Draft talk:List of modes of action of insecticides

Starter-for-ten

@Bosula. Here is a first stab at a sortable wikitable. It needs to be expanded and this is easiest in the source editor, where the structure of each row should be obvious. I've tried to wikilink as much as possible and I don't think we should add any common name that doesn't have a WP article, which will cut down the number. There are still going to be too many OPs and pyrethroids, IMO, so maybe some other exclusion criteria would help?

I've drafted this as "List of modes of action of insecticides" rather than "List of insecticide modes of action" (which could be a redirect) because I want to have the possibility of "List of modes of action of fungicides" etc later.

If you haven't already, I suggest you set your preferences for "sticky headers" for tables, which makes it easier to see what's there when scrolled down near the foot of big tables. See Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and search for "sticky".

Note that WP is unlike Excel in that you can't sort a table using multiple levels/column names. Hence it is very important that the table as seen in its source code has the precise sequence of rows necessary. The software is clever in that it sorts by the piped name, so that's the alphabetising that should be used (see Cinerin I for an example, when you sort by Common name). Mike Turnbull (talk) 17:15, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Mike, The table looks great. It would have taken me weeks to amass the know-how to do that. Here my suggestions.

Title of page: We should have "classes" or "chemical classes" in the title as well as "mode of action".

Column heading: For "IRAC code" we add the letter A, B etc. Carbamates are 1 A and Organophosphates are 1 B etc.

Column heading: "chemical class" instead of "class", although both variants have their advantages.

We write the classes as they are written in IRAC. For example "avermectins, milbemycins". There are two pages in WP in this case, which is not a problem because we can link to each of them. If the name of the class in WP is egregiously different from the IRAC one we change it; If it is different but OK we link to the WP name. If it means the text is too long to fit nicely in the space available, then some of the rows will be thicker, and we give up attractiveness for exactitude.

We either list all common names in the class or just one example, irrespective of how many of them have WP pages. If we have just one example then we need an addition column with heading "number of insecticides in class", or "Nr", or possibly two columns, one for the IRAC list and one for the BCPC list. The column heading "common name", becomes "example of common name" or something like that. Bosula (talk) 11:32, 21 November 2024 (UTC)