Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Archive10
This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Non-stub "stubs"
While we have an absolute proliferation of actual stubs, it seems--based on randomly checking a number of stub-rated articles--we've also got a good number of pages that still languish in the stub category but are in all actuality at least start (and perhaps even C). Not a massive issue, but still means it's hard to get a view of what articles most desperately need work when pretty near enough the entirety of our project is ranked as stub whether it is or not.
So if, when working on a Lepi article that's clearly not a stub, you would please consider checking the talk-page to see whether it's been appropriately rated (and if not, adjust it), that would be much appreciated. AddWittyNameHere 05:08, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- Good idea. I'll try and do some in my travels, though low-level editing at the moment. Tony Holkham (Talk) 08:53, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
- You don't have to go to the talk page to see the current quality rating. Go to Preferences>Gadgets>Appearance, and enable either "Display an assessment of an article's quality in its page header" or "XTools: dynamically show statistics about a page's history under the page heading" (or both). "Display an assessment" makes the title a color in a spectrum from red (stub) to green (GA), and gives the quality in text below the title. The XTools option displays a colored circle for the quality along with other statistics. The XTools display is slower to show up with a bad connection so I'd go with "display an assessment" if you're only doing one of them. Plantdrew (talk) 14:55, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
- A quick browse tells me that many articles on tribes, subfamilies etc. are basically lists with onward links, and so are maybe as complete as they can be, so start articles. Perhaps they should have been list articles (but that's above my pay grade)? Tony Holkham (Talk) 09:48, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- ...there also seem to be articles which do not have the stub tag footer, but whose talk pages still say stub, so they need changing. Tony Holkham (Talk) 10:06, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- @Tony Holkham: Yup. Some of those are in all honesty stubs but some editor came along, saw that it was over an arbitrary amount of bytes, and removed the stub tag without looking at whether it's a stub content-wise, and no one replaced it. (Some of the AWB users were prone to that, for a while) A whole bunch of them genuinely aren't stubs but no one bothered to update the talk page, though.
- As for your remarks about tribes etc., yeah, most of these should be start if complete, some should be converted into lists (or redirected to the parent taxon with a separate list article linked from the parent taxon, in some cases that would make more sense)—but many of them desperately need referencing and taxo-updating before they can reasonably be deemed complete. (I'm currently working on Hesperiidae and Bombycoidea, but I know there's a good number of other taxa that aren't exactly up-to-date either, ranging from "several new child taxa have been described but not added" to "major revisions not yet included")
- Probably best to only re-assess the ones that show they're at least moderately current, for now. (E.g. not referring to 1999 publications as a "comprehensive overview" of the taxon when there's been major revisions since cough) AddWittyNameHere 10:44, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks, understood. I'm not well-versed on taxonomy, so will just continue with common sense. Let me know if I'm on the wrong track. Tony Holkham (Talk) 11:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- No one is well-versed on taxonomy of the entirety of Lepidoptera, it changes far too often for that.[FBDB] Nah, but more seriously, major advances in phylogeny means that we've had a lot of revisions within Lepidoptera the past fifteen-twenty years, and in many areas the research and revision efforts are actively ongoing. Basically, if you're not familiar with what the currently-up-to-date placement of a taxon is, assume "probably incomplete or otherwise not up-to-date" for taxa above genus if:
- The most recent academic source referred to is pre-2000, if there is any at all; and/or
- The source of the taxon's placement and/or child taxa is not given; and/or
- The given source of the taxon's placement and/or child taxa is a general* Lepidoptera database (or worse, a general insect, animal, or all-lifeforms database); and/or
- The given source of the taxon's placement and/or child taxa is a specific* Lepidoptera database, but the access-date is about a decade or more ago (or the site itself specifies its version as something like "July 2009"); and/or
- The given source of the taxon's child taxa is a regional^ database when the taxon in question is not endemic to that region (or at least lacks a reference for being so); and/or
- The taxon's article content and its taxobox contradict one another (especially when the taxobox is an automated taxobox), or the taxon's article and its parent taxon's article contradict one another.
- * General vs specific Lepidoptera databases: general accumulates everything related to all (or almost all) Lepidoptera taxa; specific focuses on a single group of taxa like a particular family or superfamily, or on taxa showing a particular type of behaviour (e.g. leaf mining). General databases almost invariably struggle with the same outdatedness issues we've got, because it's just not feasible for a handful of people to stay on top of the nuances of placement of ~180000 species and all associated higher taxa and keep track of everything newly described. Specific databases can be outdated too, but are more often at least somewhat up-to-date—not least because the folks running them very often are, or work together with, the folks involved in the revision efforts)
- ^ Regional databases: generally only mention the taxa actually occurring in that region, and therefore are not a good source to find all child taxa of a taxon (except when the entire taxon is actually endemic to that particular region, of course), leading to incomplete lists of child taxa when used as sole source.
- Far as I can tell, you're definitely on the right track: articles like Dingy skipper and Great purple hairstreak indeed absolutely aren't stubs, and removing stub classifications from redirects or other non-articles, like at Danaidae, is also always a good thing.
- Giant skipper had some easy, quick improvements that could be done (which I did--separate Biology into its own section & delink tribe names because we really don't want people to create those articles when all that can be said about them is already in the giant skipper article. If anything, they should be redirs, and those don't need to be linked in their target article), but even without those changes, deeming it a start seems about right to me.
- Lycaena rauparaha is in need of some attention, from a quick look: nothing about the appearance of the adults, and I spot some too-close paraphrasing in that Biology section besides. (I'll fix both those issues in a bit) Still, reasonable enough to argue it's a start rather than stub, even if I might not have de-stubbed that one until after fixing those issues, myself (but that's personal preference, and de-stubbing it isn't wrong) AddWittyNameHere 13:27, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- Wow, thank you for all that sound advice. I will do my best to assimilate it. BTW, when does the "Article assessment and quality" table update, as I'm using that as a guide to what needs checking. All the best. Tony Holkham (Talk) 13:58, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- You're welcome, and sorry for slamming half a novella down in front of you. As for when the table updates, once a day but I'm not quite certain at what time it generally does. However, I just put in a manual update for you, which is currently in progress (and should, judging by the speed at which its progressing, be finished around the time I post this reply). AddWittyNameHere 14:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- Ah, yup, it finished, we went from 99,9-something stubs to 99,891 stubs. AddWittyNameHere 14:58, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- Good, made a start anyway - I concentrated on the high importance ones first. Tony Holkham (Talk) 15:07, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
Good, made a start anyway
- nice pun :P Anyway, yeah, high importance first makes sense. If during the de-stubbing process you come across anything you figure needs desperate attention now rather than in the next few years, feel free to toss it my way and I'll see if I can't do something about it. (Think we're getting a bit away from stuff relevant to the wider WikiProject, though. Happy to continue the conversation on either of our talkpages, but I don't blame you if you're thinking "Oh gods no please no not more conversation with 'm", I know I'm rather verbose today, so I'll leave that up to you.) AddWittyNameHere 15:47, 5 September 2022 (UTC)- You mentioned de-linking tribe names - are you referring to the binomials such as Euglyphis lankesteri on Lasiocampidae? Tony Holkham (Talk) 16:17, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- That one was more relevant to that specific article than a piece of general advice, and requires a bit of judgement. I'll post my full explanation on your talk-page, because it's mostly not relevant to the wider discussion. AddWittyNameHere 16:55, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- You mentioned de-linking tribe names - are you referring to the binomials such as Euglyphis lankesteri on Lasiocampidae? Tony Holkham (Talk) 16:17, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- Good, made a start anyway - I concentrated on the high importance ones first. Tony Holkham (Talk) 15:07, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- Ah, yup, it finished, we went from 99,9-something stubs to 99,891 stubs. AddWittyNameHere 14:58, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- You're welcome, and sorry for slamming half a novella down in front of you. As for when the table updates, once a day but I'm not quite certain at what time it generally does. However, I just put in a manual update for you, which is currently in progress (and should, judging by the speed at which its progressing, be finished around the time I post this reply). AddWittyNameHere 14:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- Wow, thank you for all that sound advice. I will do my best to assimilate it. BTW, when does the "Article assessment and quality" table update, as I'm using that as a guide to what needs checking. All the best. Tony Holkham (Talk) 13:58, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- No one is well-versed on taxonomy of the entirety of Lepidoptera, it changes far too often for that.[FBDB] Nah, but more seriously, major advances in phylogeny means that we've had a lot of revisions within Lepidoptera the past fifteen-twenty years, and in many areas the research and revision efforts are actively ongoing. Basically, if you're not familiar with what the currently-up-to-date placement of a taxon is, assume "probably incomplete or otherwise not up-to-date" for taxa above genus if:
- Thanks, understood. I'm not well-versed on taxonomy, so will just continue with common sense. Let me know if I'm on the wrong track. Tony Holkham (Talk) 11:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- You don't have to go to the talk page to see the current quality rating. Go to Preferences>Gadgets>Appearance, and enable either "Display an assessment of an article's quality in its page header" or "XTools: dynamically show statistics about a page's history under the page heading" (or both). "Display an assessment" makes the title a color in a spectrum from red (stub) to green (GA), and gives the quality in text below the title. The XTools option displays a colored circle for the quality along with other statistics. The XTools display is slower to show up with a bad connection so I'd go with "display an assessment" if you're only doing one of them. Plantdrew (talk) 14:55, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Saturnia (Agapema)
Could someone who understands the situation sort out the current status of Agapema - according to LepIndex, Saturnia (Agapema)?[1] Saw this while attempting to add a valid taxonomic ref to Draft:Agapema dyari, and still unsure what to do there (now apparently Saturnia (Agapema) anona ssp. dyari, for added flavour [2]). Cheers --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 08:19, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
- Elmidae (and pinging Agapema who is the draft's creator): Per Kitching et al 2018,[1] which is the most recent comprehensive global checklist of the Bombycoidea, Agapema is indeed a subgenus of Saturnia (and dyari is indeed a subspecies of anona).
- Someone does need to sort out the entire cluster of Agapema articles to reflect the above-mentioned current taxonomic status, though if no one else gets around to it or feels comfortable doing it, I will get around to it eventually as I am on-and-off working on bringing the Bombycoidea in line with Kitching et al. 2018 amidst other Lepidoptera updates. Might be a few weeks down the line, though, so if anyone else does feel comfortable doing it, by all means please go ahead.
- Onto the draft in specific: Subspecies don't typically warrant their own article except when there is a lot to be said about them that doesn't apply to the species as a whole, and that doesn't appear to be the case here. What relevant contents in the draft that aren't already in the article on Agapema anona should be added there, (e.g. synonyms, Hodges number) and then Agapema dyari should be created as a redirect to it. No need to wait there for someone to sort out the wider Agapema article cluster, as the redirect can always be retargeted post-move. AddWittyNameHere 09:17, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
- Much obliged! If I get time today and the current setup is not too convoluted, I may give it a go later today- --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 09:50, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
- If you run into any issues/need advice on how to/want a second pair of eyes on whether everything is done right afterwards, you're more than welcome to ping me & I'll take a look. AddWittyNameHere 10:17, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
- Thank you for bringing this up! I'm still new to Wikipedia, and saw that red link as an opportunity to get experience writing articles. I'll update Draft:Agapema dyari to be a redirect to Agapema anona, and add the Hodges/MONA number to that page. Again, thanks for the feedback :) Agapema (talk) 14:57, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
- Much obliged! If I get time today and the current setup is not too convoluted, I may give it a go later today- --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 09:50, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
References
- ^ Kitching, Ian; Rougerie, Rodolphe; Zwick, Andreas; Hamilton, Chris; Laurent, Ryan St; Naumann, Stefan; Mejia, Liliana Ballesteros; Kawahara, Akito (2 December 2018). "A global checklist of the Bombycoidea (Insecta: Lepidoptera)". Biodiversity Data Journal. 6 (6). Supplementary material: checklist. doi:10.3897/BDJ.6.e22236. ISSN 1314-2828. PMC 5904559. PMID 29674935.
Template help required
Hi there. I am in the process of converting taxoboxes to automatic taxoboxes for various lichen genera, and have come across a "conflict" with one of the templates maintained by this project. The template {{Taxonomy/Dirina}} is for a lepidoptera subtribe, but links to the lichen genus! I'm assuming that's a mistake, and that the link was meant instead to point to Dirina (butterfly). Does it make sense to move the template to match that, and allow the lichen genus to sit at Dirina instead? MeegsC (talk) 14:39, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
- In the case where taxa share a name, and the article for one taxon is at the base title and the other taxon has a disambiguator, the taxonomy template for the taxon with the disambiguated article absolutely should not lack a disambiguator. That is just confusing. I'm not sure whether the lepidoptera subtribe is accepted; if it is, perhaps the lichen should be moved and Dirina made into a disambiguation page. But given the status quo with article titles, using {{Taxonomy/Dirina}} for the lichen is an improvement. Plantdrew (talk) 15:00, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
"The butterflies of Sulawesi: annotated checklist for a critical island fauna" has been released under a CC BY license
Hi there, I'd just like to alert this community that "The butterflies of Sulawesi: annotated checklist for a critical island fauna" has been released under a CC BY license over at the Naturalis repository: https://repository.naturalis.nl/pub/220217/ Naturalis are the copyright holders - they are the institution that used to publish the journal this was first published-in, back in 2003 (Zoologische Verhandelingen) and so they genuinely can do this, this post-publication re-licensing is legit and not a 'mistake'.
I have been slowly harvesting some of the lovely image plates onto Wikimedia Commons, but only the butteflies which are in there identified with binomials. Are all the sub-species plates , the trinomials (e.g. Tacola eulimene badoura) also helpful and of interest to people? Now that this key publication is CC BY licensed, I feel it might be a treasure trove for this community to harvest from and improve hundreds of butterfly articles...? Please fire away... Metacladistics (talk) 13:34, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
- Are there subspecies plates for which there is no plate for the binomial (because, for example, the nominate subspecies doesn't occur in Sulawesi)? In general, I think subspecies plates would be a low priority. Plantdrew (talk) 15:04, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
- Very roughly speaking, I'd say species/nominate subspecies plates > subspecies plates where the (nominate sub)species has no plate > subspecies plates that illustrate/compare multiple subspecies of the same species > individual, non-nominate subspecies, as far as priorities go.
- Exception for plates of any of the 62 butterfly subspecies that happen to have a separate article, if any of them even occur on Sulawesi. Those should be treated with the same priority as species, I'd say. (On a separate note, those probably need looking at because while some of them are independently notable, a good portion of them would likely be better off merged into the relevant species article)
- Also, thanks for the heads up! I'll be adding it to my ever-growing list of references over at User:AddWittyNameHere/LepiRefs. At a glance, beyond those images, there's a lot of textual information that could be useful for various articles, too. AddWittyNameHere 22:57, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
- Yes! the text on range & food plants appears to be very useful to fill-in gaps and to improve the accuracy of articles too! Metacladistics (talk) 14:24, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Project-independent quality assessments
Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class=
parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.
No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.
However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom
parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:22, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
Genus name change in 2018?
Hi - the genus Trictena was updated/amended to Abantiades in 2018 (as far as I can ascertain). This needs updating throughout the article on Abantiades/Trictena Atripalpis. Plus the link to Don Herbison-Evan's and Stella Crossley's website is out of date (their site confirms the genera name change).
Please double-check, or feel free to tell me I'm wrong.
kind regards Carolyn Caro2023 (talk) 04:47, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
@Caro2023: Originally sent at Template talk:Taxonomy/Trictena. I pasted this here because that page has not been looked at by anyone in the past 30 days. Snowmanonahoe (talk) 15:19, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
Ping fix Snowmanonahoe (talk) 15:21, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
- @Caro2023: Appears to indeed have been revised, with Trictena synonymized to Abantiades, as of Simonsen, Thomas (March 2018). Splendid Ghost Moths and Their Allies: A Revision of Australian Abantiades, Oncopera, Aenetus, Archaeoaenetus and Zelotypia (Hepialidae) and subsequently followed by other authors (e.g. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4822.1.3) (and websites like Australian Caterpillars and their Butterflies and Moths, aka Don Herbison-Evan's and Stella Crossley's website, though as usual a fair number of them still list the outdated name)
- The cluster of relevant articles will indeed need updating. I'll see about doing that, though it might take a few days before I get around to it.
- @Snowmanonahoe: Thanks for bringing the comment to this page. Taxonomy template talk pages are indeed rarely seen and not on a whole lot of watchlists, especially the ones for lower taxa like genera. Chances are that if not for you bringing it up here, it'd have been overlooked for the next several months or longer. AddWittyNameHere 02:29, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
- I like your funny words, magic man. (And yeah, no problem.) Snowmanonahoe (talk) 02:49, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
- Ahaha, yeah, taxonomy talk is pretty much the dictionary definition of jargon, I suppose. :P AddWittyNameHere 03:13, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
- I like your funny words, magic man. (And yeah, no problem.) Snowmanonahoe (talk) 02:49, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you for looking into it - at least it will be updated. And no need to rush the change (since it's been sitting there 'as is' since March 2018 ... with all that 'lockdown time' on our hands over the past few years - I'm surprised no-one seemed to noticed it). Cheers. Caro2023 (talk) 03:57, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
- You're welcome, and thank you for bringing it up. With ~100,000 Lepidoptera articles and maybe low double-digit editors working on them, things sadly frequently get missed for a fair while until someone happens upon it. And yeah, five years and a month, or five years, a month and a week doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, I guess. AddWittyNameHere 04:46, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
- @Caro2023: Quick update: Trictena now redirects to Abantiades, all three species formerly in Trictena have been moved to the right titles (and had their prose/taxoboxes updated), and at least a cursory update of the Abantiades prose has occurred, though its list of species needs some serious work still. The same still needs doing for genus Bordaia (+species articles), which was synonymized at the same time. Should hopefully get around to that later today. AddWittyNameHere 07:17, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you for that - like most things in life ... it's never a straightforward process. *Sigh* 211.27.219.101 (talk) 08:50, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
- @Caro2023: Quick update: Trictena now redirects to Abantiades, all three species formerly in Trictena have been moved to the right titles (and had their prose/taxoboxes updated), and at least a cursory update of the Abantiades prose has occurred, though its list of species needs some serious work still. The same still needs doing for genus Bordaia (+species articles), which was synonymized at the same time. Should hopefully get around to that later today. AddWittyNameHere 07:17, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
- You're welcome, and thank you for bringing it up. With ~100,000 Lepidoptera articles and maybe low double-digit editors working on them, things sadly frequently get missed for a fair while until someone happens upon it. And yeah, five years and a month, or five years, a month and a week doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, I guess. AddWittyNameHere 04:46, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
Participant list
Fairly minor issue, but the participant list on the WikiProject's main page gives the impression of far more actively participating members than actually is the case. Would anyone object if I were to remove the indef-blocked members, and move any participants who have not edited on en.wiki for more than two years to a new subsection labelled Inactive? AddWittyNameHere 06:25, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
- As far as I'm concerned, go for it! Even cut it to one year and just delete rather than move to a subsection. Even eliminate it as I'm not sure what purpose it serves, but maybe I'm just in a mood today. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 20:38, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
- Yeah, go for it. You are using the gadget that lets you hover over a user name to see a pop-up with their last edit date (and number of edits), right? I'd suggest just removing any inactive editor with less than say, 10 edits, rather than preserving them on a list of inactive users. Benthebutterflyguy (intentionally not linked) made a single edit to Wikipedia, to add themselves to the project page. Plantdrew (talk) 23:22, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
- @SchreiberBike:
Even eliminate it as I'm not sure what purpose it serves
- The participant list as a whole, in its current form not a whole lot. When pruned a bit, gives something of an idea of how many active editors we actually have, makes it easier for non-Lep-inclined editors to find someone with familiarity with the subject if they need one, and a couple other fringe benefits like that. - The proposed inactive participant list, mostly a bit of a courtesy towards formerly-prolific Lepidoptera editors who are no longer active for *other* reasons than having gotten themselves indef blocked. Going for a fairly long cut-off mostly because it avoids removing and later re-adding people who as it turns out just were on a bit of a break.
- All right. I'll go prune the list of all editors that are a. indef blocked or b. never stuck around long enough to even become formerly active (I'll be using @Plantdrew's suggested 10-edit-total cut-off for that), then move everyone left on the list who hasn't touched en.wiki since April 2021 to an Inactive section.
- Can always tweak the cut-off line, or do away with the inactive participant list entirely, at a later point, if it turns out folks would prefer that, of course. AddWittyNameHere 03:40, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
- I'd be wary of removing names totally. An editor has decided to add their name to the list because they considered themselves participants in the project. There are no guidelines so we shouldn't be policing the list. The inactive list is a good way of handling this as it is helpful to have a list of active participants and someone put on the inactive list can move their names if they want. Mixed feelings on permabans. They obviously can't be active participants but can have had significant contributions in the past so should be recorded as inactive. An example was on this talk page yesterday, an editor with over 1600 article creations (in top 500 on Wikipedia) but permabanned. The ban doesn't negate their contributions to the project. — Jts1882 | talk 07:30, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
- I can always put the blocked/banned users back but on the inactive user list, if that's what consensus turns out to be. That said, fwiw, there are plenty of editors who have had significant contributions in the Lepidoptera area but never were on the participant list whatsoever, so the list is by no means a complete record of people who've made contributions to the WikiProject, with or without those permablocked and/or banned editors. AddWittyNameHere 07:58, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
- 'kay, everyone who hasn't touched en.wiki at all since April 2021 has been moved to inactive now. AddWittyNameHere 06:37, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you. That's an improvement. Keep up the good work. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 13:28, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks. Only a tiny fraction of stuff on our lovely WikiProject Mothballs frontpage that could do with updating, but... every bit helps, I suppose.
- Might see if I can't tackle some of the other way-outdated stuff there one of these days, too, like WP:WikiProject Lepidoptera/stubs. There's more relevant stub templates not on there than actually on there. *sigh*
- Am also kinda side-eyeing that "Article and task requests" section. This talk page seems to serve much the same function, and I'm not so sure it serves any purpose to have a second place with even fewer eyes on it to raise issues... AddWittyNameHere 14:02, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you. That's an improvement. Keep up the good work. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 13:28, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
- 'kay, everyone who hasn't touched en.wiki at all since April 2021 has been moved to inactive now. AddWittyNameHere 06:37, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
- I can always put the blocked/banned users back but on the inactive user list, if that's what consensus turns out to be. That said, fwiw, there are plenty of editors who have had significant contributions in the Lepidoptera area but never were on the participant list whatsoever, so the list is by no means a complete record of people who've made contributions to the WikiProject, with or without those permablocked and/or banned editors. AddWittyNameHere 07:58, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
- I'd be wary of removing names totally. An editor has decided to add their name to the list because they considered themselves participants in the project. There are no guidelines so we shouldn't be policing the list. The inactive list is a good way of handling this as it is helpful to have a list of active participants and someone put on the inactive list can move their names if they want. Mixed feelings on permabans. They obviously can't be active participants but can have had significant contributions in the past so should be recorded as inactive. An example was on this talk page yesterday, an editor with over 1600 article creations (in top 500 on Wikipedia) but permabanned. The ban doesn't negate their contributions to the project. — Jts1882 | talk 07:30, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
- @SchreiberBike:
Butterflies
The butterfly article starts:
Butterflies (Rhopalocera) are insects that have large, often brightly coloured wings, and a conspicuous, fluttering flight. The group comprises the superfamilies Hedyloidea (moth-butterflies in the Americas) and Papilionoidea. Butterfly fossils date to the Paleocene, about 56 million years ago.
The taxobox has suborder Rhopalocera, which is a remnant of the old classification separating butterflies from moths (Heterocera). The taxobox has had Rhopalocera since the multi-tempate taxobox days when it was ranked as a division with two superfamilies (Papilionoidea and Hesperioidea). When a bot converted it to {{taxobox}} in 2006 the division got shown as the parent to Arthropoda because it was the plant taxon and this lasted for nine months before it was fixed to display as an unranked below Lepidoptera. Superfamily Hedyloidea was added in 2007. The rank suborder was introduced when the taxobox was converted to {{automatic taxobox}} in 2016 and Hesperioidea removed a year later.
However, Rhopalocera is not widely used currently (if at all), as far as I can tell. Lepindex now uses the Animal Biodiversity classification (van Nieukerken et al, 2011),[1] which includes all butterflies and skippers in Papilionoidea. This is the classification used most of the Lepidoptera articles, but some still treat Hedyloidea as a superfamily.
I suggest replacing Rhopalocera with Papilionoidea in the butterfly article taxobox and editing other articles to be consistent with the one superfamily butterfly concept, following van Nieukerken et al (2011). Are there any newer classifications or others using Rhopalocera that should be considered? — Jts1882 | talk 11:24, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
References
- ^ van Nieukerken, Erik J.; Kaila, Lauri; Kitching, Ian J.; Kristensen, Niels P.; Lees, David C.; Minet, Joël; Mitter, Charles; Mutanen, Marko; Regier, Jerome C.; Simonsen, Thomas J.; Wahlberg, Niklas; Yen, Shen-Horn; Zahiri, Reza; et al. (23 December 2011). Zhang, Zhi-Qiang (ed.). "Order Lepidoptera Linnaeus, 1758" (PDF). Zootaxa. Animal biodiversity: An outline of higher-level classification and survey of taxonomic richness. 3148: 212–221.
— Jts1882 | talk 11:24, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
- Dyanega, any insights, by any chance? To the best of my knowledge, Jts1882 is right on the mark, but I'm certainly nowhere near as well-versed in systematics and nomenclature as you are. AddWittyNameHere 02:21, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
- I'd agree. While the higher classification has certainly been in flux (and could change again with the next major revision), the old concept of Rhopalocera seems to be defunct, and very unlikely to come back. Dyanega (talk) 15:59, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
WikiProject Lepidoptera#Article and task requests
Any objections if I mark the section Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera#Article and task requests as historical/defunct and direct editors to this talk page? It pretty much duplicates what we do here, except that the section gets even fewer edits and less attention. AddWittyNameHere 16:11, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
Re: Jts1882's aside in an edit summary
Jts1882: As an aside, was this dealt with or does it still need addressing?
Some of it has been fixed, but yeah, there's a fair bit of various outdated Noctuoid classifications lingering, especially on the less visible pages like lists of [family] genera, lists of moths of [country], and so on. I still come across the occasional mention of a "family Arctiidae" and that's been outdated for longer than most of us have been editing Wikipedia.
It's a wider problem, really. I'm currently in the process of updating the Pterophoridae, which seem to largely not have been updated since 2010-2012, with exception of the occasional addition of a single genus or species to one list or another. Alucitidae is in a similar state (with the genus list actually explicitly cited to the 2010 version of Wikispecies. sigh). You already noted the Rhopalocera issue above.
Prior to my previous break, I did some updating on the massive Eupithecia genus, but didn't get around to wrapping it up (need to get back on that at one point or another), and I never got around to wrapping up my efforts on the Hesperiidae, either, so I'll need to check if anyone else got around to it. Can't quite remember if I ran through all the Apatelodidae to bring them in line with Kitching et al 2018, but even if so, I know there were other parts of the Bombycoidea treated in the same paper that I didn't get around to. (Someone else might have, but...at minimum, it needs checking)
Geometrinae saw Plotkin & Kawahara's 2020 review of the revisions within Geometrinae since 2007, but I doubt that's been fully updated on-wiki, either. Gelechioidea has been quite unstable the past two decades and probably warrants a check to see if it's remotely up to date, as well. Taking a quick glance at our Tineoidea article, I don't see the 2015 revision by Regier et al cited, so that one's suspect too. List of Tortricidae genera claims to be "up to date to 2008". The list goes on and on. AddWittyNameHere 08:19, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
- I've had a look at the structure in the taxonomy templates. Noctuoidea currenly has six families, as in the van Nieukerken et al (2011) classification, which is consistent with Zahiri et al (2011). The families have the following content using the automated taxonomy system:
- Erebidae: 20 subfamilies and 10 unassigned genera [Zahiri et al (2012) have 18 subfamilies]
- Euteliidae: one subfamily with all genera using the automated taxoboxes assigned it
- Noctuidae: 27 subfamilies and 21 unassigned genera
- Nolidae: 8 subfamilies and 3 unassigned genera [There are also 8 subfamilies in Zahiri et al (2013) but only six match]
- Notodontidae: 11 subfamilies and 9 unassigned genera
- Oenosandridae: 2 genera and no subfamilies
- Some of the subfamily templates may no longer be use.
- A problem is determining where to put the genera as Lepindex is out of date, as you pointed out with in edits to the project page yesterday. You suggest using Global Lepidoptera Index but the linked pagechecklistbank.org only shows a screenful so I can't get Noctuoidea subdivisions. Am I missing how to do this or should we use CoL Lepidoptera?
However, CoL gives no subfamilies for Nolidae, while the Zahiri classification uses eight and goes down to subtribes.[edit: not sure what happened there] While the Zahiri classification seems the best to follow, we really should have a secondary source using it. — Jts1882 | talk 09:22, 13 May 2023 (UTC)- It's a collapsed list, clicking on the arrows in front of a taxon de-collapses it showing its child taxa, each of which can then again be de-collapsed to show child taxa.
- But yeah, I wouldn't necessarily recommend using the GLI over all other databases, just over LepIndex in that if one's looking specifically for an index of names (and authors of those names) of Lepidoptera, this one comes closest. It's a good resource if one has a specific name to plug in & check on placement, status, authors and so on. The browsing user interface, on the other hand, is far from ideal, and while it's actively being updated and maintained (a major plus over LepIndex), it's not quite up to date yet (there's a reason the version string starts with a 0, I'd say) and remains a "use with some caution".
- But yes, if one wants a catalogue rather than an index, CoL Lepidoptera is the better bet by far. (Though, as with all general Lepidoptera databases (and some of those specific to one or two families), I've seen times when it wasn't quite up-to-date. It's a lot better about it than most, though.)
- Let's just say we're certainly not alone in finding it difficult to maintain an up-to-date taxonomy of the Lepidoptera, and the lack of existence of a central, maintained database prior to the rapid-speed major revisions of the past two decades really, really hasn't helped there. It's basically trying to move the furniture in a room around while there's still a heap of stuff to sort out on every surface and even the floor, and every time you pull a bookcase from the wall, you discover yet more stuff that has slipped behind it. (Which doesn't excuse how badly behind some of our articles are, mind.) AddWittyNameHere 16:49, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
Calinaga buddha
Hi all! Someone sent me a funny screenshot of Calinaga buddha because the common name is, apparently, the freak and I was looking for a source to confirm this. Couldn't find much (I posted as such on the talk page) and I was wondering if anyone from this WP could help with improving the sources and overall article - it's not my métier and I haven't had much luck. Please ping me if there's anything I can help with or if this gets any traction! Best, Kazamzam (talk) 14:24, 25 May 2023 (UTC)