Agelaia

Welcome to Wikipedia: check out the Teahouse!

Hello! Agelaia, you are invited to the Teahouse, a forum on Wikipedia for new editors to ask questions about editing Wikipedia, and get support from peers and experienced editors. Please join us!

I, and the rest of the hosts, would be more than happy to answer any questions you have! SarahStierch (talk) 16:26, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Welcome

Hello, Agelaia, and welcome to Wikipedia! It appears you are a course instructor leading a class project. We encourage you to read our instructions for teachers and lecturers. It is strongly recommended that you add your class to our list of school and university projects. For more help about educational projects using Wikipedia, see our classroom coordination project which was created for the very purpose of assisting course instructors who use Wikipedia for their courses.

Here are some other pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question.

Before your students create an article, make sure you understand what kind of articles are accepted here. Remember: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and while many topics are encyclopedic, some things are not. Unencyclopedic articles are subject to deletion.

We highly recommend that you place {{Educational assignment}} on the talk page of any articles you are working on as part of your Wikipedia-related course assignment. This will let other editors know this article is a subject of an educational assignment and should be treated accordingly.

We hope you like it here and encourage you to stay after your assignment is finished! Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 03:31, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Online ambassador

I've noticed that several of your students are interested in lemur articles. This happens to be an area on Wiki that I guard kind of carefully, particularly the good and featured articles I have written. I am a former online ambassador, and though I no longer officially volunteer with the program, I might be willing to help your class out. Unfortunately, I'm a little limited on time because I am in the middle of several important re-writes and good/featured article reviews, but it appears that class is going to pull me away from a lot of that anyway. Would you want me to act as your official online ambassador? Your students can work with me on either Google Voice, Skype, or IRC. If so, just talk to your campus ambassador about it and let me know. – Maky ^« talk » 05:57, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Europe

Hello. On Talk:Europe, one of your students has tagged the article Europe, one of the 200 most read articles on wikipedia, as being part of your ecology project at Washington University, St Louis. I am sure that was not your intention. Europe is a very general article summarising topics that are treated in much greater detail in sub-articles. Adding small details to the biodiversity section (e.g. on the Macaque colony in Gibraltar) is WP:UNDUE: it is too specific for such a general article, but obviously is highly appropriate in more specialized articles. Two students added that kind of content to the article and I have reverted it per WP:UNDUE. Could this possibly be clarified with your students? Thanks in advance. Mathsci (talk) 23:49, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

OK, I'll talk to them. I'm delighted with their enthusiasm, but sometimes it needs a little control. Agelaia (talk) 01:04, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. There are also some technical errors, for example in adding references/citations (WhitleyTucker's edits to Polygyny threshold model). Some advice has already been offered directly by other wikipedians. Cheers, Mathsci (talk) 05:09, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

GAs of bird articles

Dr Strassmann, you might like to comment on this discussion about the attempts at producing Good Articles on birds at the discussion page of the bird project. Shyamal (talk) 14:49, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Dr. Strassman. It's great that some of your students are continuing to work on articles after the conclusion of their assignments; hopefully, we've snared a few into becoming longterm contributors! If you decide to repeat this requirement in future semesters, please feel free to let us know at WP:BIRD. We'd be happy to take some of your students "under the wing" (as it were) to help them prepare their articles for the rigors of the GA nomination process! All the best for the holidays... MeegsC (talk) 22:41, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for all your help. I hope I didn't cause too much turmoil. I just somehow couldn't see a way around having the students just jump in. I will be doing this next fall in the same course which will be likely to have more students. I will try to put my energy into closer Wikipedia oversight. This year I had a lot to do with setting up the course. It has been amazing to see how much the students learned, how much they contributed to Wikipedia, how they understand what a referenced statement is, how well they worked together. I just hope it wasn't too stressful for the rest of you. I do hope they continue to contribute, and will be watching them. I won't make it a condition of writing a great recommendation letter, of course, but what a great thing it would be to say in such a letter that they continued to work past the semester, helping the world understand behavior!Agelaia (talk) 02:36, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Great! It's always nice to have new editors getting involved—and, as you said earlier in the semester, perhaps some of them will "stick"! If there's anything we can do to help, let us know! MeegsC (talk) 13:27, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Greetings

Hello there! Thank you for all of your contributions to Wikipedia. From a quick glance at your replies, your contributions, your assignments, and what I've heard, you understand what Wikipedia is about. Thank you for that! I think you also helped out with the beginning states of this assignment: Education Program:Saint Louis University/Signal Transduction (SP13). I've helped out with developing that course page with the professor this semester. Over at the education noticeboard, your class was mentioned because I noticed a news story about it, and I noted a way I think your Wikipedia assignment could improve. You can see that discussion here. Best wishes. Biosthmors (talk) 22:28, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Original Barnstar
		Thank you for being considerate about the ecology of Wikipedia. =) Biosthmors (talk) 22:46, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Course rights

Hi Agelaia, just wanted to let you know that I have added the course instructor right to your account, as you have demonstrated a need for it through the Wikipedia Education Program. This feature will have no effect on your editing, and will just allow you to be able to access the course extension as well as create and edit course pages. If you are interested in accessing the course extension so that you might be able to create a course page right now, here is the link. For more information on the course instructor right, see this page. Feel free to leave me a message if you have any questions. Happy editing! Kevin Rutherford (talk) 17:42, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Question

Professor Strassmann, I was wondering if it would be okay to work on some of these articles that were put up as class projects. I have experience in doing this as well. The Great northern tilefish is an example of what was done in three days from an article that was listed at GA, but was going to fail. Editing with the nominator resulted in a jump from this. I have a fair amount of access to sources through my local library and Wikipedia's Resource Exchange has shown that I have no shortage of sources. However, if this is a graded project system, I don't want to be impulsive and jump into it without approval. The page on Army ant also has hundreds of relevant sources that I can access through Archive.org and other places and such content could result in a major expansion and alteration of the page(s) as they currently exist. I just want to make sure its okay on your end. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 03:42, 11 November 2013 (UTC) Hi Chris, It would be wonderful if you could help improve some of the entries. It would be best if you could start with the work my students did in 2012 which is on the Behavioral Ecology course page from that year. This year my students worked hard to bring the earlier articles up in quality. You can tell what was done last year because that page has a picture of a magpie eating a garter snake. This year's page and the list of class projects has a wasp nest. My students are graded on their work, and are supposed to improve it, so it would be better if you could hold off on this year's writing for awhile, until mid December. My teaching assistants have spent a lot of time giving the students comments and fixing things and improving is a lot of the learning process. They are putting up no new material, just fixing things for the rest of the semester, so it would probably be best if we let them do it for now. I'll ask them if there are articles in particular they are no longer working on so I could tell you about those. Thank you so much for your help and your dedication to Wikipedia. I'm sorry the learning curve for my students has been a little rough this year and am glad you are willing and able to help.Agelaia (talk) 12:38, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Nice work!

		The WikiCookie
		You've learned how to use basic wikicode in your sandbox. You can always return there to experiment more.

Posted automatically via sandbox guided tour. Agelaia (talk) 08:46, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Tips on student articles

Dear Dr. Strassmann. It's great to see expansive species level articles coming from your Behavioral Ecology course. I have some helpful suggestions I hope you will pass on to your students (and forgive me if they've already been posted or discussed elsewhere). 1. The talk page of all articles should have at least one relevant project banner, e.g. Wiki Project Insects or WikiProject Vespidae, so that they can be more easily found, assessed, categorized, and improved by other interested editors during and after the course ends. 2. Please stress the importance of only using CC-licensed or other free images and content: some images are apparently being scanned and uploaded from non-free, copyrighted texts such as Turillazzi's Biology of Hover Wasps (e.g. here) and I've posted a notice on the course Talk page regarding WikiCommons Licensing. That's all for now, all the best! --Animalparty-- (talk) 21:18, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

On WikiProject Apidae

Hello, Agelaia. I noticed you've recently created WikiProject Apidae, which you apparently intend to be used for a single course. I think perhaps it might be might be better to create a Task force for Apidae under the existing WikiProject Insects rather than a wholly independent Project: your last project (WikiProject Vespidae) had little involvement other than your students, and was largely redundant to Education Program:Washington University in St. Louis/Behavioral Ecology (Fall 2014). Drawbacks of too small or narrowly focused projects include too much self-assessment, loss of editor interest, increased administrative load, and less efficient communication between users (e.g. a question asked on an Apidae talk page may not be seen by knowledgeable regular Insect editors). In short, I fear that WikiProjects like these have a very short life before becoming inactive, which requires more administrative work to subsume and reassess. WikiProjects are communities of editors, and in addition to your incoming students there is already an established editor base of Insect articles. See WP:TASKFORCE for more on the benefits of a Task force, and for a good example of what an Apidae task force might resemble, see the Ants task force - Articles are tagged with the WP Insects banner and Ant task force tag, allowing for increased editor visibility but the tabulating of ant articles separately. For some background and various opinions, see the rather long (and somewhat heated) discussion here. There seems to be rough consensus that creating a Sub-project for every order or insect taxon is not warranted, especially if it will likely attract the same group of Wikipedians (there are only around 4 active editors in WikiProject Beetles, although they work on other articles, and other Wikipedians work on Beetle articles, so I think WP Beetles is largely extraneous). In any case, I look forward to many quality bee articles! All the best, --Animalparty! (talk) 23:42, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! I have to say I am in complete shock that there is not a project on bees, bumblebees, honeybees, stingless bees and the like. They are so important and popular, I thought there would be many people writing on them. Before we put together the Vespidae page, there were wasp entries but not under a project. I'm a little sad that what you say is correct, that few others jumped on. It is so frustrating how few academics that write themselves about wasps, or bees, or whatever actually bother to put stuff up on the best read place in the world. I am a very clunky user of Wikipedia. I know there is tons of help stuff, but I work into it only gradually. I thought joining a project was the right thing to do, but apparently not. I also think that it is best overall if I have my students work on a specific set of organisms. I am very excited to see what we do with honeybees, bumblebees, stingless bees and the like. Now I have to completely redo my course page because it has changed format. Thanks for any help.Agelaia (talk) 01:55, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi Agelaia. I saw you adding WikiProject Apidae as a subproject of Wikiproject Insects, and came here to say pretty much what Animalparty just said. Joining a project is the right thing to do, but do consider working with an existing project such as WikiProject Insects before spinning off a new project. The limiting factor on successful WikiProjects is really the number of interested editors, not the breadth of potential content in the scope of the project. Sadly, there aren't enough editors working on insects to make it spinning off more specific subprojects very worthwhile. If there are pages on Apidae or Vespidae species that haven't been tagged for any project yet, that's a symptom of the small numbers of editors working in the area. With WikiProject Lepidoptera and WikiProject Beetles as subprojects of WikiProject Insects , a WikiProject Hymenoptera might be seen as the next step. But with Myrmecidae represented by a task force at present, it seems to me that maybe Vespidae and Apidae should be task forces of Wikiproject Insects as well and not largely independent subprojects.

A task force would still give you a specific page to communicate with your students, and would keep the articles in question more visible to the larger pool of editors monitoring WikiProject Insects. While I don't have all the editing privilege needed to create a task forcee, but I'd be happy to advocate for making Apidae (and Vespidae?) task forces under WikiProjects Insects, and could take responsibility for some of the rote work in setting up them up. Plantdrew (talk) 02:51, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Oh! And thank you for encouraging your students to contribute to Wikipedia. Their expansions of the various Vespidae articles last year were nice. Sorry to have been snapping at you over technical considerations. I'm hoping to see more contributions from your course. Plantdrew (talk)

December 2015

Hello, I'm NicatronTg. I wanted to let you know that I reverted one of your recent contributions —the one you made with this edit to Scaptotrigona postica— because it didn’t appear constructive to me. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks. Lucas "nicatronTg" Nicodemus (talk) 17:50, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Please put my changes back up. The information you changed makes it inaccurate. Drones have no work inside colonies. Specifying what exactly the sex of worker and queen eggs is makes it clearer. To make it clear, I am an expert in this area and have published on it. Your changes actually make the biology of the system inaccurate. I have no idea what caused you to do this.

Hiya, sorry about that. I think I mis-clicked a button there in huggle. I reverted my revert (your edit is back). Sorry about that Lucas "nicatronTg" Nicodemus (talk) 22:13, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	Thanks for your edits (that I mistakenly reverted) on Scaptotrigona postica! Lucas "nicatronTg" Nicodemus (talk) 22:15, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject Insects/Hymenoptera task force

Hello @Agelaia: I am writing to let you know that WikiProject Vespidae and WikiProject Apidae have been combined into WikiProject Insects' Hymenoptera task force. The groups were combined to help concentrate the year-round editors and reduce workload (eg. tagging and assessing pages). If you have a new student group working on social (or solitary!) hymenopterans, I'd be happy to help out with directing them toward areas which need assistance. Thank you for getting students to contribute year after year and have a lovely day! M. A. Broussard (talk) 04:24, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Academic bios by course participants

Hi Joan, since you are the course instructor for Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Washington University/Undergraduate Research Perspectives (Spring_2017), I'd like to ask for your comments on this. Students in this course so far seem to have made live three articles about researchers in their respective work groups: Debra A. Brock, Michele Alesia Johnson, and Troy Murphy, Ph.D.. The first of these is currently under discussion for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Debra A. Brock, with as yet undecided outcome. The second I would judge to be able to meet the notability guidelines for academics, but I'm not sure. The third I'm considering nominating for deletion due to lack of notability in short order (add: done so - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Troy Murphy, Ph.D.). Generally, there seems to be a certain lack of understanding of what constitutes notability for academics (see WP:PROF), with the attendant likely disappointments when stuff gets deleted.

I'm just wondering, is the creation of these articles part of the intended course programme? I'm not sure if this is a sensible topic, and it will probably throw up a number of problems, the most obvious being that the students have a conflict of interest regarding these people they know personally. This will in all probability make it difficult for them to both vet the suitability of the subject, to describe them in a neutral fashion, and to work dispassionately with other editors on these articles. In the deletion discussion linked above, we can already see some obvious canvassing, where two other COI students were roped in to provide support. This is a recipe for friction, and I think it would be a good idea to work around it.

Ian (Wiki Ed), I'd also like to ping you for your perspective. Is this a problem in the making, and could/should there be some discussion about it with the students? -- Elmidae (talk · contribs) 18:28, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Here is my opinion on this: https://sociobiology.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/is-wikipedia-anti-intellectual-compare-athletes-to-academics-and-the-answer-is-yes/ Agelaia (talk) 20:11, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

Agelaia: I'd like to make two points. First, my concerns here, on your talk page, are about dealing with the active status quo on Wikipedia. For better or worse, the notability guidelines are in force; consequently, these articles will be judged by them; consequently, there may be disappointment and friction among editors. Depending on how keen you are for your students to have a productive involvement in WP in other areas (which seems to be working quite nicely, as far as I can tell), it is worth minimizing those. I suggest that should include making students more aware of the issues arising from conflict of interest, and discussing the usefulness of putting lots of work into articles that are unlikely to be kept. Don't you agree with that? This is quite separate from wider concerns about the validity of those guidelines.

Second, the larger part of that blog entry appears to me to be a shot fired in anger, and at the wrong target. I strongly object to the charge of anti-intellectualism. Wikipedia is chock-full of scientists who give vast amounts of their time in the cause of liberating knowledge. Bluntly, that Wikipedia's mechanics are less than ideally suited to a special concern of yours (broadly, inspiring and informing prospective students about careers in academia) does not make all of us who try to keep the machine running to provide free knowledge to the world into "trolls".

I fully agree with your main points: citation indices are an unsatisfactory metric, ready availability of information about researchers can only be of benefit to colleagues and students, and giving every ball-player a full write-up while withholding it for a scientist implies questionable priorities. However, you might want to give some thought to the necessities of keeping this enormous collective of volunteers functional and productive. Quality control on Wikipedia takes up far more energy than addition of new material, and quality control requires inclusion criteria that are easy to judge and apply by the majority of editors. We all know that the citation-based metrics used to measure academic worth are largely crap, but they are what we have available. To have articles the worth of which can only be judged by the fraction of editors that are experts in the field, and understand where the subject's ideas are positioned in the current discourse, is just not tenable. So by necessity we go by metrics, honours, and outside coverage.

As for the skew in coverage between, e.g., science and sports - for every editor interested in an entomologist, there are a hundred interested in a WWF brawler - that's just a function of volunteer demographics, and inclusion criteria reflect that. I hope you don't believe that "we are not an ivory tower" is equivalent to "we are anti-intellectual".

Please don't slag the encyclopedia because it has to be practical as well as idealistic. And if you will, please put some further consideration into whether having the students write researcher articles is a good idea. My assessment remains that this goads new editors into one of the more embattled areas of Wikipedia (WP:BIO) with false expectations. - You might want to consider pinging other editors for comment. -- Elmidae (talk · contribs) 09:14, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

I stand by my opinion that if you can get any old person who has ever participated in sport a bio and cannot get an academic one, that smacks of anti-intellectualism. There is nothing practical about deleting research active professors who give talks all over the world and people could use a good entry on Wikipedia to understand them. Nothing at all. If this is an area where for some unknown reason editors want to act as gate keepers not for knowledge but for some other reason, it is anti intellectual. It has nothing to do with the actual content or writing of the piece. It is not right. I teach my students that we don't just back down from things that are not right. The whole class worked hard to understand the ideas behind the Brock piece and added a lot of information. That is good for learning. Just because there are more people writing about sports than writing about biology does not mean biologists should be kept out. I do not understand it. I do not understand why people are so worried about judging the eminence of professors to see if they are worthy of being in Wikipedia. It isn't like we put it on our resumes or anything. And as to H factors and citations, if that is all someone can understand about a person, then they should not write about that. Most of my colleagues think Wikipedia is so flawed it is a waste of time and they do not fix articles in their own fields that would be easy for them to fix. They think this because of the joint problems of poorly researched articles and push back when they get fixed by people who do not understand the field. Why bother to fix something if the less informed person will just revert it to what it was before? I suppose this problem is biggest in really technical areas, but there is definitely a growing element that has taken the joy out of working with Wikipedia. What to do?Agelaia (talk) 11:46, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Let me take this first:

• Most of my colleagues think Wikipedia is so flawed it is a waste of time [...]

From my experience, I believe this is mostly because many people (including many academics) don't quite understand the verifiability requirements. If I may quote the summary from this page: "Wikipedia does not publish original thought: all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source. Articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to reach or imply a conclusion not clearly stated by the sources themselves."

I've seen many cases of apparent subject experts putting "the truth" into articles - based on their own research, on their knowledge of the field, even on common knowledge of the field - but not bothering to provide a source. Which makes it just about worthless here, because the material is not verifiable. Of course this cuts both ways: removal of referenced, topical material needs a good reason, and can't just happen because someone dislikes it. By and large this works just fine. The material one of your students has recently added to black-and-white ruffed lemur is not going to be reverted by anyone, because it is carefully summarized and sourced. And since this is the case more often than not, we are accruing quantity and quality.

• I stand by my opinion [...]

I am a postdoc working in population ecology. I don't have half the publications that Dr Murphy has. I find his work highly interesting. So why do I go to the trouble of nominating a well-written article about him for deletion on grounds of not satisfying some list of criteria? Because I think that Wikipedia is a worthy, possibly even a noble, undertaking, and I care about keeping it in working order. This project is trying to catalogue the world's knowledge by harnessing a herd of cats, 80% of which are primarily interested in Pokemon and soccer. This only works because we are following a set of rules that tries to set up a distinction between a curated encyclopedia and an indiscriminate collection of all available information (the latter we have already - it's called the Internet). There are consensual inclusion criteria in every category (all variations of the Wikipedia notability guidelines), and those for articles about researchers currently set thresholds based on those stupid citation metrics. I don't like them either, although I can't really see a good workable alternative at the moment, as noted above. But I pitch in, trying to implement these rules, because I know that this thing only works because so many people do their best trying to abide by consensus.

I think the worst accusation you can level against good faith Wikipedians who argue for deletion of material you care about, is that we believe that following consensual rules is more likely to produce the encyclopedia we wish to achieve, than championing our private interests. This may not be intellectual utopia, but is has already produced the greatest encyclopedia the world has ever seen, so I think there's something to it. -- Elmidae (talk · contribs) 13:54, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

One of the main things I think Wikipedia is good to teach students is that there must be references for everything. The professors I know are not in favor of not having references. I understand the criteria. I know when primary sources can and cannot be used. I also understand the fifth pillar, that there are no rules. You want to delete a tenured academic doing important work for conservation, for climate change for knowledge. Why? This is not something you address. My analogy with athletes stands. What does anyone gain by deleting the bio? What? I do not see any good answers. YOu are right that Wikipedia is overall awesome but if it has to get that way painfully only be fighting for every accurate word with people who know less, I don't think it is worth mine or my student's time. Here is another story. After the semester was over last year I went through my student's writing, correcting errors. Imagine my dismay that some of them were reverted by someone doing something referred to as a "huggle." I asked for help and got it from an excellent Wikipedia professional. My changes were put back in place. Worth my time? Make me want to do more of this? Just look at Meghan Duffy's post on her experience with teaching. Here, https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/using-wikipedia-in-the-classroom-a-cautionary-tale/ and here https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/follow-up-to-my-cautionary-tale-regarding-using-wikipedia-in-the-classroom/ Agelaia (talk) 15:59, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Nice work by students in fall 2017

I've seen a lot of good work as part of Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Washington University in St Louis/Behavioral Ecology (Fall). You and your students deserve to be commended for learning and sharing your knowledge with the world on Wikipedia. I remember writing papers in college that I couldn't take seriously because I knew I was telling the professor things they already knew better than me. It wasn't really communication. This is a great project for the students, Wikipedia and the world. Thank you.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  19:05, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. It is a lot of work, but really gratifying to see my students rise to the challenge. Glad you noticed. Agelaia (talk) 19:56, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

This has been a great success for Wikipedia and I hope it's been good for you and your students. Where I was able to give feedback to students, they took it seriously; I appreciate that. Honestly, in addition to helping Wikipedia and your students, your project has been a very powerful advertisement for WashU and today's undergraduates (which get so much bad press). These are really smart people, doing difficult things and doing them well. Keep up the good work, and if I can help in the future, please let me know.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  19:00, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! We are going to be nominating the best ones for Good Article as the final step this semester. Agelaia (talk) 03:15, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Courses Modules are being deprecated

Hello,

Your account is currently configured with an education program flag. This system (the Courses system) is being deprecated. As such, your account will soon be updated to remove these no longer supported flags. For details on the changes, and how to migrate to using the replacement system (the Programs and Events Dashboard) please see Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Archive 18#NOTICE: EducationProgram extension is being deprecated.

Thank you! Sent by: xaosflux 20:28, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Theridion grallator GA review

Hi. One of your students, Cjing99, wrote Theridion grallator and submitted it for GA review. I've done the review, but unfortunately, it looks like the author has not kept up with wikipedia, so they're probably unaware that the review has been done. Which is a shame, because it's a really nice article and will almost certainly reach GA with just some minor improvements. If you could make Cjing99 aware that the review is done and ask them to come back and respond to the review points, that would be greatly appreciated. -- RoySmith (talk) 23:34, 27 April 2021 (UTC) I let her know and I hope she fixes it!====

Slow Birding

Greetings! I have just come across and browsed through the book and it is absolutely lovely - will definitely put the thinking cap on many birders - wish there was something similar for more countries especially in the bird-rich tropics! Happy holidays, more power to your courses and the students who make the world a bit more scholarly and bright via Wikipedia. Shyamal (talk) 14:56, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi Shyamal, Glad you liked Slow Birding. I'm working hard on the next book, Social Lives of Birds which will have birds from all over the world. Agelaia (talk) 13:39, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Some great work by a student

Hi Agelaia, I just wanted to drop by to let you know that your student, username Oroblancos, has done some great work at Japanese rhinoceros beetle! They nominated it for DYK, and while it wasn't eligible for that because of an expansion requirement, I think it could become a Good Article! Encouraging the student to nominate it would be awesome, and I would be happy to help them through that process. Just leave me a ping! Fritzmann (message me) 14:34, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh, thank you. What wonderful news! I'll be sure to talk with them. Agelaia (talk) 14:36, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

A suggestion

I see that there are quite a few decent-length articles nominated by your students. Good work. Can I suggest, though, that you get your students to remove stub tags (the template right of the bottom of short articles that places the article in stub categories) as part of a major expansion? Much appreciated. Keep up your good work. Schwede66 22:06, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll be sure to tell them. Agelaia (talk) 22:10, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

English spellings

Hi Agelaia - nice to see your encouraging students to enhance insect and other articles. Could you though please ensure your students are familiar with wikipedia's MOS:RETAIN and MOS:TIES conventions on English spelling: I have recently come across (via Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Washington University/Behavioral Ecology 2024 (Spring)) multiple pages where your or other students had changed English spellings (behaviour, colour, etc.) to American spellings (behavior, color, etc.) contrary to the pages' history and/or their being UK-related topics (species native to UK & Europe but not to USA). PS if I have asked this in the wrong place (I got your name from Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/Washington University/Behavioral Ecology 2024 (Spring)), could you direct me to the right place, please. Thanks! - MPF (talk) 21:31, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Agelaia (talk) 01:28, 23 April 2024 (UTC)Thanks so much for your helpful comment. I will be sure to tell the students to change the spellings back to the originals where appropriate.

Many thanks! - MPF (talk) 23:10, 23 April 2024 (UTC)