Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment edit

  This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2019 and 4 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Steelwull. Peer reviewers: Christina.lindberg, OstapKukhar, Agandhi7.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:28, 17 January 2022 (UTC)Reply

Assessment comment edit

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Leptoconops torrens/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

This article is nearly verbatim from here:

http://www.wdarc.org/Articles/gnats.pdf

Also, google lets sites decrease their own page rank. This rarish species should rank under the species-disambiguation for insects called noseeums.

http://www.greenvalleypc.com/html/flies/sand.htm claims they have a NON-mosquito like biting action, but a sawing action, hence the uber disproportionately itchy bite for such a little pest.

Not to mention, the 2 year lifespan appears to be for atypical climates *e.g, not california*, but I cant find this explicitly stated.

Last edited at 03:37, 26 October 2011 (UTC). Substituted at 20:03, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

Reference from Bohart Museum of Entomology edit

Currently, the reference reads:

Bohart Museum of Entomology, University of California, Davis, "No-see-ums," http://bohart.ucdavis.edu/bohart.asp?s=insects&f=noseeum, 7/26/02.

That's a dead link. However, I did find a useful document with same title here (without any date). I don't know if it's the same version as the original, but it's useful to readers. So I may edit the References section in a somewhat non-standard way. If someone prefers a different solution, please do it! Oaklandguy (talk) 00:43, 14 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

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Peer Editing edit

Hello! Great job so far on this article, you have some great info, citations, and links to other Wikipedia pages. I added a section to the lead section to provide a bit more information on the fly. Try to cite a source in the second paragraph of the lead section. Overall, I think you could work on this section a little more to include some more interesting facts about the fly that would spur people to keep reading. Also, I think it would be helpful to put the first name of "Townsend" in and add a link if he has a Wikipedia page. I also switched larva and adult in the physical description as I think it makes more sense to talk about larva before the adult. I made some minor grammar edits but overall, I found nothing major. The next thing I would do is to try to flesh out the sections a little more because they are mostly quite short. In the physical description instead of just stating that it is similar to another fly, you could talk more in-depth about its appearance. I would especially try to write more in the mating section, because the one sentence does not give a great oversight into the whole mating process. Overall this is a great start but needs some more details to become an excellent Wikipedia article. Christina.lindberg (talk) 21:56, 17 October 2019 (UTC)Reply


Article is well written and informative. I did some editing and proofreading for brevity. I also made the tone more neutral. Ideally, there would be more about mating and behavior of this species in the article. I attempted to find more information on mating to no avail so it may be possible that the literature simply does not exhist. Pictures of larvae and perhaps habitat would add a lot to this article. As with all articles more information would be better but I understand that research literature may be a limiting factor. Overall great job. (OstapKukhar (talk) 03:35, 18 October 2019 (UTC))Reply

The article is very well researched, and the depth of information across multiple different headings is impressive. It was also very well organised! The only feedback is that the citations in the lead section do seem to be a bit lacking. Another thought is that, if you want to improve the quality of the article, you could elaborate on the similarities with other species physiologically, and the comparison with related species that pass diseases. It can be very hard to obtain information about flies like these, particularly if they don’t have any trademark uses or roles, and you have done a great job to create a solid article! Agandhi7 (talk) 04:52, 18 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

Did You Know? nominations edit

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 17:31, 9 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

  • ... that infestations of Leptoconops torrens, or the black valley gnat, have halted construction and farming projects in California?

5x expanded by Steelwull (talk). Self-nominated at 01:01, 15 October 2019 (UTC).Reply

  •   Hi @Steelwull, for an expanded article to qualify for DYK, its character count needs to have increased 5x in the last seven days. As it stands right now, the article contains 5296 characters of readable prose; the oldest version of the article within that window contains 5209 characters of readable prose. The article would need to be expanded significantly in order to meet the 5x standard for DYK. Morgan695 (talk) 01:34, 19 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
  • Hello @Morgan695:, thank you for the comments! I will keep that in mind when editing and nominating future articles. Sorry for the inconvenience. (Although I did not create the article, since the information previously on it was copied word for word from the sources, I did rewrite most of the contents, however). Steelwull (talk) 01:10, 20 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
  •   @Steelwull: No worries. Marking this nomination as closed. Just for your awareness, if the article is promoted to Good article status, you would be able to re-submit it for consideration for DYK. Morgan695 (talk) 01:56, 20 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
  •   Steelwull, any text that was a copyright violation does not count towards the pre-expansion amount (see WP:DYKSG#A4). This nomination may proceed if you had at least a five times expansion from what would be left after removing copyvios from the existing article. MANdARAX  XAЯAbИAM 18:14, 20 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
  • @Mandarax:, the previous contents were completely copied from one source, but the time frame was a little further back than a week, unfortunately. Thank you for the information, though! Steelwull (talk) 18:27, 20 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
  • It looks like the revisions began on October 2, which means that the nomination should have been made on October 9, but didn't happen until October 15, six days late. As this is a first-time nominator, we may wish to grant an exception, which has been done with a reasonable frequency before for people new to DYK, especially up to a week late. (The expansion is over 5x going back to October 2, so it would be considered a long-enough expansion should the period be extended in this case.) BlueMoonset (talk) 23:54, 23 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
  •   I'm personally fine with that. Article otherwise meets DYK requirements (no concering pings on Earwigs, hook is cited in article, nominator is QPQ exempt). Morgan695 (talk) 00:08, 24 October 2019 (UTC)Reply
  •   Hi, I came by to promote this, but I don't see an inline citation for the hook fact. Also, some sources refer to this as the valley black gnat; should we be writing two different common names in the lead? Yoninah (talk) 21:31, 7 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
  • @Yoninah:, for readability, I think it would be alright to use the common name rather than the scientific one, if that would be alright?Additionally, I've added a citation to the lead of the article from where this DYK fact came from. Thank you for the comments! Steelwull (talk) 22:30, 7 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
  • @Steelwull: Thank you. Footnote 5 also seems a good source for the hook fact. I'm seeing much discrepancy in the common name of this insect, and would like you to sort it out. Some sources call it the black valley gnat, others the valley black gnat, as black gnat is a common name. Footnote 3 says it should not be called this at all. Yoninah (talk) 22:40, 7 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
  • @Yoninah: - Sorry for the late reply; I suppose that since many recent sources use the scientific name over any common ones it would be alright to just take the common name out as well, since it's only mentioned a couple times within the article itself. Steelwull (talk) 06:15, 9 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
  •   OK, I'll remove it from the article. So we'll go with:
  • ALT0a: ... that infestations of Leptoconops torrens have halted construction and farming projects in California?
  • Restoring tick per Morgan695's review. Yoninah (talk) 17:27, 9 November 2019 (UTC)Reply