Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Image:Syrphidae poster.jpg

A poster of hoverflies[edit]

Reason: In the old encyclopedias, the coloured posters of flowers, animals and exotic birds in the middle pages were the most consulted by everybody. I hope that this modern version can bring the same kind of amazement that I felt when I was a kid. Sixteen different species of hoverflies are illustrated with the hightest possible quality pictures (for some, like the small Ceriana vespiformis or Syritta pipiens, the quality is just regular). Full size versions of all photographs can be found here or in the links included in the picture file. In the alternative version, the captions are included only in the picture file.
Articles this image appears in: Hoverfly.
Creator: Alvesgaspar

Support as nominator Alvesgaspar (talk) 10:59, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support! (version with species names) - great - Really illustrates the diversity of mimicry in this family. a good way to boost the encyclopedic value of FP-borderline individual images as well. Question - was the individual in the bottom right actively moving around when you took the image, or kind of stuck in that position? It looks like it's afflicted by an entomopathic fungus, stance-wise. de Bivort 13:27, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Info - Yes, the X. pedissequum was quite alive, doing his personal cleaning (or whatever they do when they rub legs and wings). That is why he was so absent-minded and cooperative for the photo... There is another view in the gallery, with a different position -- Alvesgaspar (talk) 14:15, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - Is there an order to these images? It might be nice to rearrange them for some meta composition if possible... put the yellow flower bkgrds in a row, or the purple ones together? Thoughts on that? de Bivort 14:21, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - If anything, the ordering should be taxonomic, for encyclopaedic value. Samsara (talk • contribs) 15:03, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      - There's no such thing as taxonomic order. taxonomies can be schematized as trees which are non linear objects. de Bivort 17:56, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
        Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you that one might present one subfamily first, then another, and group by genus within family (the latter being already taken care of by alphabetic sorting), as well as super- and subgenera where applicable. Best wishes. Samsara (talk • contribs) 20:08, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - Info - The order is indeed alphabetic -- Alvesgaspar (talk) 15:23, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. It looks nice and informative, but note there's already at least 2 FPs in that 300-odd word article, and . Would it be useful anywhere else? I'm also not entirely convinced of its use as the infobox image, as without opening it up to at least image page size you can make out almost no details (and remember a lot of users do not open these up any bigger than thumbnail). Also I wonder if links on the image page to the individual images would be useful (no one's going to find them on your Commons userpage)? --jjron (talk) 15:28, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Well, it's up to the juri to decide which pictures are more useful in that particular article. Yes, it is my intention to provide links to the individual images, I'm working on it now -- Alvesgaspar (talk) 15:51, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Weak oppose my only problem with images like this is the lack of order. If they could be rearranged in some way that provides information, then I would support. Right now, it seems like a mix of random genuses/species and genders. Can they be ordered according to genus (relative relation to eachother)? — BRIAN0918 • 2008-01-23 16:13Z
- Info - As I wrote above, the species are sorted alphabetically -- Alvesgaspar (talk) 16:35, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment In addition to my earlier comment, it needs a list of species in plain text in the image namespace. For an example, see Image:Haeckel Actiniae.jpg. Samsara (talk • contribs) 16:31, 23 January 2008 (UTC) Done by Alvesgaspar. Samsara (talk • contribs) 20:27, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- As an aside, that information may help build the more detailed taxonomy of Syrphidae at wikispecies (on which Alvesgaspar has already done a bit). Samsara (talk • contribs) 16:35, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I like it, and support per nomination! Seems like the mustard sparked a new trend! ;-). --Dschwen 22:56, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support alternative Very enc Diptera collection from one of my fav. photographers --Richard Bartz (talk) 23:07, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Adding them into one big file really doesn't give these images any extra value beyond the increase in resolution of the nominated image. I'd support if each shot was FP quality, but the majority IMO are not. Most suffer from noise and of particular concern are #1 (very poor sharpness), #3 (rampant noise), #5 (oversharpening), #7 (motion blur?), #9 (very poor sharpness), #13 (sharpness), #16 (lacks definition). In short it seems to have no more value or technical quality than the sum total of the existing gallery on the hoverfly page. Not FP worthy IMO --Fir0002 09:26, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

- Comment Obviously Fir0002 also thinks that the picture of a single species (Melangyna viridiceps) is more representative of the whole familiy than 16 of them. Otherwise he wouldn't have reversed my edit in the hoverfly page to put back his own picture . His comment on all images having to have FP quality misses completly the point of the nomination. I could have included a couple of hoverfly FP of my own in the poster, but I didn't, not to distract from its main purpose. WP:FPC is about "encyclopaedicity", not only technical excellence, remember? -- Alvesgaspar (talk) 09:53, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Reply Well Alvesgaspar here on WP:FPC we are fortunate enough to be able to demand not only enc value but also very high technical quality. Your images fail this requirement, some of them quite dismally. Whacking a whole heap of images together doesn't really do anything enc wise - as I mentioned before (and in my edit summary) the gallery in the article is the correct home for masses of photos. I mean by your argument we should have a 500,000 x 500,000 pixel composite of 500 animals heading the animal article to show the diversity of the group. Making those composites is a very clumsy way of presenting all those species as I can't just look at the image I want at full size without scrolling etc - and if I wanted to use a specific image I'd have to crop (and clone out the number) or find the original. And yes you've linked to the original photos which you made the composite out of, but few if any of those would (IMO) be of FP quality. --Fir0002 23:01, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - I agree with Fir's argument that if a single photo needs to meet FP quality, then a composite of 16 photos should require that all 16 photos meet FP quality. Otherwise it's like a "shotgun nomination". If the image explained anything more, such as the phylogenetic relationship between the species, or their distribution around the world, then it would have more encyclopedic value and thus not require perfection in each photograph. — BRIAN0918 • 2008-01-24 14:21Z
  - But how many times should I have to say this not a random collection of pictures to be observed separately? By observing the whole picture we may see the different body shapes, colours, mimicry solutions, wing venations, etc. Maybe I should have been smarter and downsize the poster to a third of the actual size, so that it becomes obvious that the the picture is to be seen as a whole (that way, the technical flaws would be minimized too...)! -- Alvesgaspar (talk) 15:12, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - But as a whole it has less value than a wiki generated gallery of the original images... --Fir0002 23:01, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support IMO it is a very useful image.--Mbz1 (talk) 20:55, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I agree there's too much going on here to be as useful as intended. We have a particularly limited view of this composite on our computer screens; admirable though the intention was, it'll never have the impact of a large colour plate in a printed book. I'm not sure what to suggest, except downsampling might do it no harm at all, given that this is supposed to be an overview of many, not an in-depth catalogue of all. As amply pointed out, some individual shots let the side down heavily. Nice idea though. --mikaul^talk 08:53, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support I think the poster is quite encyclopedic comparing the differences between the flies. great work! Muhammad(talk) 16:46, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. It probably doesn't matter now, but having thought more about this I have to oppose on encylopaedic grounds. The poster just seems a scattergun approach - unlike the Ceratopsian poster above that attempts to be comprehensive, I don't really see what this is doing. The only criteria for inclusion seems to be that these are the photos that were available (I'm not even sure who's photos they are - Alvesgaspar is down as creator, but then says above "I could have included a couple of hoverfly FP of my own in the poster, but I didn't...", but then all individual ones seem to be by him, so why no FP ones?). No where is it explained why these particular flies are included, what in particular they are showing about this family of flies, etc, i.e., the more I look at it the more I think 'out of the 5000 species of hoverfly, why this 16?', and the more confused I become. With a single picture, you know it's just an example, but with 16 you look for a reason for the choices, and I can't see one. In other words, it just becomes a glorified gallery, but maybe I've missed the full reason for inclusion of these particular species somewhere (the reasons above don't really do it for me, especially when they're not even included on the image page or the article caption; perhaps it just becomes up to the individual user to determine their own meaning for the inclusions? Perhaps I'm just looking for too much?). --jjron (talk) 06:31, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose I don't like posters comprised of many photographs like this as FPs, this looks like it came off of the wall of a kindergarten classroom. Rudy Breteler (talk) 01:08, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted Image:Syrphidae poster.jpg MER-C 10:42, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]