Whiteamphipod

Animal tooth development (Odontogenesis) Thermoregulation in animals

ping Whiteamphipod (talk) 15:46, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Lineage fusion (expansion of Introgression) , and/or expansion of Primitive (phylogenetics) AsteforiiAlbicans (talk) 20:39, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Topics for Wiki page

-who is more susceptible to getting retinoblastoma -viruses (influenza, how there are different strains)

Sydneyglouse (talk) 20:40, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

–non-small cell lung cancer stages IA, IB, IIA, and IIB – dont kno yet Israel.tharpe (talk) 21:09, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

-Evolution of nervous systems -Evolution of the brain — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adam.PerrettGCSU (talk • contribs) 20:44, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Assign article

@Noahratliff and Sydneyglouse: Please assign yourself to an article. Whiteamphipod (talk) 14:14, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Edits to entomology articles by GCSU students

@Guettarda: Hi. I'm a long-time WP editor who works most extensively with entomology-related articles. I also work at a University, where I encourage students to participate in contributing to Wikipedia, so I am generally very supportive of efforts to involve students in Wikipedia. I am always careful about giving advice to students on what are (and are not) appropriate ways to contribute to Wikipedia. That said, some of the students in the GCSU entomology editing project that you appear to be supervising have recently been making edits that are often redundant, often excessive, and sometimes disruptive. Hopefully they can be coached to adhere to better practices, and more appropriate forms of editing. For example, on multiple occasions, they have taken an existing introductory paragraph, re-written it, and then added the entirety of their paraphrased introduction so the article has two complete - and therefore redundant - introductory paragraphs. In doing so, they sometimes eliminate important information like the scientific name or the distribution, capitalize common names (which is against WP "Manual of Style" policy), or add information pertaining to species other than the one the article is about (see, for example, this edit). If there is nothing wrong with the existing introductions in these articles, then why are they re-writing them? Why are they adding information about a family of insects to articles about individual species, for which that generalized information may not apply?

Many of the edits involve the addition of extra images to articles that already have perfectly good images, and the inclusion of "figure numbers" to the image and the text, which is not a style used in Wikipedia articles. Image captions in WP articles are generally as short as is practical, but the students have been creating image captions that give excessive details of where the photos were taken, the exact date, who took the photo, and literature citations that might belong in the text of the article, but never in an image caption. It would be one thing if the students were creating new articles from scratch, but these are existing articles, and many of these edits are doing a disservice to the various previous contributors that have created, and edited, these articles. If there are factual errors in an article, then it's great if these can be fixed; if there are no images in an article, then it's great if images are added; if there are no citations for facts stated in an article, then it's great if citations can be added - all of those are the sorts of things I actively encourage students to do when they contribute to Wikipedia. But that's not what is happening with these edits from the GCSU students. Some of these articles are already well-written, exhaustive, and with proper formatting, style, and citations (e.g., Junonia coenia, a really well-done article) - simply adding more stuff to such articles is often not an improvement, and that really should be the criterion: in what specific ways does an article need improvement? What a student involved in Wikipedia should be learning is how to recognize what it is about an article that needs to be improved. Does it need images? Does it need citations? Does it give a physical description? Does it give things like the biogeography or phenology? Does it give information on host plants, or parasites, or other ecological information? Does it list taxonomic synonyms? If students are looking for shortcomings and addressing them, then that's wonderful, and I hope you will consider discussing and promoting that sort of constructive editing with them. Dyanega (talk) 22:17, 4 December 2024 (UTC)