Talk:Fly fishing

Needs some explanation of wet/dry fly distinction

I made an edit which was, correctly, reverted as poor, unreliable, and close to copyvio (User talk:Pol098#Fly fishing edit revert; thanks Mike Cline). The purpose for my edit was quite simply that I had no idea of the difference between dry & wet fly fishing (having done no fishing), and was trying to find out; not finding the information in the article I had to search outside Wikipedia. My hope with this sort of edit is more to prompt more knowledgeable people to improve the information that had been missing than to implement a lasting change. So I'd suggest that the article, which mentions "wet fishing" without explanation, does not sufficiently explain the difference for the non-expert, and encourage anyone who knows the subject to improve it (or leave my inappropriate content to spur others to act!) While I invoke WP:BRD, I'm not in a position to go further and make a better contribution. I'd also suggest that the dry fly fishing article could also explain, briefly, the difference. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 15:17, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

I have added a note on the difference. Any use as far as it goes? I agree that an explanation of these distinctions needs more prominence, but as I am not a fisherman either I prefer to move slowly. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 16:39, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

That would have helped me a lot when I tried to use the article. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 17:02, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Glad I could help. I would just add that making bad edits just to goad others can be seen as WP:DISRUPTIVE. Better to come to the article talk page sooner rather than later. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 17:31, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

My edit didn't "disrupt progress towards improving an article", but directly encouraged a definite improvement! It wasn't deliberate disruption, just a poor effort, worse than I realised as the source was wrong. I thought it wasn't too bad, better than nothing; on balance I still think so, not mentioning the topic was worse. It certainly comes under WP:BRD (my most recent BRD edit was to add a significant sentence to documentation of the Citation template which I hope will influence thousands of edits; it has stayed in place, after reversion of an over-explained version).

By the way, my usual (not 100%, but very usual) experience of discussing something on Talk is that nothing happens, so the change gets made after a delay - a waste of time and effort. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 17:56, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

A dry fly mimics an insect that has fallen and is floating on top of the water while a wet fly is a fly fished below the water, I know this includes streamers and I am pretty sure it also includes nymphs but I am not 100% sure. Kyrilnw (talk) 03:11, 1 January 2024 (UTC)