Talk:Variable checkerspot

Taxonomy

• Not quite sure what to do with this. The nomenclature of this group (yes, group) is not at all settled, and the most recent & thorough catalog (Pelham, 2008 et seq) has returned it back to where it was before this big lumping job, id est three species: E. chalcedona, E. colon & E. anicia. I'm giving strong consideration to splitting this into three articles, but as I haven't the time right now, it will be a spell before I can get to it. Should anyone else feel the need to do it, have at it! Glacierman (talk) 00:39, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Edits

You made a great addition to the article! You added very relevant information about the Behavior of the Variable Checkerspot. Overall, I think the article is very well-written. I rearranged the images so that the table of contents would not be in the center of the page. You should also think about adding more images to the text. I think pictures of this species during the larval stages would be a great addition. I also added wikilinks throughout the Behavior section.--Aliciacanas (talk) 04:19, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

This is a well-written and clear article. Great Job. However, there are some paragraphs that are un-cited. This should be fixed, as it is one of the requirements for Good Article. Every paragraph must have a citation at the end. In the future, you could expand on the perching and territorial behavior of this butterfly. You could also expand on the evolution of wing coloration as a result of predation and talk about mimicry. Abuatois (talk) 16:03, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Broke down the behavior section into 4 distinct sub headings.Npatel92 (talk) 01:03, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Variable Checkerspot/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Quadell (talk · contribs) 20:54, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Nominator: Npatel92

I see that you are submitting this article as a GA nomination as part of a school project. I also see that the only changes you have made to the article so far have been a few changes to the headings. I'm afraid this article suffers from a number of shortcomings, and I can't promote it to GA status at this time. I can, however, give you some guidance as to the best ways to improve this article, so that it can hopefully become a GA at some point in the future.

• The lead section of this article does not conform to our guideline at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section. That guideline says "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article" and "Apart from trivial basic facts, significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article." This lead currently gives a lot of information that is not covered in the body of the article (such as the insect's range and wingspan), and it does not summarize the most important facts in the article (regarding lifecycle, courtship, diet, etc.). You'll notice that the article is tagged with a cleanup request regarding the lead section, for this very reason.

• There are other ways in which this article does not conform to Wikipedia:Manual of Style. For instance, section headings should only be capitalized at their first word ("Mate location" instead of "Mate Location"), and one image does not have a caption.

• When a single source is used to support a paragraph of text, all important information in that paragraph should be supported by the source. The "Life Cycle" section has only one cite -- O'Brien et al (2004) -- but that source only supports the final sentence about a 15-day life span. All of the other information in that section is essentially unsourced.

• Information from sources needs to be reworded in your own words to avoid close paraphrasing, a subtle form of plagiarism. In the "Mate Location" section, the source (Rutowski 1991) states "males that... mate with virgin females will experience the highest fitness gains." Compare this to the text in the Wikipedia article: "Males receive the highest fitness gains from mating with virgin females" These are too close to be acceptable. Or consider the Rutowski et al 1983 source, which states that similar species "appear to be passing roughly similar nutrient investments to their mates." Then compare the text in this article: "these species pass roughly similar nutrient investments to their mates". I know that you, Npatel92, did not write these sections of text, but the article as a whole is not ready for GA status if these problems remain. I suspect there are other examples of close paraphrasing in the article.

This article does not merit GA status at this time. To fulfill our GA criteria, you will need to move all information from the lead into the article body, and then rewrite the lead from scratch. You would need to check all sources used to make sure the information in the article is fully supported without plagiarism. And you would need to make sure all important information about the species is provided in the article. (For an example of an excellent article on a similar species, see Chrysiridia rhipheus.) If all this is done, feel free to renominate the article for GA status. – Quadell ^(talk) 21:24, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Response to GA Review

Thank you for the great feedback Quadell! I looked over at your suggestions and made the following changes to the article: I reworked the lead so it better summarizes the main points contained in the article. I fixed the spelling of the headings and made sure that my article follows the Manual of Style. I cited information that previously wasn't. I went back and reworded information that might be construed as plagiarism from the source. In addition, I made the writing clearer and reworded some confusing parts of the article. I hope this article will be renominated for GA status; are there any other points of concern that must be addressed before it can be a candidate for Good Article?Solon5g93 (talk) 23:42, 5 December 2013 (UTC)