Talk:march fly

RFM discussion: March 2022
This, that and the other (talk) 11:44, 13 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Where should these be moved or merged to? DCDuring (talk) 17:11, 13 March 2022 (UTC)
 * I've spent an hour + on this. DCDuring (talk) 18:50, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @DCDuring. I had no idea what was needed in order to reduce duplication - in particular, whether the sense distinctions were artificial or not, so I'm very glad you've been able to apply your expertise here. I'll do some minor tidying and then this will be RFM-resolved. This, that and the other (talk) 04:24, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Google N-Grams to determine which forms are most common, though N-Grams is a much smaller corpus than Books as a whole. I then read through usage of each form (amounting to a convenience sample), starting with the most common form, to find what the referent (eg, Bibionidae vs. Tabanidae vs. genera, which were apparently limited to members of these families) was for each form. I made a horseback estimate of sampling error to justify the simplifications I then made. No wonder folks don't often do this kind of thing conscientiously &mdash; or at all. DCDuring (talk) 13:41, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
 * @DCDuring That's some dedication - thanks once again for answering my call for help like this! I notice that one of the specific senses has reappeared; should we just collapse that into sense 1? This, that and the other (talk) 04:55, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
 * The added sense is now in a different family.
 * I suppose that, as a simplifying rule, we could put all the definitions into the most common form (discoverable via Google N-Grams) and rely on crowd-sourcing for possible corrections, which can be researched/challenged as needed. That seems like a less labor-intensive approach, less likely to make me cranky. DCDuring (talk) 12:36, 18 March 2022 (UTC)