Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Arthropods/Archive 2

Millipedes on Aves

Do Millipedes catch rides on birds? --Mako

I have provided a source for that statement. In this particular study done in Slovakia, "18 species of millipedes were found in 7 different types of nests of 40 bird species". They feed in the nests and use the birds to go from one nest to another, but do not do any harm to the birds. IronChris | (talk) 02:08, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Schmidt Sting Pain Index

I found this on the WP:TOL talk page; maybe someone here can take a look at it. IronChris | (talk) 06:24, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Can some of you knowledgable and discerning scientist Wikipedians take a look at this please? This article has currently been getting some coverage in popular "gee whiz funny link of the day... how goofy!" type blogs ( I hate it when this happens and the article in question is dubious... I think it gives a bad impression of wikipedia), but it seems to be mainly based on the idea that this one insect scientist guy wrote some goofy comments for an insect sting pain index one day. Ok, I agree that insect scientists are allowed to have senses of humour (WITHIN LIMITS, for the sake of us all), but I am concerned that 1) this scale is not really widespread and may be just one scale promoted by one guy without much acceptance in the insect expert community. 2) the pdf article linked which this wikipedia entry seems to be based on does not seem to say that Schmidt actually wrote those goofy comments. Its a bit ambiguous, but its seems to say that "the media" (without specifying what media) came up with the goofy comments to append to Schmidt's original dry scale (I think this may be another case where people exaggerate or misinterpret what an article is saying). I dont have any access to science journal databases, and am certainly no science or insect expert. But these concerns and quick scans of google books and google scholar led me to bring this issue to wiser heads. Thanks very much for checking this out. 88.109.1.60 16:39, 24 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

POTD

It has come to my attention that this project has a huge resource available to it via WP:POTD. Pictures of arthropods are frequently chosen, and their high visibility draws people into editing arthropod articles. To date, 56 pictures of the day have been of arthropods — about 1 every fortnight on average; see them all at Wikipedia:WikiProject Arthropods/POTD. I think a special mention has to go to User:Fir0002, who is responsible for more than 40% of the images, including all the latest nine. --Stemonitis 08:28, 5 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

dungeness crabs

how strong are dungeness crabs? can they injure you bad? just curius.I love crustations their kool and tasty! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 75.16.139.3 (talk) 03:47, 9 May 2007 (UTC).[reply]

WP:TOL template

I'm working on a proposal to subsume all the WP:TOL project banners into a single one. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Template union proposal and its talk page. Circeus 19:22, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Arthropods A-class articles

It is a request that kindly review the articles before grading them. Most of the pages are classed as A-class articles but the fact is that they are not even compotent enough to called as Start class or B-class articles. Kindly review all the pages undertaken by the project. Thanks, Sushant gupta (talk · contribs) 06:21, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, very few articles are classed as A-class: only 45 out of 2648 (1.7%). This is a reasonable figure in comparison with other projects. It does not make sense to try and compare too closely the ratings between projects; the ratings are only relative degrees of quality within a given project, do not compare well between projects, and should not be expected to. You must understand that many arthropods are poorly-studied, so that the total amount of information available may be pretty small. This may give the impression that an article is too short when in fact it contains almost everything that is known. The ratings make sense within the project, and any attempt to down-grade the ratings will result in a loss of information. By all means help us to improve the quality of our articles — I don't believe that any of them is perfect — but spending time arguing about the ratings is not very constructive. --Stemonitis 06:58, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am not talking about the lenght and relvency. I mean to say that the article don't follow the manual of style completely. it doesn't withstands that criteria. Sushant gupta (talk · contribs) 06:50, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Collaborations

If there are sufficient takers, we should start on monthly collaborations as in other projects. If so, would nominate top level articles like Arthropoda or Insecta to start with. Shyamal 03:15, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Is it too big?

I saw on the project page mention of the need for a labium (insect) page. I thought I'd do that, but started by looking at mouthpart pages generally. There are some that try to cover parts for arthropods, and some just for insects. For example, there is a mandible (insect) page and a mandible (arthropod) page. I think I'm heading to two points.

Within the insects, mandibles are diverse. It's only worse at the arthropod level. It would seem to me to be simpler to have pages based on insect mouthparts, crustacean mouthparts and so on. These linked from relevant taxon level pages. This leads me to my second point.

I'm not sure that we need pages for every component of organisms. That is, do we need a mandible (insect) page, a maxilae (insect) page, labium (insect) page and so on? Or would it be more helpful to have an insect mouthparts page, which would in the one page provide the general model, plus the specialisations. In this concept, the general discussion would cover the component parts, followed by how they are all modified for siphoning, piercing and sucking, sponging. This would avoid people going to a number of pages to find out how ant moutparts, for example, fit together.

Grateful for your thoughts.

Heds 03:22, 22 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Your thoughts are good on this subject, but there are people who want a general view on the different species and others who want specific information on the say ant mandibles. Its like vertebrates, you can put a section on vertebrate mouths but that would be too simplistic and vague. But we will see what is done later. Hooroo. Enlil Ninlil 03:31, 22 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to make a detailed article dealing with, say, crustacean mouthparths specifically, then I would welcome that. That doesn't reduce the need for a general mouthparts article, however, which if nothing else, serves as a glossary of terms that may be used in other articles, and covers the features which are general to all (or most) arthropods. I doubt it makes sense to discuss the different forms the labrum can take, without discussing the forms of the mandibles and maxillae in the same animals, so I would agree with you that the articles like mandible (insect) are probably unnecessary and should be merged into mouthparts or, if available, insect mouthparts. --Stemonitis 06:15, 22 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Gammarid Ugliness

I revised the Gammaridae page; some of you folks might want to check it later on. The former genus list was nicked from ADW. This list is no good: it contains hardly any Eurasian genera and is horribly horribly incorrect; probably >80% of the "gammarid" genera listed there are gammarideans, but not gammarids. Luckily, the French WP had a nice list to start with. I marked the genera I have doubts about being assigned correctly, so at least people won't take the list at face value.
ADW should be checked; it is a very bad and unreliable source that is best avoided at least for amphipods and possibly for other crustaceans as well... :( Dysmorodrepanis 18:16, 9 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am slightly confused about your terminology. You use "gammaridean" to mean "member of Gammaridae", and evidently "gammarid" to mean something else. To my mind, "gammarid" means member of Gammaridae, and gammaridean means member of Gammaridea, a rather larger taxon. --Stemonitis 18:20, 9 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Whoops, my bad! Of course with "gammaridean" I meant "member of Gammaridea". Doing birds, for which are sooo many family but very few suborder pages, my brain seems already adapted to "a coming before e" :) Dysmorodrepanis 02:11, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK. I think we have to be careful about original research here. It is not up to us to determine which lists we have more fiath in and which we disbelieve. ADW is a source, and it can be cited. ITIS lists only 17 genera ("Report". Integrated Taxonomic Information System.), and could be used instead. If there were a third list, then taking genera common to two lists would be a reasonable way of determining consensus in the scientific community, as long as we are not prejudiced in our choice of which lists to use.

RE OR - you're not European, correct? Some friends of mine have majored in freshwater ecology there and I occasionally discuss invasive species and such with them. To see the notorious Dikerogammarus missing in the old list rang all alarm bells :) the French WP list simply looks best. It's got a lot of taxa I either know or strongly suspect to be "good" Gammaridae.

I removed the species based on the assignment here on the English WP BTW - they were all listed in other Gammaridea families. May be incorrect, but at least it's consistent and if incorrect, it's easier to change than to have the same genus listed twice, in separate families that were not previously linked to each other.

(Just to let you know - I removed the genera because they popped up in some other family when I searched for them. Those that didn't and that are from the unreliable list I simply marked "verification needed".) Dysmorodrepanis 11:14, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

To complicate the terminology further, I see in one article (Jazdzewski; et al. (2002). "Four Ponto-Caspian and one American gammarid species (Crustacea, Amphipoda) recently invading Polish waters". Contributions to Zoology. 71 (4). {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help); Unknown parameter |quotes= ignored (help)) that they use "gammarid" to refer to Gammaroidea! --Stemonitis 07:51, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

ITIS is a bit suspect. It's not very often updated, and for birds, we try to avoid it on WP as we have better sources (unfortunately doesn't apply to crustacens). Here - to see the misspelt "Tabztzius" (for Tabatzius, Melitidae) hand around unrecognized since 2004 disqualifies it IMHO.

I've changed my mind. Not just any source. This ([1]) is clearly very wrong. Only three genera, and one of them Palaemon. But I still think this is different from issues of taxon delimitation, which is, I assume, the problem, if all the non-Gammaridae genera are indeed Gammaridea on your list. --Stemonitis 07:57, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yet another list (way down above the big colored drawing); unsourced but many seem good; problem is, it contains many genera that WP doesn't have. This might help. Fauna Europaea has Orchestia in Gammaridae, not in Talitridae, and altogether raises more question than it answers...

Paraniphargoides seems a bit suspect judging from the name alone, but they don't place it in Niphargidae which may or may not be correct - I simply can't tell.

I see 3 possibilities:

try and find the reference used for the Wikipedia layout of Gammaridea. User:Isfisk might remember.
a Google Scholar search for assorted genera we suspect to be a) Gammaridae and b) currently valid. The first is easy, the second less so - searching for Gammarus + Dikerogammarus for example yields a lot of material, but about invasive-species ecology, not systematics.
Trying the Tree of Life website and asking the local expert for a good reference.

The problem is the wastebasket taxon issue I mentioned in Gammaridae - that's how I came to the entire issue in the first place: I had a paper that I thought was good, maybe 10 years old, but it had the Baikalogammaridae and Macrohectopidae still in Gammaridae as turned out in the end, then I had another older ref that had the Niphargidae as gammarids, etc. Thus, we're looking for information based on a review that is less than 10, ideally less than 5 years old, about a diverse and mostly obscure group. Ugh... Dysmorodrepanis 11:14, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, forget Google Scholar, forget ToL. First comes up empty, second has no entry beyond Pericarida which might be tried though. BUT: following up on the 1993 revision of Gammaridea by Kim & Kim mentioned there, I came to this. The Martin/Davis, Richter/Scholz and English refs (and their respective "cited by...") seem most promising. Dysmorodrepanis 11:22, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just browsed the English ref (Doc thesis), the results seem promising: SSU rRNA sequence analysis recovers a monophyletic Gammaridae (though with no internal resolution, but that's not our problem here and how). These also seem to have a "closed transverse apodeme bridge" (whatever that may be - doi:10.1080/713833836) unlike other Gammaridea. Hoo-ray. And it can be cited - page 128, to be exact - if the "wastebasket" bit needs to be sourced. The Englisch thesis rejects separation of Acanthogammaridae and Gammaridae; my older ref supported it based on some other rRNA sequence, for that matter... maybe it's just Parapallasea being no acanthogammarid. In any case, the thesis suggests adding Parapallasea and Eulimnogammarus to the Gammaridae, or if the latter isn't, remove Chaetogammarus.

The good Ms. Englisch seems seriously into gammarids: doi:10.1080/00222930210144352. But she seems not to be at her former university anymore... worked there as a research assistant til last year, now is gone. Maybe she married, is now called Kleikamp, and works her amphipods at Museum Koenig. Dysmorodrepanis 12:07, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Classification schemes

Hello. I came here to discuss certain classification schemes in this project that appear controversial, and the members' opinions on whether they should be kept or not.

1. Paraphyletic groups within the Crustacea: Studying the phylogenetic diagrams at http://tolweb.org, I have noticed at least three groups used in the project that appear paraphyletic.

Class Maxillopoda is shown here as a wastebasket taxon, combining Copepoda, Branchiura (including Pentastomida), Tantulocarida, Thecostraca and Mystacocarida merely because they could not be placed into any other class.

Infraclass Diplostraca, as explained in the taxobox for Branchiopoda, contains all branchiopods that are not in Anostraca or Notostraca. It is treated here as paraphyletic, Notostraca and Cladocera both nested within it.

Superorder Eucarida, combining orders Amphionidacea, Euphausiacea and Decapoda, is also displayed here as paraphyletic, with Peracarida and Syncarida nested within it. In the diagram, the order Euphausiacea is closer to Peracarida than Amphionidacea+Decapoda.

2. Hexapoda vs. Insecta: Wikipedia is the only place I have seen subphylum Hexapoda used and the orders Collembola, Protura and Diplura excluded from Insecta (even though I may not have a whole lot of arthropod experience). The term Hexapoda may in fact be outdated; for instace, Webster's College Dictionary and its online copy, Dictionary.com, define hexapod as:

a six-legged arthropod of the class Insecta (formerly Hexapoda); an insect.

Thank you for considering these controversies. -Crustaceanguy 23:28, 17 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In Study of Insects (7th ed.), p.152, Hexapoda is considered a class, and the 3 orders you named are excluded from Insecta. In Invertebrate Zoology (7th ed.), the term Hexapoda is also used, but this time it's a superclass and, again, the 3 orders you named are excluded (and the order Japygina is also exluded from Insecta). -PhDP ^(talk) 01:09, 18 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Crustacea: The higher systematics of the Crustacea are not well established yet, and each new study reveals some new possible relationships. Tolweb is one source, but there are others which are equally authoritative. In particular, Martin & Davis included a long introduction in their work, explaining which taxa are likely to be controversial and why, as well as possible alternatives. Actually, Eucarida is not shown as paraphyletic in that diagram; it is shown as possibly paraphyletic. The relationships have not been fully resolved and cannot exclude either a monophyletic Eucarida or a paraphyletic Eucarida (or even a polyphyletic Eucarida for that matter). Any cladogram with polytomies is incomplete and represents a lack of knowledge about relationships. The same is true of Maxillopoda. Their diagrams give no information about whether or not it is monophyletic. About Eucarida, M&D say "Most workers seem to be in agreement that the Eucarida is a valid (i.e., monophyletic) assemblage (but see arguments against a monophyletic Eucarida in Richter and Scholtz, in press)". About Maxillopoda, they say "The Maxillopoda continues to be a terribly controversial assemblage concerning both the number of constituent groups and the monophyly of the entire taxon. We were tempted to abandon, once and for all, the concept of a monophyletic Maxillopoda, as there seems very little in the way of morphological or molecular evidence uniting the disparate groups (Wilson, 1992; Spears and Abele, 1997; Shultz and Regier, 2000)". I think this demonstrates that the two cases are quite different. M&D is exactly the sort of secondary, review literature that we should be relying upon. They chose to continue to include Maxillopoda for the time being, but accepted that it was controversial. This is perhaps the line we should follow, not least becasue it saves us from having to decide between various more recently-published schemes. Something along the lines of "Xxxx have traditionally been placed in the Maxillopoda, but that group may not be monophyletic and some studies show Xxxx being closer to Yyyy" is probably appropriate for the relevant articles. --Stemonitis 06:39, 18 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hexapoda: When writing Protura and Diplura, I did look into the classification and came to the conclusion that the modern consensus view was to include them in a Subphylum Hexapoda. Again, systematics at this level is in a state of flux, particularly given the suggestions that insects may be nested within crustaceans, and there is a strong case to be made for sticking to a more conservative but widely-followed scheme, albeit mentioning possibilities raised by more recent work. --Stemonitis 06:39, 18 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

ID on these two bugs please?

I just came back from a trip to China, where I took these two photos. Can anyone help me figure out what exactly they are? If it helps, these were taken in and around Changsha in Hunan province. Cheers, Corvus coronoides 01:11, 25 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

- is a cockroach (don't know the species)

- is a click beetle (also don't know the species) Dyanega 08:26, 25 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the help. Cheers, Corvus coronoides 13:33, 25 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Polbot

Greetings. I run a bot named User:Polbot that creates new stubs on species it finds in the IUCN that don't already have articles in Wikipedia. She has already created all the birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. I'm now working on the arthropods, starting with butterflies. (I've already informed Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera about this.) If you think Polbot is adding incorrect information, please let me know. You can view her contributions here. All the best, – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 16:30, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, the species name in the taxobox needs to be in italics. Secondly, it would be really helpful if the articles could be assessed for importance as well as quality. I think it's safe to assume that they're all low-importance; it's easier for someone to manually alter one or two more important species than to have to go through all of them adding that they're of low importance. If possible, going through the articles already started would be good. --Stemonitis 17:07, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thirdly, the categories are in a mess. The categorisation scheme needs to be discussed before this goes any further. --Stemonitis 17:10, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings. So, what's this about the species name? It looks to be in italics in the taxobox to me. Could you give me an example? As for importance, the bot really isn't qualified to assess article importance. (Neither am I -- I'm not an entomologist, just a programmer.) I'd discussed the matter of saying "importance=low" with the Bird WikiProject, and they indicated that a bot shouldn't make that sort of decision. Are you really comfortable with me blindly assuming the articles all have a low importance? It's easy for me to do that, if you're sure that's what you want.

So what don't you like about the categories? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 17:19, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, several things. The bot is putting articles in categories which don't exist, and it's creating categories with far too few articles in. The bot should only be placing articles in categories which already exist, and then leave it up to a human editor to decide when and how best to subdivide the category. Category:Fauna of Switzerland will probably never be a good category (and has previously been deleted twice); Category:Kyidris contains two articles and is itself in a non-category. This is a serious problem. The italics issue is that not just the binomial in the taxobox must be italicised, but also the name at the top. I'd be happy with an assumption of low importance, but if others in this project disagree, then I'll concede the point (although as the one who has added almost all the assessments so far, I'd be loath to have too much needless work pushed my way). --Stemonitis 17:55, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Another point: arthropod articles take sentence case, not the bird-specific standard of capitalisation. Thus, Ravoux's Slavemaker Ant and any others like it must be moved. It would have been nice to have had the chance to discuss all this before too many articles had been made. A sample of 50 or so would have been a good idea. Well, I guess we'll consider the ones done up until now to be our sample. That will give me (and others) a chance to look through them and find other potential problems. Oh, and it's not "The Ravoux's Slavemaker Ant" — we don't put definite articles before possessive pronouns — it should be simply "Ravoux's slavemaker ant is…". --Stemonitis 18:01, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I see you mean the species name at the top (if the species doesn't have a common name). That's easy to fix. I'll set importance to default to "low", and I'll change that if anyone objects.

As for categories, you seem to have a couple of concerns, which I'll try to address. Take a look at this draft guideline linked from Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera, a subproject of this one. It says "Each genus, for which a wikipage exists, should have a category page." This is the same standard that the birds, mammals, and amphibians and reptiles use in their wikiprojects. Otherwise, you'll get a family of beetles with two thousand articles in it. Is that really what you want? Polbot had originally categorized everything by family, but many, many users objected that that was overpopulating categories and creating too much work for manual editors to fix. Instead, the consensus was that she should create genus categories, put those genus categories into family categories, and just let human editors create those family categories if they don't exist (or rename them if appropriate), which is much less work for humans to do. This is what I have done for birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles, and it has been the best choice for these Wikiprojects. Are you sure you don't want arthropods done this way?

You also mentioned "fauna of Switzerland". This has been a difficult issue to resolve. At first, Polbot didn't add "fauna of Country" categories at all, but this was a most-requested-feature, so I added it for countries where a species in endemic. Some countries have sub-categories, like "birds of Ecuador", and others don't, and some don't even have "fauna of" categories. The consensus was that I should just create "fauna of Country" categories, and then afterwards I can either remove "fauna of Switzerland" if people don't think it's useful, or replace "fauna of China" with "insects of China" for insects where appropriate, or whatever. Changing categories is trivial for a bot to do after the fact.

I looked through the arthropod wikiproject guideline, but there was no information on whether "Ravoux's Slavemaker Ant" or "Ravoux's slavemaker ant" is preferable. Only fish specify lower case -- all other wikiprojects say to use capitalization, or else don't specify. Many arthropod articles use initial caps, but many do not. If you think I should set it to lower case, that's not hard to do -- but Polbot (being just a bot) can't tell if a word is a proper name or not. Basically, she can either assume "Ravoux's Slavemaker Ant", or assume "ravoux's slavemaker ant". It's not ideal, but there's no way a bot can tell. So which do you prefer? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 18:16, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum: I see that Wikipedia:WikiProject Arthropods/Categories specifies the category structure. I hadn't seen that. Yes, I can use this for arthropods. Would that alleviate your concerns? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 18:25, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

[edit conflict]

Capitalisation: Lepidoptera and Odonata are exceptions; all other arthropods are (explicitly) in sentence case — WP:ARTH states "other common names should be in lower case".
Geographical categories: having a single endemic species does not warrant a category of its own. This is one reason why I say that only existing categories should be used. Animals that occur in Switzerland could be put in Category:Fauna of Europe or an existing subcategory of that.
Taxonomic categories: generic categories for very few articles don't make sense. Indeed, subcategories should only usually be made when existing categories become too big to be manageable. Category:Formicidae is a bad category — Formicidae is a redirect to ant; Category:Formicidae is a mal-named duplicate of the existing Category:Ants.
Non-existent categories: Putting articles in categories shortly before creating them is not recommended, but is not a hanging offence. Failing to create categories which already have articles in is, however, not acceptable.

--Stemonitis 18:30, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Arthropods/Categories is only a guide to what categories we've already got, and may well be out of date. The actual category structure is the only reliable guide. --Stemonitis 18:31, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Some more problems. The taxa in the taxoboxes are pointing to redirects. They should read regnum = [[Animal]]ia, not regnum = [[Animalia]] (and similarly for [[Arthropod]]a, [[Insect]]a, [[Ant|Formicidae]] and so on. Another useful addition would be if the redirects could be automatically categorised with either {{R to scientific name}} or {{R from scientific name}}. Finally, a text like "an ant of the family Formicidae" (which is more scientific language than "the Formicidae family") is redundant, since Formicidae redirects to ant. Bots, just like humans, should really check the targets of links to make sure that they're right. --Stemonitis 09:23, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Another category problem. If making a category for a genus, then the genus article should be both in that category and in the parent category. Chalepoxenus should be in Category:Chalepoxenus (preferably top sorted with a space: [[Category:Chalepoxenus| ]]) as well as Category:Ants. This is true for all head articles of categories. I reckon it would take me all day to clear up the mess already created by Polbot; I'm not going to, but that's my estimate of the time it would need. I am very glad now that I blocked it when I did. I think giving Polbot a cleanup function to tidy up some of the debris it has made would be of wide applicability. --Stemonitis 09:40, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please note that Polbot can make this sort of change much easier than a person can. Simply let me know this sort of request, and it'll only take her a couple of hours to put genera articles in genera categories. (However, in this case, other Wikiprojects have suggested that the genus article should only be in the family category.) – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 20:02, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Formatting issue: the IUCN link contains a number of inexplicable spaces, which isn't really a problem, but also fails to italicise the scientific names, which is. --Stemonitis 09:55, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Update: Now I see that some poor bastard has gone through trying to clean up the ill-conceived Category:Formicidae. It would be great if Polbot could rectify some of the problems it has created before too many more people waste time and effort trying to clean up after it. --Stemonitis 12:10, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A couple more problems: for the synonyms, Polbot seems to be resorting to HTML coding instead of using Wiki-syntax. It uses <i> and <div> tags instead of '' and <br />; there is also a trend towards using <small> around authorities in the synonyms section, which Polbot could follow. Finally, the comment that Polbot leaves behind ("") is redundant — that information is in the page history. --Stemonitis 12:52, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorting of articles based on quality

Sorting of articles based on quality is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Lepidoptera. As of now, the consensus with regard to importance of species article is that these be classified as per a two tier scheme (high/low):

Species of economical, scientific, or cultural importance or those that are endangered are being categorised as high.
All other species are classified as of low importance.

So if Polbot makes all the articles high in importance, that's fine by us. Any species threatened enough to figure on the IUCN list is of high importance to the WikiProject. Regards, AshLin 10:17, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That may make sense for lepidopterans, but for the whole of Arthropoda, there will be hundreds if not thousands of endangered species, most of which are not significant for anything other than their endangerment. It could be argued that, if anything, the common species are more important, since they have a greater prominence in people's lives. For this project, an endangered species is just another endangered species. An endangered species of great cultural, historical and environmental significance is of course important, but rarity alone is not sufficient. In this project, there are only two species rated as having high importance, both of which have been extremely influential in shaping biological theory: Drosophila melanogaster and the peppered moth. Even at mid-importance, there aren't so many, and they're almost all of great economic significance (as pests or as food). Like any other category, these quality ratings must match the text of the articles and if there's no claim of notability beyond an IUCN rating, then it can't be considerd highly important. --Stemonitis 10:38, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, the IUCN lists non-threatened species as well as threatened ones. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 19:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Responding to suggestions

Polbot has already been approved by the community to run the species-article-creation function (see here for details), and she has already created over ten thousand new articles. However I don't want to have her create any more arthropod articles while there are valid objections from experts such as Stemonitis. I'd like to briefly summarize the complaints, comments, and suggestions below. I'm looking forward to finishing the arthropods, so I hope to deal with all objections soon.

When the article name is the binomial name, this name should be italicized in the taxobox. Done
Polbot should assume low importance for new arthropods. Done
Polbot currently creates "Fauna of X" categories for countries where the species is endemic. Such categories are sometimes useful and sometimes not.
- Solution: Once Polbot has finished creating all animal articles, I'll look through all "fauna of X" categories. (At that point I'll be able to tell which ones have enough species to be useful.) The ones not needed, I'll merge into "fauna of [continent]".
Arthropod common names should use sentence case. Done
- However, a bot cannot tell if a word in a name is a capitalized proper name or not (like "West European lobster"), so these won't be capitalized and will have to fixed by humans. That's unfortunate, but there's no way around it.
If the first word in a name is possessive, as in Ravoux's slavemaker ant, it should not be preceded by a definite article. Done
Generic categories should only be used when there are many species in a genus. Otherwise, it should be categorized at the family level.
- Solution: This is another task that is best fixed retroactively. Once all species categories are created, I can more easily see which ones are sparse, and I can recategorize the species in those genera.
Sometimes categories should be based on scientific name. Other times, the categorization is based on common name (e.g. ants).
- Unfortunately, bots aren't able to tell the ways a category could be named. Once Polbot has finished with the deprecated "Category:Formica", this can easily be changed to "Category:Ants", and I've made such changes for birds where appropriate.
The taxa in taxoboxes are pointing to redirects.
- That's correct. Our Manual of Style says there's no reason to change a link to a redirect to point to the article name instead. It works just as well either way, so far as the user experience, and there's no difference in terms of server load.
Redirects should be categorized with, for instance, {{R to scientific name}}. Done
The IUCN "source" link should italicize binomials. Done
Polbot needs to convert HTML formatting in synonyms to wikiformating. I'm still working on this one.
It is alleged that the HTML comment at the start of the article is unnecessary. I agree, but many users have requested this, and would strongly object if I removed it.

I think that's it. If these are finished, is there any objection to me starting her up again? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 20:07, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for fixing so many of the problems so quickly.

I thought 4 might be quite difficult, and I'm not surprised that Polbot can't distinguish proper nouns from common nouns — plenty of humans struggle as well. One solution would be to put everything at a scientific name at least to start with. I find it hard to believe that many endangered species of ants and the like will really have common names (as opposed to officially mandated attempts to introduce standardised "common names").

I'm not greatly enamoured of the idea of making bad categories and then coming back to fix them. I suspect that the motivation to sort the mess out will dwindle fairly rapidly after the articles have been created. I think a better approach is to place new articles in existing categories, and let someone sort out the best means of subcategorisation afterwards. Any other method is flawed at best, reckless at worst. There are other issues with categorisation, as well (it's a lot more complex than most people give it credit for). Articles often appear in intersection categories at a variety of different levels. Thus, an article may be in [Category:Rove beetles of North America], [Category:Beetles of California], [Category:Insects of Alameda County, California] and [Category:Fauna of Oakland, California] (all made up, but you get the idea). This is of course difficult for an automated process to deal with, but at least any insects in Category:Fauna of [country] should be placed in Category:Insects of [continent] — that should be feasible. Most crustaceans don't live on continents, and the other arthropod taxa are not represented by enough articles to have warranted geographic categorisation, so it's only really the insects you need to worry about on this issue. That's excluding the spiders of course, which are categorised by continent (and I should know!), but which are covered by a different project.

7: Polbot should learn to follow links. If Formicidae redirects to ant, then it's a pretty sure bet that Category:Formicidae should be replaced with Category:Ants. Having said that, rove beetles are in Category:Staphylinidae; we might need to do some CFDs in a bit. I'd quite like all categories (and articles) at scientific name, but Wikipedia isn't written for me. At least if Polbot follows the head article, then it'll have someone else to blame.

8: The MoS says that there's no reason to change a link, but that's not what we're discussing. When creating an article, it makes sense to disambiguate as far as possible. Even if it only involves remembering a few frequent examples (Animal[ia], Arthropod[a], Insect[a], [Ant|Formicidae], [beetle|Coleoptera], etc.), it should be done in advance. Deliberately pointing at a redirect when you know the real target is not in any sense "correct", just lazy. The server load of editing an article to make bypass a redirect outweighs the benefits, but when creating an article, there is no such penalty. I can try to provide a fairly complete list of articles not at scientific-name titles if that would help. With that, it should only need a simple series of regular expressions to have everything work perfectly.

I have to say, I'm a little surprised that nobody else has come up with comments before, if Polbot has been creating so many articles — they seemed like glaring errors to me. --Stemonitis

I think Quadell does work with WikiProjects before starting Polbot runs now, but maybe the other WikiProjects have different standards and Polbot did OK with those articles. To be really organised, you could create a subpage to list problems you find that may need correction by bots or humans. Also, I noticed your comment above: "I'd quite like all categories (and articles) at scientific name, but Wikipedia isn't written for me." - there is actually a way to achieve this, a way that you touched upon with your references to {{R to scientific name}}. It is quite possible (if very tedious) to create parallel taxonomies in the category structure using "common name" and "scientific name". You simply categorise the redirects in suitably named categories. See Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects for details, and add your support there if you approve. If fully implemented for a particular area, this allows people to chose to either browse a category by common name, or by scientific name. Carcharoth 23:07, 3 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, these IUCN common names have got to go. They list three different species as "Kocevje Subterranean Spider" [sic: should use sentence case, as described above, and the town is Kočevje, not "Kocevje"] — Troglohyphantes gracilis, T. similis and T. spinipes. This is clearly not a common name. Polbot must create all arthropod articles at scientific names and let a human decide whether or not it has an applicable common name. --Stemonitis 06:54, 2 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Another problem

Here, Polbot asserts that Andrew Smith erected a new species 70 years after his death. This is a serious problem, because it shows that Polbot must have made assumptions which were not only flawed but just plain wrong. Many of Polbot's guesses at authorities will have been right, but how many will have been wrong? How can we know? --Stemonitis 08:52, 2 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ooh. That is bad. The way to answer that is to ask how Polbot guessed from the IUCN data (Smith) that this was "Andrew Smith". Also, which Smith should it have been? Also, see my comments above. Carcharoth 23:07, 3 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion on changing Cricket from the sport to a disambiguation page

As some have suggested before, Cricket should redirect to a disambiguation page instead of to the sport cricket. I'm not entirely sure what was named first, the insect or the sport, but comments/opinions are welcome.

The discussion can be found here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cricket#Requested_move. Malamockq 19:05, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure it's appropriate to advertise the move request only here; some observers may see it as an attempt at skewing the outcome. At the very least, Wikiproject Cricket should be notified, and possibly Wikiproject Sports as well. It would probably have been better not to have posted a notice here, but it's a bit late for that now. --Stemonitis 19:15, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's appropriate to calling attention to a discussion "advertising". The topic is relevant to both so I invite everyone to participate. The discussion is at the Cricket discussion page, which is quite active, but I'm letting people from this project know about it as well. If you want to post a notice on those projects as well, you are welcome to do so. Malamockq 20:03, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Request for opinions

Greetings. As discussed above, Polbot is a bot that reads information from the IUCN and creates new stubs on plant and animal species. There is currently a request for opinions here regarding the linking of biologists' names. Any comments on that page would be welcome. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 17:19, 7 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Animals project proposal

I think it's both a pity and somewhat illogical that we have no animal WikiProject despite the fact that there are over 20 projects that are basically its daughters. There are also other projects that could emerge from it in the future, such as one on animal behavior. The project would provide a central place for people from all animal projects to talk, a central set of guidelines for articles on animals and zoology, and an assessment system for articles related to animals. If you are interested in creating such a project please visit Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of life#Animals project to discuss. Richard001 08:47, 8 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The following projects would come under the parentage of this project:

Project Created

The Animals WikiProject has been created. I've got much of the framework for the project page layout done, thanks to the folks at WP:PLANTS, but there is still much to do. If you would like to participate it would be much appreciated. J. Hall • ^(Talk) 07:30, 28 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Dragonfly page and morphology image

Could someone revisit the project rating for the page Dragonfly? I was surprised to see this was A-class, since the biological information is so sketchy.

Also, the image at Dragonfly morphology edit 3.svg could use expert review. It's a featured picture, but shows a dragonfly with a "sting" (?), and the wings don't look odonate to me, even allowing for stylization. —Celithemis 00:38, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Dragonfly stubs and Category:Damselfly stubs proposed

The stub category Category:Odonata stubs is oversized; I've proposed splitting into the above two groups, which already have separate templates. If people would prefer a finer-grained split -- say, into families -- that seems doable, too. Alai 01:20, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

RE: Pyemotes herfsi

Having some problems identifying its complete taxonomy. There are some USDA sites referenced in the article, if anyone would like to help. Novickas 13:12, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

It should be OK now. --Stemonitis 13:28, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! As usual, things turn out to be more complicated than I expected tho - there are several kinds of "itch mites", so a disambig page is probably called for... Novickas 13:45, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

That shouldn't be too big a problem. There aren't very many incoming links, so switching the redirect would be relatively painless. --Stemonitis 14:03, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A Google search on "itch mite" site:.edu OR site:.gov turns up: Psorergates ovis, Pyemotes herfsi, Pyemotes tritici (straw itch mite), Pyemotes ventricosus (grain itch mite) and Sarcoptes scabiei (scabies). There were over 1,200 search matches; these 5 species represent the results shown on the first four or five search result pages. Itch mite is now a disambig page; P. herfsi was the only incoming link as far as I could tell. Thanks again, Novickas 15:08, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

The article was flagged as being US-centric; some info was added on its worldwide distribution. The creature was probably identified by Anthonid Cornelis Oudemans, but there are/were a number of other Oudemans out there, so this can't be said with confidence. Anyone's thoughts or knowledge? Novickas 15:40, 20 August 2007 (UTC) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Novickas (talk • contribs).

Isle of fleas?

WikiProject Scottish Islands has come across Island of fleas, an article created from edits by User:Portbannatyne in May 2006 at Isle of Bute. It is an unverified possible candidate for deletion, but the editor who provided the information clearly knew enough about the subject to use credible latin names. My guess is that it is a vainglorious breach of WP:AUTO rather than an outright hoax, although there is a well known Scots song about Rothesay, the capital of Bute, which contains the lines:

When somebody happened for to sneeze

And wakened half a million fleas

And all the bugs in Rothsay-O.

Comments from flea fanciers and others knowledgeable enough to comment about this oddity are very welcome at Talk:Island of fleas. Ben MacDui (Talk) 20:02, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Help with French expert

The article Bengalia has some scientific debate happening in French and perhaps across the French wikipedia. The author of a new family seems to be pointing to his own reliable published sources on the new family Bengaliidae. To keep the article NPOV the family article and the classification may need to be fixed. However this apparently needs someone who has looked at the sources in French and can follow the discussion. Thanks. Shyamal 07:53, 29 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that Andy Lehrer has moved from fr: to here in his personal quest to have Bengaliidae recognised. The French Wikipedians have already agreed to delete Bengaliidae, and fr:Utilisateur:Andy Lehrer has been blocked for his edits in the past. None of this is strictly relevant, but it might indicate that he won't give up quietly. The overwhelming scientific consensus is still that Bengalia belongs in Calliphoridae, as far as I can see, and we should be very resistant to any attempts to portray it otherwise. --Stemonitis 08:24, 29 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Does anyone recognise this.

(cross-post from talk:Leech#Does anyone recognise this.)

I presume it's a leech, it certainly moved like one, though I've never seen one coloured like this. Does anyone have any idea what species it is? I have a couple of other photos of it I can upload if any one wants. ornis (t) 03:46, 8 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Public domain images

Don't know if anyone is familiar with this public domain image repository. Insects and weeds. IvoShandor 17:46, 8 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Article requests

If anyone is interested here are some key red links, these are all pests which affect conifers.

Mindarus abietnus (Balsam twig aphid)
Adelges cooleyi, (this is just a redirect to gall adelgid, (Cooley spruce gall adelgid)
Paradiplosis tumifex (Balsam gall midge)
Tomicus piniperda (Pine shoot beetle)
Pissodes strobi (White pine weevil)
Chionaspis pinifoliae (Pine needle scale)
Hylobius radicis (Pine root collar weevil)
Dioryctria zimmermani (Zimmerman pine moth)

Thanks ahead of time. Barnstars to be had. :) IvoShandor 17:18, 10 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Colonial legacy problems

AfD alert - Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nigger_butterfly Shyamal 04:19, 20 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

crustacean sub-stub-types

If anyone's interested, there's some discussion over at WP:WSS/P about further splitting up the crustacean stubs by taxon. Alai 16:50, 27 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Love Bugs

I have to dispute a couple of your claims within your article. You state that love bugs were not bad in 2005. Ask anyone in South Mississippi when the worst year for love bugs was. Your answer will be after Katrina.

I travel by air 80% of the time and, therefore, my car sits in a airport for half the week with love bugs on it. So, after a thorough cleaning I tried Pam. Big Mistake. I may not have had love bugs but the Pam cooked on my hot black car and was impossible to get off. The result, $800 for a new paint job on the front of my car. 68.63.231.180 20:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Arthropods

i have created this portal a bit recently. kindly have a look please. Sushant gupta 12:39, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Bengalia

So much for citing peer-reviewed scientific references ! There seems to be a problem in NPOVing Bengalia which seems to have become an academic battle ground. Perhaps someone here can see the position and counterpositions (ICZN rule interpretations) to find a compromise text. Shyamal 10:35, 5 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The ICZN rules have no application here; this is not about nomenclature, it is about monophyly/paraphyly of a taxon concept, which is a completely different matter. Basically, no one is evidently willing to accept Lehrer's ranking because it would appear to render Calliphoridae paraphyletic. In the absence of an explicit phylogenetic model of what to do with the REST of the Calliphoridae, Lehrer's work is sort of hanging in limbo; he may be right, but he has given insufficient evidence to support his view, and it should not be surprising that it has been challenged. What I find unacceptable is the blatant sock-puppetry involved - realistically, he should be blocked for this inexcusable behavior, which has nothing to do with academics, and everything to do with ethics. Dyanega 19:04, 5 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. - I can find no indication to confirm that Lehrer's book "Bengaliidae du monde" was peer-reviewed; as it was published as a free-standing monograph, rather than in a journal, there is no guarantee that the publisher required peer review - this is relevant as it is primarily this work that Rognes disputes. Likewise, the editorial policies of the Croatian entomological journal cited are not entirely clear, but it appears unlikely that any dipterists familiar with the Calliphoridae examined the manuscript prior to publication (i.e., no actual "peers"). Dyanega 01:08, 6 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for clarifying the dispute and modifying the text of article. Shyamal 01:50, 6 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Arthropod article A class?

I haven't even read this myself, but it doesn't exactly look near perfect to me. I would expect to see something about twice as long with about 4 time as many references if this were FA. Richard001 00:07, 10 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

attention needed

Important works of higher classification (insects) A fuller explanation and context is needed, or else integration into some existing article. DGG (talk) 10:10, 5 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]