Compromise Proposal

After seeing the comments on Joe’s Heteroptera reorganization and my proposed Diptera shuffling, I’ve come up with an idea that I think can balance the somewhat anal retentive tendencies of systematists to group everything by phylogeny and the frustration amateurs have with navigating suborder, infraorder, and superfamily names that mean nothing to them. I think that the blood of Bugguide is not really the dedicated systematists or taxonomists. (We’re the lymph, maybe?) Joe and I can put more time into Bugguide than most largely because we are enthusiastic students who are not being paid to do other things. Many people on bugguide have not had the opportunity to be formally trained in insect systematics or insect identification. Many bugguide regulars much prefer to photograph and appreciate the beauty of insects and the cool things they do, but not so much the long, non-english, apparently meaningless name of the insect. I myself had to step back and realize that not everybody enjoys latin names like I do. I think it’s more important to make the guide accessible than to try to force people to learn things that they could learn through a variety of other sources if they so chose. So, here is my proposal for organizing orders.
I think that each order, in the “Browse” and “Taxonomy section should simply list that order’s families alphabetically. Then, under the ‘Info’ tab in each order, the phylogenetic organization will be explicitly spelled out, and each family will link to that family’s page, similar to what is currently in place under Coleoptera. So, in the taxonomy page, it will be simple for amateurs to understand, and systematists, etc., can organize the families ‘correctly’ in the info page.
The largest problem with this scheme is what to do if a picture can be identified to a superfamily, etc., but not yet identified to a family. Obviously we don’t want this information to be lost in a sea of undetermined pictures. I think that after all the families are listed alphabetically on the same page, the unidentifieds can be listed in categories like ‘___unidentifieds’ So here, you would have all the Lep families alphabetically, blah blah, Zygan*eidae, then Gelech*oidea unidentifieds, Noctuo*idea unidentifieds, etc. There’s probably a better name for these categories. This will allow the information in these groups to still be present but they will be less likely to confuse amateurs. These higher level groups can be linked to from the info page phylogeny.
So, pretty much, I'm trying to circumvent the argument by separating the two factors. In the context of the family order of orders, so to speak, I think there are two main points to balance. Let’s pretend I’m an amateur insect hunter who has a picture of a burrowing bug on a leaf, and I want to know what it is. If I had no idea what it was other than a bug, I could look through the families of Hemiptera in the taxonomy page one by one until I come upon Cydn*idae. If, however, I know that it kinda looks like a stink bug, I could look for the list of families in the info page related to Pentato*midae and find Cyd*nidae.
I would be willing to put some time into implementing this after my semester is over on Friday. I realize that this will likely be obsolete once “Bugguide 2.0” comes out, but I think we should optimize the bugguide we have while we have it. I look forward to your responses and critiques. This could certainly use some chanign and fine-tuning.
So, my proposal in summary:
For each order
Taxonomy/Browse page- families listed alphabetically, unidentifieds in higher groups listed after this.
Info page- phylogenetic classification of families.