has apparently been brought up before (insect discussion, plant discussion). I'm unfamiliar with mass-deletion requests, and thought I might raise the issue here before pursuing that route. M. A. Broussard (talk) 12:09, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, and these templates are impossible to maintain. There are three ant templates of this type:

• {{Navbox Chalepoxenus}} - is a synonym
• {{Navbox Strongylognathus}} - not up to date
• {{Navbox Myrmica}} - only includes articles on WP, but not even all of them

Imo, they're not really that useful for small (tiny) genera, and not practical for large genera. jonkerz ♠talk 06:50, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a fan of species in genus navboxes at all. Categories and the taxobox provide similar functionality for readers. Including lots of red links in navboxes is frowned on, which means they can't be done properly for the vast majority of genera. Navboxes create an extra level of maintenance (keeping up with taxonomic changes, adding blue links as articles are created), and the maintenance needed basically doesn't ever happen. I'd be happy to see these deleted (I've got my eye on a couple dozen mostly plant related species in genus navboxes that I intend to nominate for deletion in the near future). Plantdrew (talk) 16:01, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

In the main, Plantdrew must be right. There is a case, however, for popular genera like Bombus, even if these are incomplete: visitors may well find navigation useful, and are quite unlikely to spot the category entries at the end of articles on their first visit. I'd say that such popular entries should not be purely taxonomic: for Bombus, we could include links to topics like pollination and brood parasitism to assist visitors. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:47, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure there are enough Bombus-specific articles for that, but having a "Bees" / "Non-Apis bees" / "Pollinators" template might be good--to introduce the reader to other pollinators (overview articles on the common bee families, eusocial/solitary, domestication, use in agriculture. ecology?). If you do want to make a Bombus-specific template, we'd need articles on the bumblebee colony lifecycle, diseases of bumble bees, domesticated bemblebees, etc. M. A. Broussard (talk) 13:21, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

I will look into mass-deletion, since the group generally seems to be for it. M. A. Broussard (talk) 13:21, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Please provide your feedback at the Tfd page: Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2016_April_17#Insect genus navboxes — Preceding unsigned comment added by M. A. Broussard (talk • contribs) 10:21, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Multiple Category:Insects described in the 20th century subcategories

For example, how should Temnothorax inquilinus be categorized? It was first described as Chalepoxenus tauricus by Radchenko in 1989 and then given a new replacement name in 2015 (including a new author citation, 'Ward, Brady, Fisher & Schultz, 2015'). Or the Red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta Buren, 1972 vs Solenopsis saevissima wagneri Santschi, 1916). Ping: User:Burklemore1. We should document this somewhere like on Category:Species by year of formal description. jonkerz ♠talk 09:48, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

For plants, it is suggested (Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Description in year categories) that the year category should be the year a species was first described scientifically, not necessarily the year that is relevant for priority purposes. I'll note that the botanical code handles priority quite differently from the zoological code; priority for plants lays with the combination, not the epithet, so Hyacinthoides italica (L.) Rothm. has a date of 1944 for priority purposes, but was described by Linnaeus in 1753. It's simpler for animals where description date and priority date are usually the same, but suppressed names and replaced names still need to be accounted for. Going with the earlier year of actual first description makes some sense to me (given the category name), but I suspect in practice, animal description in year categories are usually filled just going off the binomial authority date given in the taxobox (without researching further to see if the species was described earlier under a replaced/suppressed name). Plantdrew (talk) 15:47, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh yes, so would this mean it is better to use its first description date? Burklemore1 (talk) 07:13, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

It's up to you. I might comment here a lot, but I don't work on insect articles much and don't want to tell the people who do work on insects what to do. I'm just offering perspective from another project that has had to wrestle with multiple possible dates. Plantdrew (talk) 16:35, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks User:Plantdrew. It would make sense to categorize Temnothorax inquilinus as described in 2015 only if the article was about the name, as opposed to the taxon that the name refers to, which is the case on WP. Adding both would also be OK imo. I've added a short note at Category:Animals by year of formal description. jonkerz ♠talk 13:07, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

"Usurpation"

The usage and primary topic of Usurpation is under discussion, see DRAFT TALK:Usurpation -- 70.51.200.96 (talk) 06:50, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Tagging redirect pages

Since we updated the category system, I was occasionally tagging WP Insects redirect pages with WP Insects tags and the various scientifically pertinent redirect codes, such as {{R from alternative scientific name|insect}}, similar to how WP Plants does it. @Shyamal: expressed some concern about this course of action and recommended a general discussion. My thought was that the tagging of redirects with WP insects, combined with classifying the redirects might make them searchable (eg. find all monotypic taxon redirects for WP insects). Thoughts? M. A. Broussard (talk) 09:48, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Extended content

There are 3 types of edits to consider with regard to redirects: 1) adding project banner to redirect talk pages 2) adding templates that categorize the type/purpose of the redirect (e.g. alternative scientific) 3) adding conventional categories. The vast majority of organism related redirects don't have project banners on their talk pages. Wikipedia:WikiProject Turtles is a notable exception, with almost 2000 redirects tagged for the project (representing almost 2/3 of all pages tagged for turtles). There were two of us who were doing some work put the project banner on plant related redirects. I basically only have done it in two cases; redirects due to monotypy (in theory these could be turned into articles) and redirects from scientific names to common names (with ~99% of plant articles at scientific names, it made sense to me to tag the handful of scientific names that weren't article titles). For a while I was removing banners from pages that were turned into redirects (e.g., when a species got sunk into synonymy), but I got some flak for that. While there doesn't seem to be much consensus to add project banners to redirects, removing them isn't uncontroversial either. Overall, I'm not sure that the benefits in adding project banners to redirects justify the work involved. There are several tools and reports that depend on project banners, but they generally don't work with redirects, or redirects are irrelevant to their function. The Article Alert report does work with redirects, but was recently upgdated so that it follows the redirect to its target to alert the appropriate projects; as long as the target has the project banner it's not necessary to tag redirects for Article Alert purposes. Tagging redirects does have some use for searching and meta-categorization, but that functionality can be approximated with redirect categorization templates. Adding redirect categorization templates is not at all controversial. The link to how WP Plants does it captures the major rcat templates for organism related redirects. In the past year and half, support has been added for subcategorization. Plants, fungi and spiders have been spun off into their own subcategories. If there is sufficient interest, subcategories for other groups of organisms could be added (it certainly doesn't hurt to include |insect in {{R from alternative scientific name}}, even though it doesn't do anything at the moment). Without a subcategory, it's not easy to search for say, monotypic insect taxa redirects, unless they have the talk page tagged with the project banner. But with a subcategory, there's no need to have the talk pages tagged for these searches. If you do want subcategories it would probably be good to figure out in advance how many you want. Will "insect" be sufficient, or would "ant", "hymenoptera", "beetle" and "lepidoptera" also be desired (I'm not sure it should get broken down any more finely then the existing taskforces and subprojects). Finally (and this is sort of a different topic), adding regular categories to redirects is usually discouraged, but there are some exceptions. The species described in year categories are intended to hold just species, not genera. For a monotypic genus, the year category should go on the species redirect. Plantdrew (talk) 20:54, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

My comment got pretty long, so I've collapsed it and will summarize. I've added WikiProject banners to the talk pages of some redirects, but I'm not really sure it's worth the effort. I do think adding redirect categorization templates (such as {{R from alternative scientific name}} is worthwhile, but I don't like doing so when it dumps everything into a massive category with fishes, birds, insects, etc. all intermingled. And it seems especially silly to add a talk page banner to flag one group of organisms in the intermingled category; better to set up subcategories. Support for subcategories can be added if there is sufficient interest in making use of them. If there is interest, insect editors should figure what subcategories they want. Just "insects", or also "beetles", "lepidoptera", "hymenoptera", "ants" to correspond to existing task forces and subprojects? Plantdrew (talk) 20:54, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately it is not just redirects relating to taxonomy but includes speedy deletions, spelling variations and other kinds of redirects including those to specific sections. The one I did not see much point in was wasp facts redirecting to wasp (diff). I would certainly agree that it is not worth the effort. (It could be automated at some point if absolutely needed by duplicating the banners on the redirection target.) Shyamal (talk) 12:53, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Tools for exporting AntCat references

antcat.org book and journal references can be exported on the reference's details page (expand the reference by clicking on it and follow the linked id to the details page, then click on 'Export' --> 'Wikipedia'; example reference, output). WP:COI/humblebrag notice: I made this.

For {{AntCat}} (based on cite web), see Template:AntCat/doc for a bookmarklet that can generate these.

Ping ant people: Kevmin, Burklemore1.

jonkerz ♠talk 02:58, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

This makes life much easier, thanks for notifying! Burklemore1 (talk) 07:10, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Euryomma (fly)

Hi insect lovers (I'm not :-P ), I added 7 species to the list of this genus and a link to the publication. I don't have access to the full article and those criminals ask me to pay 50 dollars to see it (scientific pubs should be available for free; they are paid for already by tax money), anyone who has access to the pub can help out on especially the Euryomma muisca (named after and linked on Muisca people) please? Thanks in advance, good day, Tisquesusa (talk) 12:56, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Pdf request

Does anyone have access to the type description for Ceratomyrmex that they could pass to me? Thanks!!--Kevmin § 15:22, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

@Kevmin: In case you haven't found it yet, it's now available on ResearchGate. jonkerz ♠talk 19:00, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Looking for feedback on a tool on Visual Editor to add open license text from other sources

Hi all

I'm designing a tool for Visual Editor to make it easy for people to add open license text from other sources, there are a huge number of open license sources compatible with Wikipedia including around 9000 journals. I can see a very large opportunity to easily create a high volume of good quality articles quickly. I have done a small project with open license text from UNESCO as a proof of concept, any thoughts, feedback or endorsements (on the Meta page) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 14:40, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Missing tags for Hymenoptera articles

I'm not sure what's gone on, but I was just checking the Hymenoptera task force articles, and there are fewer than I remember. A while ago, I filed a bot request, and thought that at least 1,000 articles were tagged due to this (the reduplicative Megachile articles are 1,500+ by themselves). Does anyone remember what the Hymenoptera task force totals were? I've been finding a lot of untagged articles while going through WP Vespidae's old stuff, and realized that there are still hundreds of articles in the Hymenoptera category tree not currently tagged with the task force. No page history I've looked at shows that the categories were removed. Ideas? M. A. Broussard (talk) 22:17, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I can't recall anything that should have done this when I was retagging a lot of WikiProject Insect articles at least. That being said, I wouldn't mind taking on adding the taskforce to articles that don't have it listed yet since it looks like a good AWB canddiate. Are there easily accessible lists of articles that should be included for the taskforce? I shouldn't have any issue adding a blank importance template, and someone can come along later to assess the article once it's tagged. With what I know of AWB, we'd need to have a bot request if we wanted to match the importance tags to WP Insects. Kingofaces43 (talk) 23:08, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I have taken a look through some of the articles in the category trees I suggested, and very few were tagged (but not none). The problem is there are 1,400+ wasp articles, 2,300+ bee articles, only 600-some of which are currently tagged with the task force. It would take a very long time to go through these and give them a quality rating. I believe that they are, by and large, deserving of the "low importance" flag. Would it be possible for you to give them all an identical flag, or would this also require a bot request (in which case getting the importance inherited would be preferable). M. A. Broussard (talk) 02:09, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

The more I think about it, it actually should be doable to functionally do an inherited importance with AWB. I would need to do a little bit a front end work, but if for some reason that doesn't work, it's absolutely no hassle at all just giving everything a blanket low importance. It'd be nice if AWB had some function to completely copy one line or tag and paste it slightly modified into the next line, but I'm not aware of that functionality yet. I probably won't get to it until next week, but if you just want to point me to the exact lists of articles to run this on, ~4,000 articles won't take long at all. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:21, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

It seems that the popular pages tool hasn't run since mid-April. It usually updates monthly, and I signed the hymenoptera task force up for it shortly after the last run (Wikipedia:WikiProject Insects/Hymenoptera task force/Popular pages is still a red-link). At this point, if somebody with AWB (or a bot) is going to tag the remaining Hymenoptera for the task force, I'd suggest making them all default to "low importance" for now, and going back through later when the popular pages report is live to upgrade importance for the articles that get a decent number of page views. If you want taxonomic rank to play a role in the importance ratings (e.g., families as mid or better importance), it's possible to search for articles with "idae" in the title to in order to re-rate those. Plantdrew (talk) 04:16, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

The pages that were supposed to be tagged by the bot, and I still stand by the assessment, were these:

• Category:Wasp taxonomy and all subcategories
• Category:Bee taxonomy and all subcategories
• Category:Vespoidea

I think that going back and tagging families as mid-importance would be a reasonable idea, provided that it didn't over-run previous assessments of high/top importance. There are a lot of tiny families in Hymenoptera, and it can be challenging to find good information on them. Thank you both for helping look into the (apparently numerous) issues coming up! M. A. Broussard (talk) 01:46, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

The bot had good timing. AWB was actually going to make things tricky for a few cases I was trying, and I decided to just put work down for the night. Kingofaces43 (talk) 14:03, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Trying to identify this insect

Found a mile or so inland on the Sonoma Coast in California.

http://imgur.com/a/VFK9P

Thanks in advance! Waggie (talk) 16:31, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

@Waggie: Looks like a cerambicid beetle. For a better (potentially even species-level) identification, I would post the photo on bugguide in their "ID Request" section or on iNaturalist. M. A. Broussard (talk) 22:27, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Common name for Sapygidae

From the article on Sapygidae: "There does not seem to be a common English name, but club-horned wasps (translating the German name Keulhornwespen - in reference to the distinctive thickening of the antennae) seems as good a name as any, though various other groups of wasps also have clubbed or thickened antennae."

Not sure about the rights and wrongs of 'inventing' an English common name based on one used in another language. In fact there does appear to be an English name, at least in scientific usage: "sapygid wasps". Suggest changing the article accordingly.

(I hope this comment is in the right place; on the Talk page for Sapygidae it suggests taking part in the insects discussion rather than talking there).

Robin (talk) 14:09, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

FYI, there isn't anything at the talk page that says discussion should occur here instead of at the respective talk page, but you do get more the attention of more people this way. Without seeing the actual source, I highly doubt the the German source is discussing any potential English common name, but it was rather someone's personal WP:SYNTH of the source. I think we're fine just not mentioning anything about English common names in this case. Kingofaces43 (talk) 14:43, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

On the talk page for the article in question it says "If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion ..." - that's what I was referring to.

Thanks for your answer.

Robin (talk) 15:27, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

Ah I see where the confusion was. That's for participating in the project itself, not so much on article specific content. Kingofaces43 (talk) 17:41, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

There doesn't seem to be much of an English name for them, but "Sapygid Wasp" gets around 1000 hits on Google, so there is some precedent for that. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:18, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

Are there blood eating butterflies?

At the Hematophagy article there is an image of butterflies supposedly feeding from blood on a sock. This strikes me as rather unlikely for a nectar feeder. There is no common or scientific given so I have not been able to verify this. Do others think this is a likely behaviour for a butterfly? DrChrissy ^(talk) 19:00, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

I know people use pretty disgusting mixtures to attract Purple Emperors, but blood? Hmm. There is a report of a "Vampire Moth" on Nat. Geog., make of it what you will. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:08, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks very much for that article. I think the last few paragraphs are very important. It is suggested that blood feeding is so the male can provide the female with a nuptial gift of salt. We have all seen photos of butterflies swarming over salt licks, so this explanation is at least plausible. DrChrissy ^(talk) 19:19, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

Recilia glabra

Can anyone identify the binomial authorities, and either link them to articles or turn the links into redlinks? I haven't been able to find their paper. (1) Cai links to a DAB page, and is a common Chinese surname. (2) I have my doubts as to whether botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton (died 1934) described a bug in 2001... Narky Blert (talk) 19:49, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

It's Cai Ping and Kerry Britton. See here. Plantdrew (talk) 21:42, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Notice to participants at this page about adminship

Many participants here create a lot of content, may have to evaluate whether or not a subject is notable, decide if content complies with BLP policy, and much more. Well, these are just some of the skills considered at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship.

So, please consider taking a look at and watchlisting this page:

• Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Optional RfA candidate poll

You could be very helpful in evaluating potential candidates, and even finding out if you would be a suitable RfA candidate.

Many thanks and best wishes,

Anna Frodesiak (talk) 17:46, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Proofreading

Hello all, I intend to translate from French to English the article about Colilodion schulzi, a small rove beetle from the Philippines. Would someone be interested and kind enough to proofread the English language? Thanks, Totodu74 (talk) 10:50, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

I finished the translation, I rely on you guys to make sure my English writing is as close as possible of the Shakespeare's language. ;) Totodu74 (talk) 18:08, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

2016 Community Wishlist Survey Proposal to Revive Popular Pages

Greetings WikiProject Insects/Archive 3 Members!

This is a one-time-only message to inform you about a technical proposal to revive your Popular Pages list in the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey that I think you may be interested in reviewing and perhaps even voting for:

• Fix and improve Mr.Z-bot's popular pages report

If the above proposal gets in the Top 10 based on the votes, there is a high likelihood of this bot being restored so your project will again see monthly updates of popular pages.

Further, there are over 260 proposals in all to review and vote for, across many aspects of wikis.

Thank you for your consideration. Please note that voting for proposals continues through December 12, 2016.

Best regards, Stevietheman — Delivered: 18:01, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

New article - Ralph Hopping

Any improvements (whether adding other taxa, or shooting down my mistakes in flames) would be welcome. I'm mildly nervous, because Hopping & Hopping are named as authorities for Cortodera coniferae (1947) - and Ralph died in 1941. Narky Blert (talk) 00:59, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Tons of new images to sort and use

Neolochmaea dilatipennis, one of 6k insect photographs waiting to be used

Yesterday, Judy Gallagher from flickr relicensed the collection of her 6 thousand photographs so they can be uploaded to Commons. Most of her photographs are high quality shoots of identified insects from eastern US, see her albums. I uploaded couple hundred and was adding them to Wikipedia articles and wikidata. In many cases her photographs are the best or the only photo of a given organism, and many of them do not have articles on en-wiki, so it looks like the main beneficiary of the collection so far are a few small wikipedias that used a bot to create articles based on Wikidata. I will continue uploading the rest of the collection, and placing it in c:Category:New photographs by Judy Gallagher but help is needed with adding the photographs to articles and Wikidata. See the category for help suggestion. --Jarekt (talk) 14:50, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

Proposed merges

Please see the discussion here regarding proposed merges of the articles Lepidopterist, Aurelian (entomology), and Lepidopterology. Cheers, --Animalparty! (talk) 03:40, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Article exposure

Neopalpa is linked from Neopalpa donaldtrumpi. The latter will get homepage exposure including a photo in a few hours. The former article isn't in good shape. It would be good if members of this project could give Neopalpa some attention. Schwede66 18:58, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

WikiJournal of Science promotion

The WikiJournal of Science is a start-up academic journal which aims to provide a new mechanism for ensuring the accuracy of Wikipedia's scientific content. It is part of a WikiJournal User Group that includes the flagship WikiJournal of Medicine.. Like Wiki.J.Med, it intends to bridge the academia-Wikipedia gap by encouraging contributions by non-Wikipedians, and by putting content through peer review before integrating it into Wikipedia. Since it is just starting out, it is looking for contributors in two main areas: Editors See submissions through external academic peer review Format accepted articles Promote the journal Authors Original articles on topics that don't yet have a Wikipedia page, or only a stub/start Wikipedia articles that you are willing to see through external peer review (either solo or as in a group, process analagous to GA / FA review) Image articles, based around an important medical image or summary diagram If you're interested, please come and discuss the project on the journal's talk page, or the general discussion page for the WikiJournal User group.

T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 10:38, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Neopalpa donaldtrumpi rfc

As a note there is now a rather contested RFC happening at Talk:Neopalpa donaldtrumpi on what details of the type description should be included in the article. Further opinions are needed to give clarity on how to proceed.--Kevmin § 06:34, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Donald Trump and insects

Unfortunately, it looks like we have another unfortunate insect overlap with a controversial topic (similar to Gamergate ants). Neopalpa donaldtrumpi is an insect that was named after Donald Trump because one of its key features is a head covered by yellowish white scales. The other primary identifying feature listed in the source's key is genital differences compared to the other species in the Neopalpa genus; males have overall less prominent genital features, and females possess only a few setae in their genitalia.

At some point, people started making memes out of this about Donald Trump related to appendage size. There's now discussion on the talk page where some editors are saying information in a species key if it talks about genital size is not important, and that basic information about the differences in species genital features (such as this) should not be included. There are issues with policy such as ignoring sources, WP:WEIGHT, and WP:NOTCENSORED.

It seems like there's a combination of editors there not being familiar insect morphology papers or that genitalia are commonly used as an identification feature. That and political related concerns are seeping in to what should be a cut and dry scientific description without being too technical on morphological terms. It seems like something that's silly that shouldn't be disputed, but that's why I'm asking for more eyes from editors familiar with entomology topics like this. Kingofaces43 (talk) 00:17, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

There are some. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:18, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Reassessment request

Hi All,

Could I please submit the updated page Tansy Beetle for an quality reassessment as I'm working on updating it further and would appreciate the benchmark. Hoping its about 'C' class now, but happy to take pointers on where to expand (or indeed if there is a more useful place to suggest peer reassessments that I'd missed). I would have done so at WikiProject Beetles, but the group is only semi-active at the minute. Cheers. Zakhx150 (talk) 12:31, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

@Zakhx150: Done. I think C class is fair. But it would be good to have a section on the taxonomic history (it was originally placed in another genus, and I have a strong suspicion that other species (e.g. C. herbacea) may have been split out since Linnaeus described it). The distribution and habitat section is pretty heavy on the United Kingdom; it'd be nice to have more on distribution elsewhere, and I don't feel like habitat is really covered (from the food plants I infer that habitat is likely meadows and wetlands, not so much in forests). Plantdrew (talk) 22:56, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

• @Plantdrew: Thanks for the reassess and the general comments there, much appreciated. I appreciate its a bit York/UK-centric at the minute, but that's where all the conservation excitement is going on and I see that first hand. It's a fair point and I'll see what I can do there. Cheers. Zakhx150 (talk) 08:49, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

  @Plantdrew: I've improved the article throughout since last I asked. Still a bit stumped on this reference to it being split out from its original genus. I'm not particularly strong on taxonomy to be honest. Any wisdom? Zakhx150 (talk) 10:40, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

@Zakhx150: The article is definitely improved, but you do seem to be getting a bit in over your head on taxonomy. I'll take a stab at it. Plantdrew (talk) 19:57, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: Having gone from Start to B, I'd love to see this through to GA. Any further suggestions appreciated.Zakhx150 (talk) 12:27, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Are Bees domesticated? You are invited to join a discussion.

Please join our discussion at Talk:Beekeeping#Domestication. More that opinions, we need sources that claim whether bees are domesticated or not. Thanks for your help. Cliff (talk) 15:17, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Which species of bee is this?

@Kingofaces43: or @Dyanega: or anyone else, I was wondering if you know which species of bee is in this photo or if you know someone who would know:

Thank you. PumpkinSky talk 22:10, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm not absolutely certain but appears to be the common honey bee, Apis mellifera. --Animalparty! (talk) 22:23, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

That would be my rough guess too, but I'm also not trained in bee identification to species. My preference is to usually use pictures from reliable sources that identify the species rather than us doing it ourselves. Kingofaces43 (talk) 02:16, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

I work specialize in pollinators, and I am absolutely certain that, given the locale, it is Apis mellifera, @PumpkinSky:

Common whitetail

• Common whitetail (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Would someone please check recent edits which added sections on Mating, Life cycle and Anatomy. There is a problem with the references, but the main issue is that the text contains text like "[4]" for a ref. There are some tab characters in the article so it might have been prepared in a word processor and pasted in. Johnuniq (talk) 10:41, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

 Done Chiswick Chap seems to have taken care of this. Thanks for the heads up! M. A. Broussard (talk) 23:59, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Popular pages report

We – Community Tech – are happy to announce that the Popular pages bot is back up-and-running (after a one year hiatus)! You're receiving this message because your WikiProject and related task forces have signed up to receive the popular pages report. Every month, Community Tech bot will post on Wikipedia:WikiProject Insects/Popular pages and the subpage /Popular pages of WikiProject Insects/ant task force|the ant task force.

We've made some enhancements to the original report. Here's what's new:

• The pageview data includes both desktop and mobile data.
• The report will include a link to the pageviews tool for each article, to dig deeper into any surprises or anomalies.
• The report will include the total pageviews for the entire project (including redirects).

We're grateful to Mr.Z-man for his original Mr.Z-bot, and we wish his bot a happy robot retirement. Just as before, we hope the popular pages reports will aid you in understanding reach of WikiProject Philosophy, and what articles may be deserving of more attention. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at meta:User talk:Community Tech bot.

Warm regards, The Community Tech Team, through Johan (WMF) (talk) 11:44, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

ID help

I really know embarrassingly little about bumblebees. Any idea what this is? It's in Michigan, last summer. Guettarda (talk) 22:07, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

@Guettarda: This is probably a queen of Bombus impatiens, though there is a small possibility that it is a queen of Bombus griseocollis--the difference is whether or not the spot on the top of the thorax is actually due to black hairs on the bee (B. griseocollis) or if there merely appears to be a black spot due to short yellow hairs showing the black exoskeleton through them (B. impatiens). Given the locale, B. impatiens is the more likely of the two. M. A. Broussard (talk) 01:39, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks very much! Guettarda (talk) 03:00, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Taxobox -> Speciesbox?

Hello fellow members of WP Insects! There has been some talk by a few of you over various pages about using the speciesbox/automatic taxobox templates rather than the historical taxobox template. As far as I'm aware, there's no official stance here at WP Insects about which one should be used. Several editors have expressed interest in moving away from taxoboxes to increase the maintainability of our thousands of pages when new taxonomical information comes out. Should we recommend the usage of the more centralized speciesbox/automatic taxobox or keep things how they presently are? M. A. Broussard (talk) 07:12, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Is this related to this proposed move discussion for {{Automatic taxobox}}, or simply whether to replace instances of {{taxobox}} with {{automatic taxobox}}? Might be sensible to see how the move proposal plays out (and to direct relevant comments there). --Animalparty! (talk) 09:02, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Unrelated, I presume. There's been been a lot of (largely undiscussed) effort recently to switch manual taxoboxes to automatic ones. There were 24,000 species using the automatic taxobox system in December 2016; there are 38,000 today (not all of this increase is insects, but they are a big part of it). Discussion of this should happen; I raised the issue at WP:PLANTS a few weeks ago. Thanks M. A. Broussard for bringing it up here. Plantdrew (talk) 01:22, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, this was unrelated to that move request, which I am only now aware of. Thanks for the heads up about that. M. A. Broussard (talk) 02:12, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I think automatic taxoboxes should be recommended (recommended, not required and let's not say that manual taxoboxes are "deprecated"). I'm increasingly concerned about the ability of Wikipedia to keep the information in taxoboxes up to date. Overall editor numbers have declined from their peak, but the number of articles with taxoboxes continues to grow. There's an enormous number of insect articles and a handful of editors working on keeping them up to date. Taxonomy will march on, but I'm not sure if Wikipedia will if it continues to rely heavily on manual taxoboxes. The automatic taxobox templates are much improved since there was last any broad discussion of rolling them out (circa 2011). Status quo seems to be that using them should be decided on a WikiProject basis, and WP:INSECTS has never had any discussion. Let's have it now (and bring the Lepidoptera project in to the loop). Plantdrew (talk) 01:22, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

I have left a note at WP Beetles and WP Lepidoptera so they can join the discussion. M. A. Broussard (talk) 02:38, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the discussion link M. A. Broussard at WP Beetles. Full disclosure: I can honestly say I've never used an auto-taxobox as an editor or creator, and my taxonomy skill is, frankly, amateur. However looking at the conceptual difference between that and manual and auto taxoboxes I'd have no problem in personally using it and recommending it to others if I get on well with it. If we reach consensus to the positive, I'd be happy to encourage/disseminate amongst the few regulars at Beetles, once I've actually tried it first. Looking at it as an amateur entomologist rather than a wikipedian, it looks straight forward enough and would probably be quite useful personally to those in a similar situation to myself. Plantdrew speaks sense talking about 'recommended not required' - I think this is particularly relevant to the Insect Wikiproject with its 59k articles because of the issues of standardisation we'd encounter, either backdating as editors or patrolling new articles by non-project affiliated contributors if we'd want to make it a requirement.Zakhx150 (talk) 20:33, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

I was hoping to get some responses from more WP members. I know that some of the ants task force are using speciesboxes now, but hearing from them on this issue would be good. I personally think it'd be a good idea to move this direction, though, as Zakhx150 mentioned, it will be a tough row to hoe with 59k articles! I think that it will be worth it in the long run, though--I'm presently working on getting the bee taxonomy sorted out, but even that small group is going to take quite a while as every single page must be edited. Perhaps there is a way to do batch conversions (I am thinking here specifically of the reduplicated 1500 Megachile species articles) automatically? Patrolling new pages should be easier--I know that there are a few people patrolling new pages to add them to the wikiproject, though I don't think that taxoboxes are being converted to speciesboxes in that patrolling check at the moment. M. A. Broussard (talk) 23:58, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

hello Broussard and all other "insect"-interested persons.

I mostly create or edit articles concerning lepidoptera or moths but once in a while it happens to me to hit other types of living like plants, or just simply other kinds of animal lifem geographicsm or others - and noticed also that different kinds of speciesbox are in use. Actually - these confuse me more than I would like. Sometimes I abandon an edit just because I dont just want to mix them up.

This is a general problem at wikipedia - sometimes very hard to look thru. Rgds I'm so tired (talk) 13:50, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm relatively new to the automatic taxobox and speciesbox format, but I didn't find it more difficult than the original taxobox format; the one issue could be one-time edits from unregistered users, as it's not immediately obvious how to edit the tree (but you can do it by clicking the pencil icon--see Colletidae for an example). Would you be willing to give these taxoboxes a try? Their code is much shorter than the traditional ones as you only need to write taxon = Colletes instead of genus = '''''Colletes''''', without needing to copy the rest of the family tree. The other parameters (eg. for images, captions, range maps, subdivisions, etc) are largely the same. I'd be willing to write a tutorial on the WP insects front page if you (or others) feel it would help. M. A. Broussard (talk) 02:08, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Which is the real "Florida leaf-footed bug"?

Both Leptoglossus phyllopus and Acanthocephala femorata are named as the "Florida leaf-footed bug" in their pages. Acanthocephala femorata claims the page Florida leaf-footed bug but Leptoglossus phyllopus seems to have much more info available about it. One or both pages could use some clarification/updates. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.189.155.8 (talk) 22:58, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

A problem with common names is that they often refer to multiple species. You are right that both species above have the common name "Florida leaf-footed bug". I've put a hatnote at Florida leaf-footed bug (Acanthocephala femorata) leading to Leptoglossus phyllopus which should help a little.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  23:27, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Discussion of article title at Grasshopper

There is a new discussion of the appropriate title for the article (Grasshopper vs Caelifera) at Talk:Grasshopper#Taxonomy. Editors are invited to contribute. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:02, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Derobrachus geminatus vs Derobrachus hovorei

Currently, the page on Derobrachus geminatus contains an entire article's worth of information on Derobrachus hovorei. While the two are similar, "palo verde root borer" is generally used to refer to D. hovorei, and the photos on the D. geminatus article are in fact photos of D. hovorei. In contrast, the page of D. hovorei is a pitiful stub. In fact, even the references listed on the D. geminatus page identify D. hovorei as the palo verde beetle, so I'm unsure how this mishap occurred. Hopefully someone with greater site credibility can go ahead and switch the content of the pages? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.180.128.146 (talk) 08:42, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Scientific v. common names

Searching for the "pea leafminer" I came across Chromatomyia horticola, for which we have a stub article. However this common name is also given to Liriomyza huidobrensis, an invasive species for which I am currently writing an article. This latter species is also known by the name "serpentine leafminer", and guess what, we already have an article Serpentine leaf miner referring to a different species again, Liriomyza brassicae.

Would it not be better to have a policy that such species, which are often known by different common names in different parts of the world, are always listed under their scientific names? Cwmhiraeth (talk) 18:10, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

I thought the idea was that we only used common names as article titles when they were unique. Otherwise we use the scientific name, mentioning the common name(s) in passing. The common names can of course be listed on disambiguation pages. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:42, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

While Aphis fabae was undergoing its GA review, it was forcibly changed to "Black bean aphid", a move which I did not approve of. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 19:22, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that. But it seems to be quite a widely-used name, without conflicts? Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:27, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Well, I call these "blackfly" when I find them on my beans, and this is a widely used name. But Black fly has a different meaning in Wikipedia. All these insects would be better, in my view, to be listed under the scientific name with redirects from vernacular names. Cwmhiraeth

(talk) 09:30, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

The Wikipedia cannon for black fly is the one I am familiar with, though the members of that family are locally called "sandflies" not "blackflies". I think this is a case where Wikipedia is a bit US-centric (?) M. A. Broussard (talk) 04:04, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

When the names are ambiguous, you are certainly correct. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:36, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

The situations above are why we should be using the taxon names universally, with only a few exceptions. We are here to educate, part of that being using the most correct term for the articles, not the most commonly used lay name, especially given that less then 2% of all taxa will even have a lay name, making them very odd exceptions as the encyclopedia grows.--Kevmin § 00:21, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes and no. Education is not our primary role, which is to inform. That requires us to be both trustworthy and approachable. No doubt we fall over on both of those far too often, but making ourselves unapproachably graeco-latinate for the cases which you rightly acknowledge as "only a few exceptions" won't help. We always provide taxon names in the lead, in taxoboxes and if need be in redirects, and that's sufficient. Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:52, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Sigh. My ideal would be for use of scientific names exclusively, however we have rules (Naming conventions (fauna)) that cover all animals. It is fine for birds and mammals but gets annoying if only one member of a genus has a common name (so is at that name) and all other members are at scientific names. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:43, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

We aren't making ourselves "unapproachably graeco-latinate" for the exact reason that you just stated, the vernacular name is right there in the lead, and in a notable portion of cases taxa have multiple vernacular names anyways, making it even more logical to use the taxon name. Logic shows that the pages should be at the taxon name, not on an arbitrary vernacular.--Kevmin § 19:59, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

I think that common vernacular terms should be at the common name (eg. "tree", "insect", or "fish"). However, a number of insect species--especially today--have "common names" which are promoted by single groups or organizations, such as conservancy agencies, which are not actually the "common name" because too few people know about the organism for a common name to gain traction. One such problem, to pick one from my area of expertise is Osmia lignaria, which I have heard called the following: blue bee, blue mason bee, blue orchard bee, blue orchard mason bee, mason bee, and orchard bee. There are a large number of species in Osmia and the related genus Hoplitis which could have any of these names if they were given a common name. It's worse for bumblebees because the recent conservation craze has led to people giving the bees a number of inventive names, which are not used at all by the public. I believe that more than 95% of insect species articles should be at the scientific name as per the MOS (and many are). However, well-known insects such as the gypsy moth or silkworm could probably live happily at the common name (though neither do at this time). Personally, and I am biased as an entomologist, I would prefer most insects be at the scientific name; but I know from my many educational outreach interactions with the public that the Latin binomial clouds rather than elucidates matters for the majority of non-scientists I've encountered. In cases where there really are a number of taxa at the same common name (especially for pest insects), a disambig page and articles at the scientific name is the way to go, but in cases where there is a clear common name, the page should probably live there. I think it's up to us as individuals to use our best judgement when creating and moving pages. M. A. Broussard (talk) 04:04, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Carabus linnei and Carabus linnaei - same insect?

Hello, are Carabus linnei and Carabus linnaei the same? Both have the same binomial authority, Panzer, one for 1812, one for 1813. The only link that works in either of these pages has a different year (1810)... I noticed this while trying to de-orphan some of these beetle stubs, but I don't know anything about beetles, or have any references to refer to. If someone could point me in the direction of a reliable reference, I would be grateful. Thanks. DferDaisy (talk) 03:51, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

@DferDaisy: The website you want is carabidae.org, but unfortunately it requires a subscription to view pages. The source of your confusion is that the species Carabus linnei was described by Panzer in 1810, but the subspecies C. linnei linnei was described in 1812 (also by Panzer). Carabus linnei folgariacus was described by Born in 1813, which is probably where the third date came from. As for Carabus linnaei, I am not certain, but I believe it is a misspelling as there is only one mention of that spelling prior to 1999 in the Google Scholar literature search, and it occasionally occurs alongside the linnei spelling in more modern documents where there is clearly only one species being represented, presumably as a typographical error. My best bet is that the appropriate reference is "Carabus linnei Panzer, 1810". Thanks for looking after the orphaned stubs! M. A. Broussard (talk) 05:14, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

@M. A. Broussard: Thanks for looking into this. I'll take another look at the two pages and see if I figure out what to do next. DferDaisy (talk) 02:40, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Broussard, shouldn't that be Panzer 1810, not 1910, then? In any case, the date given for linnaei (1813) does not correspond with the category (1832), or rather the reverse situation. Tisquesusa (talk) 03:41, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

@Tisquesusa: Good catch; I should proofread better when talking about typographical errors! I have amended my post above to indicate the correct dates (all in the 1800's). M. A. Broussard (talk) 23:07, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Insects of New Zealand edit-a-thon, 3 September 2017

Members of this wikiproject might be interested in participating, remotely or in person, in an upcoming edit-a-thon. With the support of the University of Auckland, I'll be helping run an all-day workshop centred on the 52 species depicted on the Insects of New Zealand playing cards. It'll be 10:00 am – 4:00 pm NZST on the Tāmaki campus, free to attend, with lunch and refreshments supplied. We have 7 signed up so far, mostly postgraduate students new to Wikipedia, so we could use experienced editors. If anybody else wants to join in please go to the #NZInsectCards project page for more details, including the list of species, and to register. Remote participants from all around the world are welcome! Giantflightlessbirds (talk) 03:46, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Ravet

Hi, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask a question, i couldn't find a noticeboard. I've created a disambiguation page for the name 'Ravet' as i was working on some Indian village articles of that name. I came across references to a beetle called the 'Ravet' in a few sources such as here,here and here. The sources say it is a maylfy/cock-chaffer type beetle from Guadaloupe, the latter source suggested it is a type of Cancrelas/Blatta Indica. Does anybody know where i can find the article on this specific beetle? I was hoping to create a Ravet (insect) redirect to said article and list it on the Ravet disambiguation page. Thanks Cesdeva (talk) 16:25, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

From what I can find, this seems to be a French term for "cockroach" (or whatever the local etymology considered such) that was used in the French Antilles. As such I don't think it would merit a redirect, not being a common English term. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 17:18, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Arthropoda or Euarthropoda

At Arthropod, the phylum has been changed from Arthropoda to Euarthropoda. Is there a consensus about that? Should insect articles' taxoboxes be changed? I was just surprised to see it and wondered.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  01:35, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't think there was any discussion that lead to a consensus for that. It's apparently based on this paper which says "...leads to the abandonment of the original meaning of Arthropoda sensu von Siebold (1848), as its strict diagnosis and taxonomic scope have become distorted in the recent literature" (von Siebold's sense included tardigrades). I don't see that any taxonomic databases are recognizing Euarthropoda as a phylum (and from my quick skim of the Ortega Hernandez paper, I'm not seeing that Euarthropoda is being treated as a ranked taxon there). I don't think at this point that manual taxoboxes should be changed en masse to show Euarthropoda as a phylum (articles using automatic taxoboxes have already been changed in en masse, but could easily be changed back with a single edit to a template). Plantdrew (talk) 01:05, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

*Sigh*, another reclassification du jour. Let's not throw thousands of articles, and over a hundred years of conventional wisdom, into unfamiliar chaos simply because one paper suggests so. --Animalparty! (talk) 02:28, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

I concur. Honestly, I don't think it should be on the automatic taxobox either -- it causes unnecessary confusion because of the articles that list phylum as Arthropoda, and there's no way those will all need to be fixed just because of some paper. Snorepion (talk) 15:09, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Use of Category:Insects described in ____ for species with nomina nova

Hi, so I was wondering which category, Category:Insects described in 1950 or Category:Insects described in 2014, should be at the bottom of Tetramorium inquilinum. The initial species description was in 1950, but it received a replacement name in 2014. It's unclear to me if this category is literally meant for the first formal description of a taxon or the year of its present author citation. Sorry if this is a silly question, thanks for any guidance :) Umimmak (talk) 23:34, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

WP: BEETLES

Dear mother project, I'm here on behalf of the 'semi-active' sub project WP: BEETLES just to highlight some of the excellent work that has been undertaken in the last 12 months and to highlight that the project as a standalone is still in the minds of some of us. I've personally adopted the organisation of the project page and keep updating it when necessary, so the main project pages should be fairly up to scratch. Today, with the promotion of Colorado potato beetle to GA status, we've hit a new milestone of 5 - yes 5! - articles at that status and I've re-adjusted the target to the heady-heights of 10. Four of these have been promoted during 2017, including the top article Beetle. FA status remains elusive, but a serious and potential goal for this project.

As beetle articles represent approximately half of all the WP: INSECT articles there is a huge crossover with the WP:INSECTS section and I always welcome the tagging of both projects on talk pages and we always welcome everything from one-off or occasional contributions and new formalised members. Particular thanks to Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs), Plantdrew (talk · contribs), and Hectonichus (talk · contribs) for additions, advice, taxonomic corrections, reviews, copy-editing, article creations etc. - your efforts have not gone un-noticed and have helped my Wikipedia editing no end.

Moving forward there are two on-going tasks: one is to improve the articles for the Coleopteran sub-orders Adephaga, Archostemata, Myxophaga, Polyphaga, & Protocoleoptera (two of which are Stubs, two are Starts, and one is C). The second is the ongoing improvement of a single species page to GA status. As Hercules beetle is regularly placed near the top of the monthly view table that where I'm going next. Hope to see you there.

Thanks, happy thoughts et al. Zakhx150 (talk) 21:12, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Importance grading scheme

Who decides how important an article is for the project and how do they decide it? I disagree with the listed importance on several pages I've come across, some way too high and some too low in my opinion (maybe some editors are a bit beetle biased?). I don't want to make any enemies, and would be more inclined to make changes towards increasing rather than decreasing. What are some appropriate actions I could take if I think something is mis-graded? Thank you, Zelomorpha (talk) 19:53, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

@Zelomorpha:, I don't think you'll really step on any toes if you change importance assessments. Importance ratings have been mostly done haphazardly and inconsistently. It would help to have somebody review them and change them. In my opinion, Top/High importance should be reserved for well known groups (orders, families) of insects that would be familiar to most lay people. Very few individual species deserve High importance. However, there are a lot of species/genera that are rated Low that probably deserve to be Mid. I think a rough rule of thumb for Mid importance might be; do non-entomologists ever write about them? Species that have some significance to humans are more important, whether that importance be as crop pests, disease vectors, pollinators, spectacular appearance, widespread presence in anthropogenic habitats, etc. Page views can provide some guidance; I'd think that most of the 1000 most viewed articles (Wikipedia:WikiProject Insects/Popular pages) probably deserve Mid importance. Plantdrew (talk) 22:25, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

I'd been wondering this myself; these are good guidelines, Plantdrew. I'll apply them to some of the New Zealand species, which have high cultural importance, especially to Māori, but are currently rated Low. Thanks! Giantflightlessbirds (talk) 03:42, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

@Giantflightlessbirds: and @Zelomorpha: as Plantdrew stated, it's largely haphazard and often arbitrary. Some projects have explanatory guidelines for importance: see WikiProject Animals/Assessment#Importance scale. Based on that text, a good rule of thumb is "how likely is this article to be viewed by a member of the general public needing thorough coverage?" Thus the single species Western honey bee, with widespread economic, cultural, and biological interest is of a higher importance than Stingless bee, covering a whole family of bees, but primarily of interest to biologists. Keep in mind that WikiProjects are for tools for groups of editors on a single topic, and articles can have different importance rankings for different projects: an insect species with high Maori significance might rank higher on WikiProject New Zealand (and/or the Māori task force) or WikiProject Polynesia, but lower on WikiProject Insects, simply because insect-oriented editors may be less likely to be knowledgeable on Polynesian cultural issues, or the species is relatively less prominent compared to insects as a whole. The best thing we can do is strive to improve as many articles as we can, while keeping an eye on those most likely to be seen on a daily basis. --Animalparty! (talk) 21:09, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Interesting and good. That suggests that anything mentioned in Template:Insects in culture must be of at least mid importance and probably high. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:52, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Suggests, but doesn't require. It really is arbitrary, and at this point, most high importance articles have already been created. If you think reassessing will lead to practical improvements, have at it, but I don't think List of insect-inspired songs merits the same importance as Beekeeping. --Animalparty! (talk) 22:57, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

It seems we violently agree. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:04, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Cerambycidae cleanup

Hello. I have noticed that many cerambycid species articles have the genus in bold in the taxobox despite being part of a polytypic genus. I have been, and will likely continue to remove the bold from these articles from time to time, but this is quite a large job and some assistance would be appreciated if possible. Cheers. Ypna (talk) 08:12, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

A link to a DAB page

Utecha trivia links to the DAB page clavus, which contains no relevant-looking entry. Insect morphology is no assistance; it too links to the DAB page, and I've just {{dn}} tagged the link. Can one of you experts help solve this problem? Narky Blert (talk) 13:44, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Heteroptera has an illustration with the clavus marked. Shyamal (talk) 14:22, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

That doesn't really help. Links to DAB pages are errors per WP:INTDAB, and need to be fixed. Narky Blert (talk) 10:56, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedian at Large grant proposal needs volunteers and endorsements

I'm applying for a reasonably large Wikimedia Foundation grant to support a year of Wikipedian in Residence postings at a wide (and growing) range of institutions throughout New Zealand. I'm posting a note here because I'm an entomologist, and several of the residencies will tackle insect articles and collections: at Landcare Research, for example, I'll be organising putting a collection of beautiful illustrations of different beetle species by NZ's foremost insect illustrator into Commons, and will be running edit-a-thons like this one to bring articles on some iconic NZ insects up to Good or Featured status.

The grant has just gone live: Project:New Zealand Wikipedian at Large.

1. If you're interested in helping, please add yourself using the Volunteer button and summarise your background and what you'd be keen to do.
2. If you think a "Wikipedian at Large" is a good idea, please write a short endorsement. A vote of confidence from the Wikipedia community will make a big difference to the grant's success.
3. If you have suggestions or think there's something missing, make a note on its Discussion page.

If you can take the time to do this, many thanks. —Giantflightlessbirds (talk) 06:40, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Giant South American grasshopper

Hi, could someone verify the taxonomy in this article? Trying to figure out if the name Tropidacris violaceus is valid and coming up blank, need real references. Thank you Ruff tuff cream puff (talk) 21:47, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm not having any luck finding any sources that mention this name (aside from Wikipedia scrapers). @Arpingstone: took the photo at Bristol Zoo. Presumably the zoo had this on a label somewhere; perhaps it has now been corrected? Plantdrew (talk) 22:06, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

The specialists of the Orthopterist's Society on Facebook have identified the one that landed on the footballer as Tropidacris collaris. Comparison with museum specimens on Commons suggests that the image from Arpingstone is the same species. Shyamal (talk) 07:05, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Harpalus pennsylvanicus

Hi the article Harpalus pennsylvanicus looks to me like a duplicate of Harpalus pensylvanicus, but I think it needs a subject expert to determine. Thanks Mccapra (talk) 19:26, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

 Done They were almost certainly dupes, so I've redirected one to the other. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:53, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Taxa named by Francis Walker (entomologist)

Hi, I just noticed there are two categories that seem to be doing the same thing: Category:Taxa named by Francis Walker (entomologist) and Category:Taxa named by Francis Walker. Presumably these should be merged. I don't know the best way to do this, though, so I figured I'd just bring it to others' attention. :) Thanks Umimmak (talk) 19:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

RfC on categorizing by year of formal description

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#Request for comment: categorizing by year of formal description for a discussion on possible guidelines for categorizing by year of formal description of a species. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:54, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Nemopalpus or Nemapalpus?

We have Nemopalpus from User:Qbugbot and Nemapalpus from User:Polbot; with Nemopalpus nearcticus (or is it Nemapalpus nearcticus?) to accompany. Polbot was doubtless driven by IUCN. Any idea which is correct? Fauna Europaea favours Nemapalpa. It seems agreed that Justin Pierre Marie Macquart is the authority. William Avery (talk) 12:05, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

That's a good question. Fauna Europaea lists Nemopalpus as a synonym of Nemapalpus. ITIS (and Catalogue of Life) and Zoobank have Nemopalpus as an accepted name. There are 2-3 times more Google Scholar hits for Nemopalpus in articles since 2014 and 2017. I'm not sure what the rules are regarding the original description. Bob Webster (talk) 14:31, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Looks like people have argued for both.

Using Nemapalpus, citing Duckhouse, D. A., and D. J. Lewis. 1980. Family Psychodidae, pp. 93–105.In R. J. Crosskey [ed.], Catalogue of the Diptera of the Afrotropical region. British Museum (Natural History), London.:

• Quate & Alexander 2000: As stated by Duckhouse and Lewis (1980), Nemapalpus is the original spelling of the genus and has priority over the commonly used Nemopalpus. doi:10.1603/0013-8746(2000)093[0185:SOTNWN2.0.CO;2]
• Hribar & DeMay 2011: The genus Nemapalpus Macquart 1838 (not Nemopalpus Macquart 1839, see Duckhouse and Lewis, 1980; Alexander, 1987; Quate and Alexander, 2000) JSTOR 24321804

Using Nemopalpus, citing Sabrosky, C.W., Thompson, F.C. & Evenhius, N.E. 1999. Family-group names in Diptera and bibliography. Myia 10: 1–576:

• Wagner & Stuckenberg 2012: Concerning nomenclature, we follow the proposal of Sabrosky (1999: 211), who justified in a long note the adoption of the name Nemopalpus over Nemapalpus. doi:10.5733/afin.053.0119
• Elgueta & Jezek 2014: Duckhouse & Lewis (1989 y nueva version 2007) mencionan a Nemopalpus como error for Nemapalpus. Sabrosky (1999, p. 211) estableció la denominación incorrecta Nemapalpus Macquart, 1838 como grafía original rechazada. doi:10.4067/S0718-686X2014000200007

So... I'm not sure if there's agreement on whether the original spelling is correct or incorrect.... Umimmak (talk) 14:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC) Edited 15:17, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I guess Wikipedia doesn't need both articles. I'll merge the articles and redirect from the newer (Nemopalpus) to the original, and we can reverse the redirect later if necessary. Bob Webster (talk) 15:04, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

The mystery genus Adaeudora

I've been meaning to get attention to this article for a while now (I tried before as an anonymous IP user, but with no success), so I thought I'd bring it up here. The article "Adaeudora" was apparently created in 2012 by Simuliid, apparently as a genus of tachinid flies, but...

Nothing, absolutely nothing, on the internet besides Wikipedia scrapers mentions this genus name as ever being used anywhere. Even the sole reference cited there for its existence doesn't seem to have ever listed the name. It also doesn't appear in Evenhuis et al's list of Townsend's genus group names from 2015 (Townsend being the claimed authority). As I further mentioned on the talk page, I suspect it probably was supposed to be Adejeania, given the species names, the authority and apparently even the synonym.

What's the best course of action to take if it really is a genus name that never existed? Deletion, or redirect to Adejeania?

Monster Iestyn (talk) 12:47, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Caveat: I'm not a Tachinid expert, but I do have decent Google-fu. I also checked the books on Archive.org, Google Scholar, and Hathitrust -- nothing comes up. Google Books does bring up The Siphonini (Diptera: Tachinidae) of Europe, and Catalogue of Palaearctic Diptera: Athericidae - Asilidae - Volume 5, but I'm skeptical. The first book has a preview mode which allows one to search the book and see the Taxonomic Index and no such name exists. I think you're right that it's supposed to be Adejeania based on this, what seems to basically be the original ref (updated 22 October 2013, so only a year after consulted) for the article, showing Adejeania with the same species, authority, and type species. It looks like like Simuliid also added "Adaeudora Townsend, 1933" (note the year dif) to Tachinini and Tachininae using the same reference. Has Simuliid already been pinged in reference to this supposed genus? Maybe they have an explanation. I would imagine the article can probably be deleted as it seemingly never existed and the existing incoming links can be removed. Umimmak (talk) 14:28, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Almost read that as Google-flu, in which case I've probably caught a relative, hah. (I do most of my source-searching via Google too!) Didn't think of consulting Simuliid for some reason, wasn't sure if he/she is still around or would remember but maybe I'm just tired and didn't really think that through.

Also for quick reference, the Evenhuis et al 2015 ref I referred to can be found here as a PDF: [6] It's part of a "Nomenclatural Studies Toward a World List of Diptera Genus-Group Names" series of articles if you're unaware. Monster Iestyn (talk) 14:46, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I think you are correct. As James E. O'Hara (2009) is not online anymore, I cant say where Adaeudora came from. Maybe a typo or mis-scan in O'Hara? However seems very safe to say this page can deleted or redirected to Adejeania. Thanks for flagging me Simuliid talk 21:54, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

No problem, glad to have your input. Now all that remains is actually redirecting/deleting the thing. I'm leaning towards deletion for now. Monster Iestyn (talk) 01:27, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{Transclude lead excerpt}}.

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

Background

On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   07:42, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

A link to a DAB page

I have raised an issue at Talk:Stigmus#Stigmina which needs expert input (and someone who knows how to edit a taxobox). Narky Blert (talk) 11:44, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Bombus ruderarius

The photo in the article on Bombus ruderarius is not correct. It is rather showing a Bombus ruderatus and is the same picture as in that article. I don't have a replacement photo. Hummmla (talk) 09:03, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

@Hummmla: indeed the photo is clearly identified in Commons as Bombus ruderatus. I've replaced it with one categorized as Bombus ruderarius – it appears more likely to be correct, although my experience of B. ruderarius in the UK is that the 'tail' is more red. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:47, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, that looks more like it. It is sometimes hard to see the difference between B. ruderarius and B. lapidarius though, the latter having a more redish tail. Hummmla (talk) 11:40, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Lagria hirta main image might be Lagria atipes

The main image (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tenebrionidae_-_Lagria_hirta-2.JPG) of the Lagria hirta page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagria_hirta) appears to be in line with the description of Lagria atipes that I found (http://aramel.free.fr/INSECTES11-21.shtml). The latter page shows that the last segment of the antennae of Lagria hirta is smaller than those shown on the Lagria hirta picture. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rikmwouters (talk • contribs) 13:29, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Problem with automatic taxoboxes?

I've just returned to Wikipedia and stub sorting, after a very long break, and some things have changed! Automatic taxoboxes seem pretty great, but I don't understand how they work. In particular, I'm going through Category:Insect stubs, and an awful lot of those pages seem to have taxoboxes that go straight from Class to Family. If I click on the family, I can find out what order it belongs to, but why doesn't the order show up on the species page? Example: Petridiobius arcticus.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I figured someone here might know. Thanks in advance for any insights/advice. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:08, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Petridiobius arcticus and the related templates used to create the automatic taxobox were created by a bot, which did a pretty good job as far I'm aware. This is the first time I've heard of it omitting a rank. I assume it has something to do with some uncertainty about recognizing Apterygota as a subclass. If you see a problem with the taxonomy displayed by an automatic taxobox in the future, you can click on the red pencil icon that appears just to the right of the words "Scientific classification". That takes you to a display of all of the hierarchical templates that are used to generate the automatic taxobox for that taxon. The hierarchy is constructed via a series of parent relationships, which means when you see a error, you need to edit the template immediately below the problem. In this case, I edited Template:Taxonomy/Machilidae to replace Insecta with Archaeognatha as the parent (see this diff). Plantdrew (talk) 03:16, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

In the case of Petridiobius arcticus, I believe the bot encountered Archaeognatha in ITIS as both the Order and Subclass, so skipped over them to use the Class as the parent of the family. I'll make sure this has been resolved or flag it as an exception in the future so it can be handled manually. Bob Webster (talk) 14:32, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

It's all very tricky at present, since there's no real consensus on how to classify insects, as per Insect#Definitions. If Insecta sensu strictissimo = Pterygota is treated as a Class, then Archaeognatha can also be treated as a Class. We may end up in the same situation as birds, where we have to deal with widely used but incompatible classifications. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:27, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I've noticed this comes up frequently with insects in Psocoptera/Psocodea, where I guess there's some uncertainty, or instability, regarding which really is the order. It still seems better to have one or the other than to have neither. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:37, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Clistopyga crassicaudata

Clistopyga crassicaudata is a new type of species of wasp with it's a big sting needs article to be created. 49.145.244.119 (talk) 00:57, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I took the liberty of creating a quick stub for now -- I'll leave the expansion to others. Umimmak (talk) 02:07, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Request for comment on recommending usage of automatic taxoboxes

There is an RfC regarding recommending usage of automatic taxoboxes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#Request for comments: Should the automatic taxobox system be the current recommended practice?. Inviting anybody who watches this page to contribute their thoughts to that thread.

WikiProject Insects is currently using automatic taxoboxes in 32.9% of project tagged articles that have any form of taxobox. Plantdrew (talk) 01:24, 16 July 2018 (UTC)