Maybe off-topic, can a taxon page on Wikipedia have an ID section?
Then isn’t Inat a great place to push identifiers to write their comments on Wikipedia?
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This may depend on the language version on Wikipedia. However, most species in most language versions already have (or should have) a section for description. Assuming more details for ID:ing the species is written in an encyclopedic style rather than a how-to, I think it could fit in that section.
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I have seen it said here on the forum, but I have not made the effort to confirm it, that Wikipedia actively does not want articles about taxa to include information on how to ID them, even in the Description section. If that’s true, I can understand it, as that is not really their mandate, and identification information is often more technical and voluminous than they might want to add.
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I split off the posts above to their own topic.
The answer is that yes, identification tips can be added to Wikipedia. Like all content there, the information must come from a reliable source.
The content also needs to be phrased a certain way. Wikipedia isn’t a “how-to” guide, so content shouldn’t be written like “this is how you identify this moth, look for the dark brown speckles on the whatsit”. But you can absolutely share information phrased like “it has dark brown speckles on its whatsit (citation here)”.
More info about ways to improve taxon pages on Wikipedia here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ways-to-help-improve-inaturalist-taxon-pages-through-wikipedia/2680
And discussions about the proposal to put identification guide type content content on iNaturalist itself can occur here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/expand-the-similar-species-tab-into-an-editable-identification-guide/13890
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I second @ainali ; biggest challenge here IMO is that Wikipedia requires sources, and sometimes the identification tips are a bit more experience-based than literature-based.
They should fit Wikipedia to some extent, yes, as long as the text is encyclopedic, at least for Portuguese Wikipedia (diff languages have slightly diff rules, as everything is community-driven).
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The specific requirements of Wikipedia seem to require some threading the needle in terms of including as much diagnostic information as possible while still have sources for everything and not formatting it as an ID guide:
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Thanks. Those restrictions make pretty clear that Wikipedia is not the right vehicle for iNat identifiers to share how to ID things.
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Can I get some background on Wikipedia’s posture with respect to identification info? What is their logic in not allowing comparitive identification tips, keys, etc.? Why is the site so rigidly stuck on an “encyclopedia-style” presentation of information? I can’t find any satisfactory answers in their “NOT” proscriptions.
I can’t really speak to the history of most policies/guides on Wikipedia being established, but you can usually dig through old versions of articles and their “Talk” sections to see what was happening around the time specific content was added, e.g. these quotes from around the time the “NOTHOWTO” stuff was first added to that “What Wikipedia is not” article.
Dpbsmith: Picking any one particular set as “the right way to do it” is very, very, POV-ish. An article which tells you so much about telegraph systems that you could go out and build one is probably a great article; an article which sets out to tell you how to build your own telegraph system is non-encyclopedic.
and
Bunchofgrapes: There is almost always more than one way to do something. Specifying a specific set of how-to instructions in a specific order is therefore almost always an arbitrary choice - unless if you think you can determine a “best” choice, which is likely to be the “best” only in one particular Point of View
While species identification is mostly neutral, the “not an instruction manual” policy becomes more obviously pertinent for cases such as “how to cook an egg” or “how to train a dog”. You can provide information about how eggs are often cooked or what training methods have been found to work, but the “how to” framing enters the realm of sharing personal preferences. I think people tend to read the policy too literally. I cannot think of a single time in tens of thousands of Wikipedia edits that content I shared about identification was contested or removed on the basis of that policy.
So all that said, you can absolutely include information comparing taxa. For example, this is a “Featured Article” (the most highly ranked type) that has an astounding amount of information distinguishing varieties of this species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphyotrichum_lateriflorum#Varieties
If you want to trial it out with a species in mind I’d be happy to work with you to help with getting the formatting and citations sorted out.
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Thanks for the extra details, it’s really helpful to get thoughts from people with more experience here since evidently there’s a lot of competing information.
Using the example you mentioned, if you wanted to describe differences between S. lateriflorum and similar species to it, would it be more appropriate to put that on the “List of Symphyotrichum species” page (e.g. adding another column to the Subsection Dumosi table, something like this) or on the S. lateriflorum page itself (e.g. as additional details in the “Description” sections)?
This seems like a perfect example to me where that’s the first thing I’d look for on a page about a species like this; aster ID involves an overwhelming number of variables on first impression and I’d be lost without assistance knowing which features are important in which context.
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I’d put it on the S. lateriflorum page.
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(Background: I’ve been a modestly active Wikipedia editor for 20 years.)
While Wikipedia is not a guidebook, the other policy that may come into play is that Wikipedia does not host original research. At least in theory (although this isn’t always stringently or immediately enforced), you shouldn’t be saying “species A has feature X while species B has feature Y” unless you have a source that compares A and B (although IMO having both in the same published key would be acceptable). It is OK to make those comparisons in source, but in general Wikipedia is not really a suitable vehicle for an identification wiki.
We did codify a long-standing practice last year that all extant, taxonomically accepted eukaryotic species are presumptively notable, which is to say that you should be able to create an article on any such species without too much risk that it will be deleted or merged into another article. That said, this has been somewhat controversial, as some editors are concerned this will give others license to flood Wikipedia with very short (“stub”) articles about species.
In general, what Wikipedia needs most for taxon articles is help with the “Description” section. Morphological descriptions are often difficult for non-experts to understand and more likely to be in offline print or paywalled sources than distributions, habitat, etc. If you’re familiar with a somewhat obscure group of species and have a technical manual or guide you can cite to describe it, using that to write a description is IMO one of the more high-impact things you can do to improve Wikipedia. (Having more well-developed species articles also tends to strengthen support for the idea that species in general should be allowed standalone articles.)
Wikipedia has many WikiProjects, which are nominally collaborative species to allow interested editors to coordinate work on a particular subject. They’re rather moribund compared to the earlier years of the project, but if you reach out and ask for help with your own work, people will generally show up to help explain existing practice. If you browse to an article of interest and then navigate to the associated “Talk” page, there will be banners at the top to indicate relevant WikiProjects. (It may take some clicking: on mobile, you have to select “Learn more about this page” and then a “show” link in a banner when the article is covered by “multiple WikiProjects”.)
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From my time reading Wikipedia’s species articles, I can say for sure that using the “Description” section has never been helpful in making identifications compared to the sections and images showing ranges and describing species behaviors. These sections, when they describe species morphology, use very specific anatomy terms without linking them to the Wiktionary and require that I either have prior knowledge or do the due diligence of looking up the word. Wikipedia as used for identification help is not great, and the best alternatives are existing keys and identification guides intended for people to use for ID.
The only way Wikipedia species pages have been helpful for making ID, in my experience, are in the habitats and behaviors of those species. Yes, the main image in the species infobox is helpful, but sometimes it’s an old black-and-white illustration or a dead specimen taken out of its usual environment.
It’s also a good point that we have to build out species articles that exist so people don’t decide to revoke the automatically endowed notability of species. Morphological descriptions are important, but it’s more important to get multiple publications that describe the same species and using all the relevant information in them to build the articles.
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To be fair, the impenetrability of morphological descriptions is a feature of scientific papers and technical manuals as well! When I write species descriptions, I make extensive use of links to entries in pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_leaf_morphology and parenthetical glosses, but one does have to assume some knowledge on the part of the reader about the larger group the species belongs to. But after all, it is an encyclopedia and a work of reference and not a flora or the equivalent.
Having more sourcing is more important from a legalistic, policy point of view (on Wikipedia), and I don’t discourage it, but there’s also a pragmatic angle. As a reader, I feel a little frisson of disappointment when I click on a link and get a 2-sentence stub. In theory, the state of development of an article is orthogonal to whether or not it should be kept, but in practice, I think it often does. If you’ve been cranking out those 2-sentence stubs (as someone is doing for South African plants), even adequately sourced, some editors will get cranky and start nitpicking whether the source is reliable, whether the information constitutes “routine coverage”, etc. But if the article is decent–giving a reader has a sense of what the species “is like” and what makes it distinctive–editors are more likely to favor keeping it regardless of sourcing quibbles.
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The Wiki stubs are deliberately coming from iNatters
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I think this comes down to the first of the five pillars of Wikipedia: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Without this pillar, articles could deviate in many directions and it would be challenging to figure out what a good article should look like. Through this scoping, it at least gives an idea of what to strive for (not that it removes all discussions for how articles should look like).
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Why would that be bad?
I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malephora_verruculoides; the creator seems to be grinding out a lot of them without much information about the actual organism. Finding short articles like that in a favorite subcategory of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Biota_of_South_Africa and adding a few sentences of description from a field guide could be a very productive activity.
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Many stubs have little or no real information. One example of many:
“Acrolophus abdita is a moth of the family Acrolophidae. It is found in South America.”
This is the entire text of the stub on that species. How is this useful?
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It’s a bit difficult to explain. Wikipedia has this slippery quality called “notability” which doesn’t quite correspond to the vernacular use of the term, meaning whether or not we should write an individual article about a particular topic. There have always been divergent philosophies about how stringent this should be, the two poles being labeled “inclusionism” and “deletionism”. In the earliest days of Wikipedia, there was a lot more optimism about the amount of volunteer labor available and the amount of reliable data available to enter into the encyclopedia. Some subject-specific notability guidelines implied that, e.g., everyone who had ever competed in the Olympics could be assumed to have enough written about them to justify a biographical article.
People used that opportunity to go absolutely ham: in the case of Olympians, 93,000 stubs created, very few of which were ever subsequently expanded. (In general, creating a stub based on a database entry doesn’t seem to noticeably stimulate expansion into an article worth reading.) That has resulted in some backlash in the past few years. Deletionists would generally argue that Wikipedia is meant to be a prose encyclopedia, not a database like WikiData, and that flooding it with articles that can never become substantial is contrary to its general purpose. There’s also a greater misinformation risk: mass-creation of stubs from the US GNIS database and similar sources from other countries resulted in many stub articles about places that don’t actually exist, some of which have leaked further into Google Maps and so on.
Hence my pragmatic advice: if you feel called to create an article on a taxon, try to start it with enough information that a naive reader can come away from it feeling like they have some idea what the taxon is like. That will generally create goodwill in editors with no particular connection to the subject; stubs like the one Jason quoted will not.
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