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:
I have edited a lot on Wikipedia (>100k edits over several years) and can confirm that it is against the editing guidelines to add guidebook style identification information such as ID tips to Wikipedia pages. The WP:NOTGUIDE policy (here ) deters the addition of anything that resembles a guidebook or identification key for articles. Additional project guidelines (birds, fish, plants, etc) have examples of species article layouts that encourage the addition of morphological descriptions that do not reach the level of a guidebook.
To re-use an example, you could give a description like this which doesn’t mention any other species or advise how to distinguish them:
That successfully eliminates all the other similar Melanerpes species , but it becomes sort of a logic puzzle for the reader to figure out which individual feature doesn’t match if they’re looking at an observation of one of those species. It’s much more intuitive to add another paragraph:
They differ from other species in that Red-crowned Woodpecker is very similar but is only found between Costa Rica and Venezuela, Gila Woodpecker has no red on the nape… etc.
But that might be over the line given that the Wikipedia articles for those species don’t include anything like that? When you get into more intricate ID challenges with multiple variables to compare, those comparisons are almost essential.
I don’t feel it should be necessary for all identification tips to have a published citation attached. This would exclude all identification tips sitting in the heads of expert iNaturalist users. I can see that a citation gives an element of reliability, but published keys have plenty of errors or couplets which are at best unreliable. If tips were to require a citation, many skilled identifiers won’t get around to writing a published note on everything they know, and when they do it could be a year or more before the article is published.
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