User talk:Bolosphex

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Welcome!

Hello, Bolosphex, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome! 

[edit] Crabronini

We welcome articles like Crabronini and other similar insect articles you recently started. In addition to the infobox, would you please add at least some text that describes the creature to these articles. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style for some ideas on what an article should contain. Thanks, and good editing. Truthanado (talk) 02:49, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] a little cooperation, please?

Hi. While much of your recent editing is VERY welcome, a few things to consider are these: (1) please bear in mind what the taxonomic hierarchy being used here happens to be - if you wish to apply any alternative classifications, it might be best to discuss any changes before proceeding, and (2) please do not move pages that have common name titles to pages with scientific name titles, as you did for Eumeninae - the problem is that scientific names can change, while common names do not. Moves such as this go contrary to Wikipedia policy in naming conventions, and MUST be discussed prior to implementation.

As a minor technical point, it is generally NOT policy to place the authors of subdivision names within the taxobox, as you have done with Eumeninae and Synagris, for example. This makes the taxobox vastly longer than it needs to be - those author names should be used only in the taxobox of the article for the appropriate taxon (e.g., the author of the genus Abispa should only appear in the Abispa article, not the Eumenine article). No, I'm not saying you need to go back and remove those names you have already entered, but in the future save yourself all that extra work and keep the taxoboxes down to a more manageable size.

I've done over 5000 wikipedia edits, covering nearly every one of the insect-related pages, especially Hymenoptera, and I'll be happy to offer advice and guidance so our efforts work together, and not in conflict. Peace, Dyanega (talk) 18:03, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Also, regarding the size of the taxoboxes; while I realize that technically you are able to supply the names of all the species in a genus such as Zethus (I can do the same, as I have Jim Carpenter's complete world Vespid catalog in digital form), the simple fact is that no one - including yourself - is likely to ever make a Wikipedia article for every one of those species. As a rule of thumb, once a genus has more than ~20 species, it is more practical to simply state in the taxobox that there are >20 species, or >25, or whatever a reasonable approximation happens to be. In cases such as this, if you DO make actual species pages, then it is easy to go back and modify the genus page to contain a link to the species for which actual articles are present. Look at the Carpenter bee article, or Cerceris, for example - those articles would be unmanageably long if all of the known species were redlinked there! Yes, I have those species lists, and I could paste them into Wikipedia in a matter of seconds, but it would NOT be helpful to do so. Basically, a page which consists of little more than a giant list of permanently red links (such as the Zethus page) - while it is not against policy - could be done without listing every single species, which would make your job as an editor easier, without losing any real information that a reader might be interested in. It is possible to compromise on accuracy and still maintain utility, and doing so will allow you to create more pages, faster and more efficiently. Dyanega (talk) 18:28, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
I understand and appreciate that as a new editor, and not a native English speaker, your initial efforts may not all conform to the standards, which is why I'm happy to offer advice on what those standards are. We're both professional hymenopteran taxonomists, and I'm definitely happy to have someone like you joining up with Wikipedia to help improve the quality of the insect articles! Allow me to offer a few more minor things, then: (1) try to avoid having wikilinked terms that link back to the page itself (for example, you had the name "Masaridae" wikilinked back to the pollen wasp page on which it appeared - this is called a "self-link" and should be avoided) (2) If there is only a single genus in a family/subfamily, or a single species in a genus, then the only article that should be created is the article for the lowest applicable taxonomic rank, and any higher ranks should be simple redirects to that lower-rank article. See, for example, the changes I made to the Euparagia article, as well as Heterogyna. Note that comment #1 above applies to the taxobox, as well - e.g., the name "Euparagiinae" should not be wikilinked on the Euparagia page, since it redirects back to itself). (3) Finally, the category assignments should not overlap; any member of the Apoidea (the sphecoid wasps) should list ONLY the category "Apoidea" at the bottom, and NOT the category "Wasps". The latter category already includes the Apoidea as a sub-category. Again, I'm trying to be helpful and make it so that you can focus more on the addition of content, and not worry as much about the format, without creating articles that require extensive cleanup. You'll see that I have done cleanups on a number of the articles you've created already, most of it minor, and mostly to make sure the articles are consistent in appearance and structure. Dyanega (talk) 21:28, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A question about Epipona

Bolivar - a colleague here has recently observed Epipona guerini extracting burrowing larvae from within avocado fruit; are you aware of any records for this or other Epiponines which involve this form of prey capture? Thanks, Dyanega (talk) 00:29, 10 January 2008 (UTC)