User:Qbugbot/info

If you have questions, comments, criticism, or general harassment regarding Qbugbot, or if you'd just like to comment on the weather, please leave a note on the Qbugbot talk page.

About Qbugbot
Qbugbot is a bot that creates new Wikipedia articles ("stubs") for Arthropods. Arthropods are members of a group of animals classified in a phylum called Arthropoda. Arthropods include insects, spiders, crustaceans, centipedes, and a number of other creatures many people refer to as "bugs".

You can help by expanding these pages from their initial layout. For example, the geographic range, habitat, stages of life, active periods, and physical description are potential areas of contribution, as well as the organism's interaction with people, plants, and other animals. Many of the references listed on each page are available online at no charge, giving you easy access to start your research. Photos and drawings are sometimes available on Wikimedia Commons. Most importantly, have fun and learn something new!

You can browse this list of articles to find arthropod stub articles that look interesting.

Data
Most of the data for Qbugbot articles comes from the following online sources:



Additional information and confirmation comes from many sources, including:



A note about taxonomy
The scientific names of arthropods and other life forms are constantly changing, especially with the advent of genetic analysis. Sometimes there is a question as to what the proper scientific name is for an animal, and sometimes there is debate over whether a particular type of animal is entitled to have its own species at all. On the other hand, many new arthropod species are being discovered and described virtually every day.

In other words, in researching arthropods, "your mileage may vary." If one of the Qbugbot pages says there are at least 110 species in a genus, the precise number is probably near 110, but it might be 378, depending on many factors. In researching and editing these stub articles, you may be able to improve their accuracy with new information in addition to providing new material for the article.

Bells and whistles
There are a few features in the Qbugbot articles that are worth pointing out.
 * There is an Infobox at the upper right of each page containing the scientific classification of the organism. If you want to read about the family of the organism, you can click on the name of the family. If you want to see more details of the classification, you can click on the small red pencil just to the right of "Scientific classification".
 * There is a Taxonbar across the bottom of each article that is labeled on the left "Taxon identifiers". It has links to various external sites with information on this particular species or class of species, and can save a lot of Google (or Bing) searching.
 * Some of the references have a DOI number, which allows easy online access to the reference. Some of the DOI references cost money to read, and some are free. All of the references with the green "unlocked" icon are free to access.

Qbugbot run complete
As of May 7, 2018, a mere 477 years after de Soto discovered the Mississippi (give or take a day), Qbugbot has created articles for 15,631 species, those listed in both ITIS and Bugguide.net. 18,407 articles were created in total, including upper level taxa and list pages. These numbers are close, but possibly not exact.