Talk:Insect

Semi-protected edit request on 12 December 2023

Under "insects and other bugs" --> Diversity --> figure with header "Insects are extremely diverse. Five groups each have over 100,000 described species" the word "Bettles" should be changed to "Beetles" Finaledylctvm (talk) 06:54, 12 December 2023 (UTC) Done. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:02, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

lead image

I feel we can still use File:Insect collage.png. We can either expand it with non-Neoptera insects or even replace two of them. LittleJerry (talk) 02:44, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I feel that that would be a backward step. Here's why. Many, most, readers now use small mobile devices. They see a tiny collage of 4, 8, 12, 16 teeny tiny leggy thingies with, um, legs or teeth or shells or somethings. Don't know, doesn't matter, move on, read.... it's simply useless as an experience.

With one insect there, those readers have a chance of seeing a 3-part body, 3 pairs of legs, a complex head, a long abdomen, segments even. A million times more useful, more to the point. Chiswick Chap (talk) 03:44, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 26 January 2024

Change "Woodlouse: a dozen legs, a dozen segments"

to "Woodlouse: seven pairs of legs, seven body segments" 50.173.91.21 (talk) 14:34, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

That'd be seven thoracic segments, I see. Ok, let's tweak the text. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:38, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Lead image redux

I started a discussion on this some months ago, see the thread above, but it seems to be being ignored by editors, so let's try again. The MOS indicates that the lead should have an image which gives an idea of the subject of the article. There is no call for the image to try to cover everything, and it's clearly impossible to do so in a large subject like this one. The body plan of an insect is however rather simple: 3-part body, 3 pairs of legs, appendages including antennae and mouthparts, and very often two pairs of wings. An image with an insect big enough to be intelligible and legible on a small screen, or in a thumbnail image, conveys this message clearly to readers; a composite image with a dozen or more micro-thumbnails crammed together may say "variety" but it also says "too small to see properly" to a large percentage of the audience. I'd say that a lead image should be exactly that: a single instance, big enough and clear enough to say just one thing: "insect". Scroll down in the article, and the physical diversity, the range of body plans for different habitats, the phylogenetic range, the various life-cycles, the different means of locomotion — diversity has many meanings for insects, and all are covered in the article: but they can't all be covered in the lead image, and nor should they be, it's at once impossible, unnecessary, and pointless to try. Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:59, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

These are not substantive objections. Gallery lead images are widely used for animal clades articles, e.g. Arthropod, Animal, Mammal, Reptile etc. There is no opinion other than yours that there should only be a single lead image, and several editors have objected to it, including me and LittleJerry. Hemiauchenia (talk) 06:59, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict) There is no justification for using unreadably small images. The function of Wikipedia articles is to inform readers. Images that can't be read aren't informing. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:12, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

@LittleJerry: what are your thoughts on Insecta Diversity.jpg, do you think it is too cluttered? If I was to make a variant of Insect collage.png, what insect groups do you recommend that I add and/or remove? Hemiauchenia (talk) 07:11, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

There isn't a lot of justification for canvassing, either. Nor is there any policy which says that we must add "groups", i.e. illustrations of subsets of the article topic. An article on Castle does not need a lead image that illustrates forecastles and sandcastles or whatever, the job is best done with a single image that illustrates the article's key concept, its subject. We have multiple images, indeed a whole phylogeny in the article here. There is no point trying to make the lead image do a dozen jobs: it won't do any of them well. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:12, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

If anybody else has expressed an opinion on this topic I would have also pinged them, regardless of what their position was, so it's not canvassing, but merely pinging previous discussion participants. Hemiauchenia (talk) 07:28, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

I would prefer File:Insect collage.png or something similar. Chap objected because it contained only Neoptera insects, so I guess we should have some non-Neoptera. LittleJerry (talk) 14:42, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Please don't refer to me as "Chap", that's insulting. As you rightly say, the collage is quite unrepresentative; as I've said, it's also hopelessly cluttered. If we are to have more than one image, I suggest one Neopteran (already done) and one Palaeopteran, such as a dragonfly. And we might include an Apterygote, like a silverfish, if we're really going to town on this one. The goal of representing full diversity in such a group as Insects I'd have thought plainly hopeless; the collage demonstrates exactly what can go wrong with naive attempts. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:30, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

To save faffing about, I've implemented a 3-part image; at least the insects are full-width within that scope, and the selection makes some kind of sense phylogenetically. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:09, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

qualification to introduction

Right now the intro says "Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and a pair of antennae."

This should be qualified to say "Most insects ... ". The chitinous exoskeleton and 3-part body are universal, but the legs, eyes, and antennae are not always present. Mydas ruficornis (talk) 17:02, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Many thanks. It may help to understand that the lead is not a book-chapter introduction, more a short abstract. Its job is to provide (new) readers with a quick, light, overview of the article's contents. As such it employs broad, simple statements to make the main structure of the topic clear. It is not the place for special cases, technicalities, or rare exceptions. Every topic has those; they are covered in the article's body, not the lead: and specially not in the first paragraph. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:04, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

It seems like one of the most important stages of the life cycle of most insects is the larval stage, when they don't really look like the adult, because that's when insects are doing most of their eating and being eaten, and that's the stage in which different insect species seem to differ the most from one another in terms of specialization. I guess most insect larvae/nymphs also have all of these characteristics except for fly larvae (e.g. maggots), so I appreciate your explanation. Mydas ruficornis (talk) 17:40, 22 November 2024 (UTC)