Lhikan634

Ways to improve Pygodasis

Hello, Lhikan634,

Thanks for creating Pygodasis! I edit here too, under the username Girth Summit and it's nice to meet you :-)

I wanted to let you know that I have tagged the page as having some issues to fix, as a part of our page curation process and note that:-

Hi - BugGuide and iNaturalist look like interesting sites, but if I'm reading them correctly, they both appear to be user-generated content sites, which are generally regarded as unreliable. It would be really useful to have a reliably published secondary source, like an academic textbook or similar, to back up the sourcing here.

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GirthSummit _(blether) 12:29, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Girth Summit: BugGuide info pages are specifically created by taxonomists, in conjunction with the Iowa State University Department of Entomology, and the site is a common citation on most pages for insect species from the US. Their info page on Pygodasis recounts info directly from the scientific literature. iNaturalist is cited secondarily as a taxon ID provider. The scoliid wasps (such as Pygodasis) are regrettably full of taxonomic issues, so the majority of taxonomic references outside of the primary literature would end up being worse options (and the primary literature is, per usual, either largely not readily and publicly accessible or at least a century obsolete). There are a handful of papers (primary lit.) that I'm attempting to access for parsing information on genera, but BugGuide is frankly the most accurate secondary source for genera of the US at the moment. Lhikan634 (talk) 15:07, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Please do not accuse me of making up common names for Wikipedia

The pages Lasioglossum tuolumnense‎ and Lasioglossum floridanum‎ were created in 2018. The common names came from Bugguide, listed in the references. Those names were apparently removed from Bugguide yesterday, the day you made these edits, and this seems to be a bit controversial. I did not make up these names, and it makes zero sense that you would accuse me of that when they've been in Bugguide for years.

When you state in your edit of List of Lasioglossum species that "a single BugGuide user has made up several hundred names that the site is trying to find and remove," it doesn't seem to agree with the comments in the Bugguide editor's forum.

I don't know whether these common names are legitimate, but if they are referenced properly it is not inappropriate to put them in Wikipedia as I did in 2018. If they are no longer valid, it is fine to remove them. You might also want to remove these names from Wikidata and iNaturalist.

If you have a list of unquestionably invalid common names, I'll be glad to flag them in my database so I don't inadvertently use them in the future. Bob Webster (talk) 16:26, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Bob, regrettably I've been becoming more and more aware that the reliability of information on BugGuide really varies page to page since it's a form of user-generated content. As far as the forum link, the evidence I'm following is that there was no consensus to add those names in the first place and that there was no reference material. Issues of their own site policy could be verified with the publisher or senior editors of BugGuide. But if the standards for publishing material are lower than those of Wikipedia, that would be a problem. Worse, names on iNaturalist can be added by anyone at all, so that aspect does not appear to be in line with Wikipedia:UCG. And at a cursory sample, I'm not seeing many of their bee names outside of the site. They will have their own policies on how to handle this, but it may be worth reaching out to their own admins in case it's the same individual making up information. Your best bet would be to use a Google search test (preferably Google scholar) to make sure that the material can be backed up by a reliable source. By default, my searches exclude BugGuide and iNaturalist as both have demonstrated issues with reliability with common names. Lhikan634 (talk) 23:54, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

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Ascalaphidae

Hi, thanks for your interest in this article. However, you mention Oswald without citing that paper in the article, so your changes are indistinguishable from original research until that source is discussed and cited in the article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:22, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Chiswick Chap I suspect that Lhikan634 was meaning Oswalds neuropteran database rather than a peer-reviewed paper. It is one of the most complete Neuropteran databases at present, but still runs into the problem that systematists are split on what phylogeny to use.--Kevmin § 17:36, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Kevmin Yes, I searched and it was the only thing I could find: I was and remain reluctant to use such a source. As you say, it doesn't resolve the issue, and it's not clear what citing it would mean – if it's constantly updated, how would a citation be verified once the state-of-the-data has been changed, for instance. I suggest we don't try, in which case what I've done, which is to show what Jones and Machado each propose, is about as far as we can go just now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:41, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

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Eucerotinae

Thankyou.I think I will rewrite this page so delete text as you wish (and by the look of it should).In any event the source is partisan and I should look at alternatives. Best regards Notafly (talk) 18:52, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Since when are iNaturalist and BugGuide unacceptable as WP:UGC sites?

These sites are heavily screened by expert taxonomists, such as myself and many others, and cited quite heavily in Wikipedia. I strongly suggest that if you want to categorize content from these sites as violating WP policy, you bring this up in an appropriately broad WP discussion forum (e.g. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life) and, in doing so, solicit feedback from as many editors as possible, rather than unilaterally deleting links. It would be good to be clear as to whether these sites are okay to cite, or not, given how prominent they are. Thanks. Dyanega (talk) 23:35, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Again, it's not that you're wrong to be skeptical, but my concern is that for such widely-used sources, ideally we would hope that all editors either agree never to use these sites, or that these sites are acceptable. I suppose it's possible that they could be considered cite-worthy for some types of information and not others, but that seems like it would be a difficult line to draw. I share your concern that some of the content is being created arbitrarily by non-expert users (e.g., some of the "common names"), but I'm not sure it would be possible to tease these out. Dyanega (talk) 00:09, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Here are my thoughts. Part of the problem is that BugGuide and iNaturalist really are collaboratively-created like fancy wikis, which already can't be cited regardless of how correct the material is. In fact, this is essentially what a site administrator noted above about the Pygodasis page and one reason (in addition to those below) why I've re-evaluated my thoughts on the matter since since 2019 to be in agreement with their above statements. Wikipedia's guideline states that "[c]ontent from websites whose content is largely user-generated is generally unacceptable" and includes under this definition of user-generated content "collaboratively created websites". The format of editing taxon pages on BugGuide is precisely that of a wiki, and not all contributing editors are actually experts. Though not the most common occurrence, there's evidence that edit wars have gone on from perusing their forums. iNaturalist specifically classifies itself as a social media site, which is explicitly a part of the user-generated content guideline. I would be concerned that both sites are already explicitly covered under that guideline based on my current understanding of how both sites operate.

There are additional issues to consider in terms of being reliable sources, and these are all problems I've seen since the above-referenced conversation from 2019. Both sites have a bunch of common names that originate on those sites and cannot be corroborated in any sort of publication, and I've seen a lot of these start migrating into Wikipedia articles as well. Thousands of these were created just between a couple of site curators and one admin from issues I've been watching. Then there are more complicated areas where taxonomic changes have been made prior to a publication, such as how both sites currently treat species of Ululodes. They may well be correct, but neither site has any published reference for these changes. I've also run into several sections of blatantly plagiarized material where citing BugGuide would be a misattribution. I even see this argument on the topic, where all participants are contributing editors. This also isn't a unique incident or plagiarism. This really isn't a good look for BugGuide if they aspire to be a reputable and credible reference.

That's certainly not saying they don't have use. For instance: until the Khouri, Gillung, & Kimsey (2022) and Ramírez-Guillén Falcon-Brindis, & Gómez (2022) papers, BugGuide was one of very few references using (mostly) correct scoliid taxonomy. Most other papers just ignored the Argaman (1996) and Osten (2005) papers for decades. BugGuide was a great starting point for working with the Pygodasis page and pointed me toward several of the scientific papers that are now cited. Likewise, iNaturalist was really useful for finding CC BY and CC BY SA images, and in fact 4 of the 5 images on the page came from and were identified on iNaturalist. Now, while both sites are reasonably accurate in terms of scoliid taxonomy, there are several express errors. Campsomerini is still represented on both sites as Campsomerinae, and Crioscolia is treated as a genus rather than as a subgenus of Colpa. I even see these issues were pointed out on their forum 8 months ago and still haven't been corrected. Relying upon either BugGuide or iNaturalist here rather than the recent scientific literature would end up being a step backwards (in fact, just a bit over 4 decades to 1981).

I think at the end of the day, reliability really relies upon emphasizing the scientific literature. This should be easy where BugGuide provides appropriate citations as they've already done the hard work. Maybe a specific comment or a guide by a particular expert on either site could be worth treated as a self-published source, based on how I read the note about official celebrity and organization media accounts. Lhikan634 (talk) 10:08, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

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