Moving moths to family

Lately I've been making a lot of bulk moves of moths out of ID Request to the Lepidoptera page but I haven't made many moves from Lepidoptera to taxonomic levels between order and genus. I've been wondering how long we should leave images at the order page, which now has close to 12 pages of images. I know there have been at least a few times Kyhl Austin has moved all images he could identify at least to superfamily, leaving only a handful of odd ones left on the moths page, while there are other times a backlog has built up.

I'm happy to move images along but I think it might be helpful to generally move images either after a certain amount of time or once they're a certain number of pages in. For example, I personally tend to avoid making bulk moves out of ID Request of images that aren't at least 10 pages deep (though I'm curious what others typically do.) I'm not suggesting a strict rule about the number of pages of moth images we should have or the amount of time unidentified images should be left on the order page, nor am I suggesting Kyhl has done anything wrong in moving images off the moths page. I just think it would be helpful (at least for me) to get a sense for what other moth folks think would work best.

Contributed by Aaron Hunt on 6 October, 2016 - 12:24am

This has been discussed several times we think

You might find this discussion helpful. If not, we're pretty sure we can find some others.

… john and jane balaban, 6 October, 2016 - 8:17am

Thanks

I've seen that discussion before (though not at the time it took place). I was wondering more how long images should be left in moths. For example, should images that can easily be placed to family be left for a few days before being moved, or should they be moved right away? (In the latter case we should let regular contributors know that moths identifiable to family should be generally be placed on their respective family pages rather than on Lepidoptera).

The most sensible solution to me seems to be to leave a few pages of images identifiable past order where they are and to move images more than a few pages in. That way, moth folks have some time to look through images before they're moved deeper into the guide. I'd gladly move images from the moth page regularly so that we never have more than a few pages if that's what we think is best. I'm just unsure how many of the most recent images to leave for now. There are certain groups (Pterophoridae, Herminiinae, and Catocala come to mind) that I move right away but most (Olethreutinae, Noctuinae, Spilomelinae, etc.) should I think be left in Lepidoptera for a little bit so everyone can take a look at them. If most of us tend to see everything within a few days I'd say that would be a good length of time to leave them at order. I just don't want to move images to family before someone who may be able to provide a better ID has a chance to see it.

… Aaron Hunt, 6 October, 2016 - 10:54am

For the record

I've taken to leaving the first four pages alone and moving images to family, or intermediate taxa once they get five pages in.

… Aaron Hunt, 16 November, 2016 - 12:41pm

Moving images out of Moths

Aaron, though I haven't been active for quite a while, yours is the tack that I took, generally starting 10 pages in or so and moving the beasts that I thought obvious to Order, Family, or, occasionally, lower-level taxa pages. Since this discussion has not generated any negative response to your query, I believe that I will continue on that tack.

… Tony Leukering, 16 December, 2016 - 1:51pm

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