Talk:Fly

Fly has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: July 28, 2016. (Reviewed version).

A fact from Fly appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 21 August 2016 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that flies (crane fly pictured) have a single pair of wings for flight, the hind wings being modified into tiny gyroscopic organs known as "halteres"?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2016/August. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Fly.

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Insects Top‑importance

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Diptera Top‑importance

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Tree of Life Mid‑importance

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Archives

1

Minor edit request for semi-protected article

I believe there is a comma splice on line 14 of the main text under "Flight" in "Anatomy and morphology". Please correct me if I am wrong and feel free to ignore this if I am wrong, but replacing the comma with a semicolon should be correct. CoroneC0rnix-64 (talk) 09:12, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

NOT DONE: I don't see it, possibly because "line 14" depends on the browser, window size, and font size settings. The section seems to be properly punctuated. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:17, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes, sorry. I see where I was wrong. Thanks for your consideration, though. CoroneC0rnix-64 (talk) 10:43, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No worries. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:15, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GA

It's more than 9 years since this article was assessed as WP:GA, and as we all know how important (not to mention tedious, to be polite) reassessment can be, I just looked over the article superficially with this in mind. If anyone spots anything they think might fail a reassessment, I'm happy to pitch in to put it right before that happens. Cheers! Tony Holkham (Talk) 12:20, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Better we do it, yes. Believe me, I'd be incensed if this were called in. This was one of the many I co-nominated all those years ago. I don't think we should be madly re-evaluating taxon articles all the time, as their subjects develop pretty slowly in comparison to more newsy topics. I'll have a look at it with all that in mind. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:24, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely, and thanks. I raised it because I've seen borderline reassessments triggered by a few missing citations which were easily found. This article is OK in that respect. Tony Holkham (Talk) 12:30, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thanks. I'm revising the phylogeny of Nematocera, which will result in an additional tree here. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:54, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Quick note here since you're giving this attention right now, but I don't think the cited FLYTREE project phylogeny is really from 2016, since the phylogeny from the archived FLYTREE website (which is copyrighted 2015 but last updated 2012) actually appears to be pretty much identical to the one given in the 2007 Zootaxa paper also cited (except Culicomorpha and Ptychopteromorpha are the other way round and Aschiza (part) instead of Platypezoidea). The 2011 "Episodic radiations in the fly tree of life" paper is also associated with the same project but gives a slightly different phylogeny to the one from the website. Monster Iestyn (talk) 16:39, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OK, let's lose the date... though it does seem the tree evolved a bit over the years! Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:05, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Updating cladogram for internal phylogeny

Concerning updating the cladogram (which still based on the FLYTREE project one from the 2007 Zootaxa paper, also the same as the old Flytree website), if it helps I've written up a cladogram based on Wiegmann et al. (2011) in my userspace at User:Monster Iestyn/Insect systematics#Diptera phylogeny. I believe this is also related to the same FLYTREE project as the older one, though it's not clearly stated in the paper ("FLYTREE" is mentioned but the Zootaxa paper isn't referenced at all). Be warned though, it's HUGE (if I'm being honest maybe too big, maybe it's best not to give any detail within Schizophora because of the massive number of families in it without superfamilies to lump them away for cleanliness).

There are many notable differences in the 2011 phylogeny to the existing one, such as:

Deuterophlebiidae is sister to all other flies
Nymphomyiidae sister to all others except Deuterophlebiidae
Neodiptera clade recovered (originally proposed by [1])
Bibionomorpha is sister to Brachycera
"Muscomorpha" is not used
Orthorrhapha is resurrected
Acalyptratae is paraphyletic

Similar conclusions are found in another study by some of the same authors from 2013, except particularly that Orthorrhapha was not recovered, Culicomorpha has a different position, some families such as Deuterophlebiidae were not sampled.

Since 2013 or so though, unfortunately I don't know of any major works giving a phylogeny of the entire order Diptera offhand, only numerous papers focusing on particular groups (e.g. Bibionomorpha sensu lato in 2016, lower Brachycera in 2017, Calyptratae in 2019, and of course the Nematocera/lower Diptera paper from 2023 already referenced in the article).

Regarding wormlions (Vermileonidae) being part of Xylophagomorpha, this was a change made in this paper from 2021/2022, but I don't know how accepted this new classification is, other than that some support was given in a paper last year. Currently as far as I know, wormlions have traditionally been part of Tabanomorpha and may still be generally considered to belong in that group (Vermileonomorpha doesn't appear to have stuck that much despite what en.wiki showed all these years until recently).

(Pinging Chiswick Chap in particular since you no doubt will be interested) Monster Iestyn (talk) 17:51, 6 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks. There is a general consensus that composite (multi-source) cladograms are dangerously close to OR. Better to give limited detail but in a clean single-source way. There's no reason why the main tree shouldn't stop at Schizophora, for instance, with a separate diagram (and source) for that group. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:56, 6 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, glad to help! Yeah, I figured a multi-source cladogram would be a bad idea, as it sounds like WP:SYNTHESIS. And even with my limited knowledge of how phylogenies work, the impression I get is that the produced trees may vary greatly depending on factors such as what taxa are included and software used, so compositing them together might not produce the same result as if they were actually all included in one phylogeny. (In addition the fact that the various phylogenies may be based on different sources of data like morphology, selected genes, mitochondrial genomes, etc., which may not even give the same results as each other.)

But yeah, a separate diagram would make sense for Schizophora, if there's a source for all of that group in particular. Monster Iestyn (talk) 20:45, 6 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]