Can species identification tips be added to Wikipedia?

Seems useful to me so I guess that’s a matter of opinion.

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I forgot to mention that there are how-to-identify articles for a specific few taxa like Latrodectus spiders on WikiHow. This site is probably better for posting and revising identification information than other sites.

For obs trapped at Life due to Kingdom Disagreement - the stub emphasises - this one - is a moth and you intended the homonym plant.

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Thanks everyone, there is a lot of interesting bits about Wikipedia in your answers.

Adding disambiguation pages to Wikipedia for similar species names would be helpful in the future for name-based differentiation of very different organisms. The greatest example I can come up with right now are locusts (Caelifera, the insects) and locusts (certain trees in Fabaceae).

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Great explanation. I think this is actually somewhat parallel to iNat’s process for taxonomic curation:

On iNat, we generally don’t add every possible species or taxonomic group to iNat that we could (or are requested) - only those for which observations exist/are likely to exist or those taxa which are useful to users. The main goal of iNat isn’t to be an up-to-the-minute taxonomy of life (just like Wikipedia’s goal isn’t to be a storehouse for every bit of human minutiae). Both platforms’ goals are to serve their users in defined and somewhat limited ways (even though the remit for both platforms is quite broad on the whole, especially in the case of Wikipedia).

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More informative than the entry for Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at least!

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