Talk:Atta (ant)

Number of Castes

five castes being present in established colonies - minims 1 (or 'garden ants'), minors 2, mediae 3 and majors 4 (also called soldiers or dinergates) being present. Why fifth caste is not mentioned? Verdi1 06:51, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

The fifth is presumably the queen.

The main text has been changed to say "four" castes, not including the queen.

But there is still a problem. The lede says "three" castes -- worker, soldier, and queen. The contradiction (four vs. three) needs to be fixed. 70.179.92.117 (talk) 22:24, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Proposed information on Atta

Removed thread that repeated the copyvio from the article. jonkerz ♠talk 13:14, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Copyvio from The Insects, an Outline of Entomology

Ping Ukexpat.

Does the ticket (ticket:2016041610000512) say which paragraphs are affected by this? I found this in the 3rd edition of The Insects, an Outline of Entomology (ISBN 1-4051-1113-5), p. 228: "Leaf-cutter ants dominate the ecosystems in which they occur; some grassland Atta species consume as much vegetation per hectare as domestic cattle, and certain rainforest species are estimated to cause up to 80% of all leaf damage and to consume up to 17% of all leaf production."

From Atta (genus)#Diet: "Leafcutter ants tend to dominate the ecosystems they inhabit. Some grassland Atta species colonies consume as much vegetation per hectare as domestic cattle. Certain rainforest species are estimated to cause up to 80% of all leaf damage and to consume up to 17% of all leaf production."

jonkerz ♠talk 13:11, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The ticket refers to "many paragraphs" without further detail.--ukexpat (talk) 15:48, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

@Ukexpat: Ouch :/ I'll look into it. Do you want me to publish a draft somewhere before restoring the article after cleaning it up? jonkerz ♠talk 15:56, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

@Ukexpat: It may be very easy to fix after all. The copyvio mentioned above was added in diff. Reverting that edit probably removes all copyvios. Throwing out the baby out with the bathwater is not always the best solution, but I'm not comfortable with restoring content by a user known to have added at least one copyvio, and comparing the content is very time-consuming (and would not catch other parts possibly copied/WP:CLOSEPARAPHRASEed from other sources). Would that make it possible to restore the rest of the article? I can do a quick read through of the WP article and pages 226-228 of The Insects, an Outline of Entomology before restoring. This also calls into question this addition by the same user. jonkerz ♠talk 16:21, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The part on eyes appears to have been copied from here which is generic information on ants rather than this genus. SmartSE (talk) 16:33, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Some parts are ok though e.g. this is the source for the information about mating and is not a copyvio. SmartSE (talk) 16:59, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Please go ahead and fix it as you see fit. Thanks.--ukexpat (talk) 15:17, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Cool, thanks ukexpat. Great finds, SmartSE, not sure how you managed to find them. I'll go ahead and restore the article without the content added by the user. I have a great deal of patience with new contributors and do not mind cleaning up articles, but without access to the all the sources, I'm not too happy to cleanup content with this many issues (copyvio, using general references for genus articles, large sections of unreferenced content, incomplete references).

Also pretty much copied from The Insects, an Outline of Entomology, p. 226-227: "When the leaves finally reach the nest, other individuals lick the waxy cuticle off the leaves and chew it up into small pieces. Next, they inoculate the leaves with a fecal cocktail of enzymes from their hindgut. This initiates the digestion of the newly chewed leaves." (#Diet on WP)

We can look more closely at the other sections later. Right now just having an article is the top priority, and it has been unreadable for 10 days already. jonkerz ♠talk 16:51, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Diff for future reference. jonkerz ♠talk 17:01, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Two other sections ('Evolution' and 'Ecological effects'; diff) were likely added by the same user from an IP. I skimmed through Farji-Brener (2000) and "quote searched" a bunch of sentence fragments from both sections without finding any issues, so I've not removed them.

The only confirmed copyvio is that in the second half of the former 'Diet' section, and right now I do not want to put too much blame on the user who added that, because a likely scenario is that they copied it from the source while working on the content and then forgot to rewrite that part (speculation, but I've seen it before). I've left a message on the user's talk page asking for assistance and notified them via email. jonkerz ♠talk 18:41, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

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