Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera

This is a WikiProject, an area for focused collaboration among Wikipedians. New participants are welcome; please feel free to participate! Guide to WikiProjects Directory of WikiProjects

The aim of this WikiProject is to set out broad suggestions about how to organize data in the articles relating to the insect order Lepidoptera, which comprises the butterflies and moths. We also hope to encourage the development of important stubs and articles following these suggestions, which are not obligatory except in the case of WikiProject Lepidoptera Article Guidelines. These guidelines are being formulated as policy to give a more uniform look, feel, and organisation to WP Lepidoptera articles and are in the process of being developed through discussion and consensus on the project talk page. In the case of these guidelines (when formulated) editors are expected to follow with exceptions to be discussed on the project talk page before implementation.

This WikiProject is an offshoot of WikiProject Tree of Life

WikiProject Science

WikiProject Biology

WikiProject Tree of Life

WikiProject Animals

WikiProject Arthropods

WikiProject Insects

WikiProject Lepidoptera

• Portal:Biology

To become a member, just add yourself in the right place to this alphabetical list.

• Aaron Lox - working on the Phryganodes pages
• AddWittyNameHere - have access to approximately 70 printed books about Lepidoptera, some in German, some in Dutch, some in English. Most are Europe-centred.
• Agapema - here to help contribute where possible, with a main focus on (you guessed it) the Agapema genus.
• Alexlu5418 - I like butterfly and moths and I like moths the most
• Ambrosia10 - Lepidoptera of New Zealand
• AncylurisFormosissima Focused on butterflies in Oregon, USA and in the American tropics.
• AshLin
• AWolfSpider
• Bastique
• Bfpage/Barbara (WVS)-I am continuing to add references to the Monarch Butterfly
• BIRDSANDBUGS - working on creating pages for various moths, mainly saturniidae.
• Calibas
• Charlesjsharp - Special interest in photography - Sharp Photography
• Daniel Mietchen
• D. Gordon E. Robertson
• Dr Mel Ganus from wikiBlind.org - we can help with image descriptions
• Firos AK
• Foiled circuitous wanderer
• FozzieH
• Friesen5000 - Leps of Canada
• Glacierman
• Gug01
• Guy Manners
• Hectonichus
• Himalayacetus - Pyraloidea globally
• Roger Kendrick (a.k.a. HKmoths)
• Jkadavoor
• J.M.Garg
• Jowaninpensans - mines
• J.R.Fe.P. — butterflies of Venezuela
• Leiobunum rotundum - works on different moth pages, lepidoptera illustrator.
• Leomk0403
• Loopy30
• Manoj Karingamadathil
• MasterOfHisOwnDomain
• Merenta
• Metacladistics - Butterflies of Sulawesi -- adding images of pinned specimens
• Million Moments - pest species
• MrX
• Neilj
• Nickrz
• Notafly Robert Nash
• Ornithoptera
• ProbablyAPineapple
• User:Dr. Raju Kasambe
• Rfairb - Planning to contribute to entomologist & curator pages, cleanup for species and family pages
• Riparia riparia - Natural history
• User:redwoodsoda moth
• Resilientricekrispy - Focusing on skippers and cleaning up species pages
• Sandew LA - Interested in butterflies of Sri Lanka
• Seacactus 13
• Sebastiaan van Doorn - Mostly Lepidoptera orientated independent entomologist hoping to contribute on Palearctic species, but willing to look way further.
• Shyamal
• Squirkl - Moth enjoyer & budding naturalist
• Stemonitis
• Tony Holkham - Lepidoptera of Britain and Ireland
• Vijay Barve
• Walter Siegmund t
• Wilhelmina Will — I've recently created several articles on species from the moth genus Prays, and intend on creating many more, as well as many pages on many other moth/butterfly species.

Inactive

The following guidelines have been established with consensus after reasoned debate in WikiProject Lepidoptera and should be followed. In case of exceptions please discuss first on the talk page.

• Article importance grading scheme.

A suggested format for articles on Lepidoptera is given in the Article formats page.

See Moduza procris (commander) and Eacles imperialis (imperial moth) as examples of typical species accounts.

Some species have extremely little information and are little more than stubs, so most of these headings are deleted. See Parnassius imperator augustus (imperial Apollo) as an example. Such species in a single genus probably would merit consolidation in the near future, as per the accepted usage.

In some cases, the species has additional interesting information which merits separate sections and sub-sections. These are issues such as taxonomy, polymorphy, mimicry, ant-association, migration or any such feature characteristic to that species and warranting a detailed treatment by itself. Hence additional headings are provided on an as-required basis. The sequence of headings, sections and sub-sections may also be changed to represent the information in the best and most convenient manner possible.

See Danaus chrysippus (plain tiger) and Papilio polytes (common Mormon) as such examples.

Lepidoptera articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
FA				2			2
FM					105		105
GA	3	5	6	12			26
B	1	31	16	77			125
C		11	37	471			519
Start		57	116	1,650		2	1,825
Stub		2	569	95,604		3	96,178
List	2	102	20	591	1	5	721
Category					2,990		2,990
Disambig				2	108		110
File					10		10
Project				1	29		30
Redirect		1	42	3,507	2,617		6,167
Template					7,501		7,501
Other					1		1
Assessed	6	209	806	101,917	13,362	10	116,310
Unassessed					1		1
Total	6	209	806	101,917	13,363	10	116,311
WikiWork factors (?)		ω = 588,696			Ω = 5.97

New articles

Article alerts

Articles to be split

• 08 Jan 2024 – Dudgeonea (talk · edit · hist) is proposed for splitting by Jlwoodwa (t · c); see discussion

Articles needing cleanup

• Lepidoptera articles with maintenance and cleanup category listings

Popular pages

Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Popular pages

/Checklist

One key aim is to set an extremely high standard of writing quality and user-friendliness in this project.

Use of media and level of detail

The articles try to display as many relevant images as possible. The aim being to be as useful and encyclopedic as is necessary. We would like to have, and in some cases, we have been able to obtain photos of:

• Adult (imago), egg, larva (or caterpillar) and chrysalis (pupa or cocoon).
• Male and female forms, polymorphic forms, mimic forms, dorsal and ventral views.
• Butterflies and moths involved in activities such as nectar-sipping, mud-puddling, mating, basking, migration, etc.
• Comparison of photos between models and mimics.
• Photos of any other aspect of natural history relevant such as host plant or parasites.
• Drawings or illustrations from old books, paintings or sculpture.

In the future we would like to attach video clips, list of common and vernacular names, distribution maps and comparison galleries to ease species identification.

Task Set 1 - Get the basic framework up

• Prepare viable checklists for each family of Lepidoptera.
• Get the taxonomic check done through various resources:
  • http://www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/gbn/ may eventually be the primary database to lookup
  • WikiSpecies pages on Lepidoptera are growing, so check Lepidoptera overall or Butterflies to see what has been posted on this sister Wiki project.
  • LEPINDEX ([1] Archived 2008-04-09 at the Wayback Machine). (N.B., LepIndex is not 100% accurate (though very close to it!), nor very up-to-date. Where recent authoritative publications post date the taxonomy in LepIndex, use and cite them.)
  • Markku Savela's site - Lepidoptera and some other life forms.(N.B. Incomplete and incorrect at places, a collection of disparate data; good for a quick and dirty overview).
  • Tree of Life Web site (TOLWeb) (Basically lists of species in genera. Suitable for seeing which species are presently considered valid by the panel of experts for that family/subfamily/genera).
  • WikiSpecies pages on Lepidoptera are growing, so check there to see what has been posted on this sister Wiki project.
  • van Nieukirken et al., 2011. Order Lepidoptera Linnaeus, 1758. In:Zhang, Z.-Q. (ed.) Animal Biodiversity: an outline of higher-level classification and survey of taxonomic richness. Zootaxa 3148: 212-221. [open access paper published in December 2011]
• Place the stubs.
• Prepare articles to extent possible up to the required standard.
• Place images suitably captioned.

Task Set 2 - Improve general standard of the project

• Get maximum information, images, links and references for each article. Each article to be made up to required standard.
• Get a recording for spoken Wikipedia for each stable article.
• Get short videos appropriately for each article, convert to Ogg Theora, place on WM Commons and link up on the articles.
• Get maps ready for each species and place in each article.

• Sloth moth, aka Bradipodicola hahneli  Done AshLin (talk) 08:57, 14 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of insecta
  • Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of lepidopterans (but many are still in the parent category)
• Lasiocampa quercus (Oak eggar) - I've been working on this article today, but I can't find any information on the range of this species beyond Britain and Ireland, other than mentions in France and Spain. It's in the category Moths of Africa, too. Can anyone help? Tony Holkham (Talk) 21:25, 1 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Tony - check out the Fauna Europaea entry at https://fauna-eu.org/cdm_dataportal/taxon/962668a0-71b8-47ec-a0eb-d2cd1254db4b and the Lepiforum.de entry at http://www.lepiforum.de/lepiwiki.pl?Lasiocampa_Quercus HKmoths (talk) 07:25, 8 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Atalopedes campestris Been working on this but it is my first time at doing this level of original work. I don't think it's a stub-class article anymore but not sure how or where to ask for that to be changed. PopularOutcast ^talk2me 01:28, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

PopularOutcast, you just change the banner at the top of the articles's talk page from Stub to Start.  Done Tony Holkham (Talk) 08:46, 11 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Laothoe populi The list of synonyms in the info box is enormous and disrupts the flow of the article. Unless anyone objects, I will make this a three-column section in the body of the article. I've repeated this on the article's talk page. Tony Holkham (Talk) 10:58, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• I need help on Atalopedes campestris. I've done the best I can. I am not a biologist so I think some part are not clear or I may have interpreted wrong from my research. I would like some feedback and pointers. Also, is there any way to request photos for larvae and eggs? I've found a handful online but there is no indication of who owns them or what kind of license they have. Also, they are not on reputable websites so I am not even 100% sure they are the right species.PopularOutcast ^talk2me 02:13, 15 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Classification updates in Noctuoidea - this stems from my adding a talk note "Classification of Athetis" on the recently created page Athetis hongkongensis. Athetis is placed in the subtribe Athetiina, of Caradrinini, in Noctuinae, by Holloway (2011)^[1], and also in Kononenko & Pinratana (2013),^[2] which were both based on (developed in parallel with) the molecular review of Noctuidae by ^[3]. The American list (see Results paras 11 & 12 of ^[4] and Fauna Europaea https://fauna-eu.org/cdm_dataportal/taxon/bb9d98b2-73dc-4b51-af53-cfc41f467c1f both now follow this arrangement. The Acronictinae is not the correct placement for Athetis. I suspect that there will be a lot of incorrect Wikipedia placements of genera in Noctuidae, as most volunteer Wiki editors/contributors have not yet caught up with the major recent upheavals in Lepidoptera classification. This is going to take a lot of effort, as thousands of species pages will be in need of correcting/updating..... We should follow the Zahirian approach as implemented by the American and European listings. The Fauna Europaea website's database already is updated, so there is no excuse to have Wikipedia out of data or incorrect. I can do a few items as time allows, but I am bogged down with other projects at work most of the time, so am looking to all other participants to give a bit of time to check Noctuioidea (i.e. Erebidae, Noctuidae, Nolidae, Euteliidae) taxa, especially subfamily, tribe, subtribe, genera) and their taxonomic placement. See also ^[5] ; ^[6] and ^[7]. It is worth noting that the Fauna Europaea concept of Acontiinae differs from the Borneo listing quite considerably.HKmoths (talk) 07:15, 8 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I am working on a page about a new species of butterfly. Please, I want the new article that I created in my sandbox to be checked and see if it is up to Wikipedia standards. If there are any problems or anything you would like to add let me know. If the article is okay let me know so that I can paste it as a new article on Wikipedia. The link is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Space_chinedu/sandbox. I really appreciate if the new article I made is verified.

• [[User talk:Space chinedu#Blocked]] Invasive Spices (talk) 15:58, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Mythimna irrorata (& Timora irrorata) [2] is with incorrect synonyms and appears to be an incorrect merger of two species .... confusing because both species were described in 1881 by Moore, but note the different pagination. Full synonymies can be found on Funet (links below). Please can someone address this issue?
  • Mythimna irrorata (Moore, 1881: 341) - https://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/bio/life/insecta/lepidoptera/ditrysia/noctuoidea/noctuidae/hadeninae/mythimna/#irrorata
  • Timora irrorata (Moore, 1881: 364) - https://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/bio/life/insecta/lepidoptera/ditrysia/noctuoidea/noctuidae/heliothinae/timora/#irrorata HKmoths (talk) 06:41, 13 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject cleanup listing

• This project's listing in one big table
• By categories

Stub templates

• {{butterfly-stub}}

For example, placing the stub on a page gives the following effect:

It also places the associated stub category Category:Moth stubs on the page.

• {{moth-stub}}

For example, placing the stub on a page gives the following effect:

It also places the associated stub category Category:Moth stubs on the page.

Aside - the butterfly-stub shows a blue morpho butterfly, a nymphalid, while the moth-stub depicts an Atlas moth, a saturniid moth.

We now have stubs for many Lepidoptera superfamilies/families. See here for the full list.

Talk page template

Please place {{WikiProject Lepidoptera|class=article_quality|importance=article_importance|needs-photo=}} at the top of each article's talk page. This will help to direct editors to WikiProject Lepidoptera for guidance. The arguments to be filled for importance and quality can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Article Classification. The value "article_quality" is a measure of the quality of the concerned article and will be one of the following: FA, GA, A, B, B, C, Start, Stub, List or Category. Similarly, "article_importance" is one of: top, high, mid or low. The "needs-photo" item if given a value of "yes" will indicate that a photograph is needed. An example of a WikiProject template with values of "B" for quality and "high" for importance and "yes" for needing a photograph will look like this:

{{WikiProject Lepidoptera|class=B|importance=high|needs-photo=yes}}

and will produce this:

Lepidoptera NA‑class High‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Lepidoptera, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of butterflies and moths on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LepidopteraWikipedia:WikiProject LepidopteraTemplate:WikiProject LepidopteraLepidoptera articles NA This article has been rated as NA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale. An editor has requested that an image or photograph be added to this article.

Lepidoptera families listbox template

• {{Lepidoptera}}

This template creates a box listing the families of Lepidoptera and provides a navigational aid. It also indicates by red links those families which do not have a wiki at all. This template is recommended for taxonomy wikis (above species level), checklists and general articles on Lepidoptera.

Placing this template on a page results in a box as shown below:

There's also the superfamily template, incorporating some of the historical and hobbyist terminology (not for taxonomic use).

WikiProject Lepidoptera userbox

{{User WPLepidoptera}}

results in:

WikiProject Lepidoptera barnstar

{{subst:Lep-star|message ~~~~}}

results in:

		The Wikiproject Lepidoptera Barnstar
		For editors who have contributed greatly to Wikiproject Lepidoptera

• {{subst:The Lepidoptera Barnstar|1=message ~~~~}}

		The Lepidoptera Barnstar
		{{{1}}}

• Category:Lists of butterflies by location
• Category:Lists of Lepidoptera by food
• List of moths
• Sphingidae species list

Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Articles.

• Wolterbot has added WikiProject Lepidoptera to its subscribed service. Find articles to work on here:
  • Wolterbot's project listing in one big table
  • Wolterbot's project listing by categories
• Keep watch on project articles here using Tim12357's WikiProject Watchlist.
• Article alerts for this WikiProject can be found here.

Resources provided by participants of this project

• Project Library - A collection of sources from participants of the project.
• List species authors with wikilinks.
• Glossary of terms connected with Lepidoptera.
• List of food plants of Lepidoptera (under preparation).
• Bingham's Fauna of British India (Butterflies).

Project subpages

For a complete list of project subpages see here.

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/To do
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Log
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Articles
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Article Classification
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Unidentified pictures
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Unclear facts
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Family taxobox example
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Genus taxobox example
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Lepidoptera/Species taxobox example

Also relevant

• Category:Unassessed Lepidoptera articles

Online

General

• Tree of Life website
• LepIndex 'LepIndex' Project of National Museum of Natural History, London. Queries on the site can be placed at: [3] Archived 2008-04-09 at the Wayback Machine. WARNING: Just did a check but Lepindex can not be trusted wrt "original combination". LepIndex has not been updated in over five years, and many parts of it are outdated or otherwise incorrect. It is no longer recommended that LepIndex be used as the authoritative reference to check Lepidoptera taxonomy. A revised, curated dataset based on the LepIndex digitized card archive, which is in the process of being corrected and updated, exists as Global Lepidoptera Index (and has been linked further down this list)

• Beccaloni, G.; Scoble, M.; Kitching, I.; Simonsen, T.; Robinson, G.; Pitkin, B.; Hine, A.; Lyal, C.; Ollerenshaw, J.; Wing, P. (2023). Hobern, D. (ed.). "Global Lepidoptera Index v. 0.32.3". Retrieved 12 May 2023.
• Lepidopteran caterpillar hosts database Another project of the Natural History Museum. It is a database of larval foodplants of butterflies. You can search by butterfly_name, butterfly_family_name, plant_name, plant_family_name and country/region.
• Another interesting taxonomy project from Finland! The gentleman, Markku Savela, uses perl scripts to generate rough distribution maps from the text data on distribution. The site is at : [4]
• Häuser, Christoph L.; de Jong, Rienk; Lamas, Gerardo; Robbins, Robert K.; Smith, Campbell; Vane-Wright, Richard I. (28 July 2005). "Papilionidae – revised GloBIS/GART species checklist (2nd draft)". Archived from the original on 9 September 2010. Retrieved 24 October 2010.
• Die Großschmetterlinge der Erde, Verlag Alfred Kernen, Stuttgart Band 2 Die Großschmetterlinge des palaearktischen Faunengebietes, Die palaearktischen Spinner und Schwärmer, 1912–1913 in English translation

By taxonomy

• Hobern, Donald (5 May 2023). "Catalogue of World Pterophoidea". Catalogue of the Pterophoroidea of the World. Retrieved 12 May 2023. - families Pterophoridae and Macropiratidae, with an acknowledgement that research has shown the latter to not belong in the Pterophoroidea (but not formally assigned elsewhere yet, either)
• Hobern, Donald (5 May 2023). "Catalogue of World Alucitoidea". Catalogue of the Alucitoidea of the World. Retrieved 12 May 2023.
• Globiz Pyraloidea database

By area

Africa

• Afromoths

• Linking to Afromoths: On the Afromoths website, maintained by Jurate and Willy De Prins at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, pages for species have somewhat dynamic links. Linking to the URL in the browser's address window will not reliably continue to go to that species. Each species page has a "Permalink" button - right clicking on that button and selecting "Copy Link Location", "Copy link address" or similar depending on your browser, will put the permanent link for that species into your clipboard, from which it can be pasted into the link you are creating.

Europe

• Plant parasites of Europe
• UKMoths

North America

• Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA)
• BugGuide.net. North America north of Mexico.
• North American Moth Photographers Group. Published by the Mississippi Entomological Museum at Mississippi State University.
• Mass Moths. Moths of Massachusetts.

Oceania

• Butterflies of Australia, Moths of Australia, Caterpillars.

Print

• Charles A. Triplehorn, Norman F. Johnson Borror and DeLong's introduction to the study of insects, 7th edition, Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2005 - Excellent reference for insects. The keys are for North-America but can apply also to European insects.

• Kristensen, N.P. (Ed.). 1999. Lepidoptera, Moths and Butterflies. Volume 1: Evolution, Systematics, and Biogeography. Handbuch der Zoologie. Eine Naturgeschichte der Stämme des Tierreiches / Handbook of Zoology. A Natural History of the phyla of the Animal Kingdom. Band / Volume IV Arthropoda: Insecta Teilband / Part 35: 491 pp. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York. For taxonomy...

• Scoble, MJ. 1995. The Lepidoptera: Form Function and Diversity. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-854952-0 Excellent for Lep biology. However, Scoble seems to have changed his mind about some of the taxonomy: here, he has Geometroidea and Uranioidea, but in his chapter in Kristensen, he has Uraniidae and Sematuriidae in Geometroidea.

• WikiBooks search
• Google WikiBooks search
• WikiQuote search
• Google WikiQuote search
• WikiSource search
• Google WikiSource search

• iNaturalist
• Nearctica.com for North American butterflies Archived 2008-09-11 at the Wayback Machine
• Neotropical Butterflies for Central and South America – post images to the relevant country forum for appropriate feedback