Talk:Coccinellidae

Prothorax wording

Instead of "The coccinellid prothorax (front of thorax) is broad and convex...", would it be more clear to write, "The coccinellid prothorax (the first segment of the thorax) ..."? -rudyard (talk) 19:17, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Bird

I'd like to see also explained why are they called "ladyBIRDs". 37.31.27.245 (talk) 13:45, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

Move to Ladybirds?

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna) says "Use the most common name when possible". This would be Ladybirds in British English and Ladybugs in American English. As far as I can see as a non native speaker, the article coccinellidae is predominantly British English. It contains 17 times the string "colours", zero times "color", once "autumn", and twice "fall" as a season, including once "fall harvest in South Dakota" where the use of "fall" could be justified by context.

The convention says "Do not use vernacular names when it is not clear to what the name refers" and gives sardine as an example and fruit fly further below. Does this apply when the ambiguity doesn't refer to other animals? I don't think so. Else, the ambiguity of Bird (disambiguation) would mean that the article about the animal should be moved to "Aves".

"Sardine" and "fruit fly" refer to various groups of animals whereas I don't see other animals than coccinellidae in the disambiguation pages Lady Bug (disambiguation) and Ladybird (disambiguation). According to Wiktionary, "sardine" and "fruit fly" are zoologically ambiguous, but the only animals called ladybird are coccinellidae and the synonym ladybug has no further meanings.

Does "use the most common name when possible" mean that we should use the zoological name when it isn't clear which common name is the most popular one? I don't see this explained in the naming convention. I think we should apply to coccinellidae what the naming convention says about redirects:

« Make redirects from alternative common names:

• Red-spotted newt, Red eft → Eastern newt

Make redirects from scientific names when they are not the article title:

• Notophthalmus viridescens redirects to Eastern newt

» Tim2007viatge (talk) 13:44, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

It does seem that it should be Ladybirds rather than the latin, yeah. Chattenoir (talk) 14:10, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

The article title and naming issues have been discussed before. If it were going to be moved to a common name, it would be the universal common name lady beetle, which is used in both British and American English. Coccinellidae is even more precise though and overrides any WP:ENGVAR issues that have come up in past discussions on this. Coccinellidae#Etymology is also near the top of the article with names also discussed in the lead, so there really isn't any pressing reason to move the article away from Coccinellidae either. KoA (talk) 18:36, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Please see gasoline.

Articles are named based on the WP:ENGVAR guidelines. Chattenoir (talk) 23:59, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, ENGVAR is why I said what I said, hence citing it. Again, this has already been discussed previously, so it may be helpful to read those discussions. MOS:COMMONALITY may also help as well as WP:CRITERIA. Ladybird would not be a recognizable name for a significant portion of the English-speaking population, especially when we have universally understood names already. The article is also already at FA status and has been thoroughly vetted by multiple entomology editors, including those from the UK.

If someone really wanted to re-open this, ladybug would probably win out over ladybird in terms of recognizability (Brits likely recognize ladybug as an alternative name), but lady beetle would be recognizable and also lack the issues outlined in the article I mentioned. Ladybird would be a pretty massive leap in that context. Policy and guideline on article titles has us default at least to the taxonomic name when there are issues with the common names, so we wouldn't feasibly be moving to either ladybird or ladybug at least. KoA (talk) 01:17, 20 September 2026 (UTC)

Under MOS:commonality, "lady beetle" may be the choice, though I think that is quite the rare name predominately used by entomologists rather than the general public.

It does have the advantage of being more accurate, but that shouldn't influence any decision on the name since it is what is most common not most accurate.

"Ladybird would not be a recognizable name for a significant portion of the English-speaking population", this is also true for Gasoline, non-americans do not necessarily know what Gasoline is.

If it was a decision between bug and bird, it would have to be bird, since the article is written in British English. Chattenoir (talk) 01:37, 20 September 2026 (UTC)

@Chattenoir When I opened this discussion, I was surprised that none of the existing discussions had made a similar proposal yet.

In my native German, the talk page of the corresponding article, de:Diskussion:Marienkäfer has a paragraph in the header text explaining the rules for "Automatische Archivierung" (automatic archiving). I would have made my English proposal much shorter, if I had found any hint about archiving on this English talk page.

I would have desisted from my proposal if the convention on animal names explained that in case of competing common names in different variants of English the zoological name should be used.

Wikipedia in English, German, and my local language, Catalan, prefers common names, whereas the convention of the Spanish Wikipedia prefers biological names. For example en:Lion, de:Löwe, ca:Lleó, but es:Panthera leo, not "León".

I came here from the Catalan article which is titled ca:Coccinèl·lids instead of the apparently most common Catalan name "marieta". Its section "Etimologia" strangely focusses on the English names "ladybird" and "ladybug", which made me guess that the whole Catalan article is based on a translation of the English article and the choice of using the biological name instead of a vernacular name has been taken over from here. Before proposing changing the title in the Catalan article, I wanted to understand the choice of the English article title.

The Catalan article contains a long list of common Catalan names and the German article a long list of common German names. One of the common German names is much more popular than all the others and is used as the title. If "marieta" is much more popular than the other common Catalan names, the situation is different from English, where two highly popular common names are competing. Therefore the justification for the English decision (here by @KoA and probably in past discussions, too) shouldn't be applied to the Catalan article. Tim2007viatge (talk) 21:17, 20 September 2026 (UTC)