User:Antarctic-adventurer/How to check an article

This is now posted at WikiProject Gastropods/Checking an article.

Instructions for checking a gastropod article:
Check to see how the article looks, and then fix it accordingly. Most of these instructions apply to articles about individual taxa.


 * 1) If it is a genus or species article, is the title in italics?
 * 2) Is the taxobox properly updated (according to Bouchet & Rocroi)? If you want to replace the outdated taxonomy, or add in any missing taxonomy, first go up one by one through the taxonomic levels that are linked in the taxobox, until you reach a level that has B&R taxonomy in it. Check that it is correct, then copy it, and go down through the taxonomic levels, fixing each one of them up, until you reach the article you started on. This isn't as bad as it sounds, it doesn't take long.
 * 3) Does any taxonomy which is mentioned in the intro (and elsewhere in the body of the article) also agree with the B&R taxonomy?
 * 4) Does the taxon have an authority listed right after it in the taxobox, like for example Bloggs, 1899? An authority is the name of the scientist who first described and named the taxon and the year is the year the type description was published. If the taxon does show an authority, is the person's name a wikilink? If not, then please make it into a link, preferably using the full name of the scientist, if that can be discovered. For example... Bloggs, 1899 ... If it's not possible to find out the full name, just make the person's last name into a link. If a taxon is lacking the authority altogether, it's usually possible to find this out by doing a Google search using the scientific name of the taxon.
 * 5) Does the list of species or genera in the body of the article need a heading and/or an intro sentence? Add both if they are lacking.
 * 6) Does the article at least have a heading for the References section and , even if there aren't any references yet?
 * 7) If it's a stub, does it have a tag at the bottom that says: gastropod stub?
 * 8) Turn any sentence fragments into whole sentences. Any other obvious prose errors or typos, go ahead and fix.
 * 9) Is this a species article, and is the genus article a redlink? If so quickly create a genus article based on the species article but pruned down.
 * 10) Talk page: Does the article talk page have the gastropod template on it?
 * 11) Is the template filled out all the way, with class, importance, and needs photo (or not)?

Once you have fixed up even one article, then celebrate! Yay! This will pay dividends in the future. Time spent now is time saved in the future as articles multiply.

If we are going to start checking articles thoroughly like this, it would be a good idea to keep a log of which genera or families have been done, clearly indicated, so that we don't duplicate one another's efforts in looking for ones to fix up. I will set up a list for this here if there is interest from other users. Or someone else can start the list of course. Best wishes, Invertzoo (talk) 18:35, 14 August 2009 (UTC)