User talk:80.41.196.217

Hi. Welcome to Wikipedia. While your recent edits were plainly well-intentioned, it would have been preferrable if you had taken the time to read the Mantis article before you edited it. The term "mantid" is restricted to ONLY the members of the family Mantidae; all the other members of the order Mantodea are referred to as "mantises", and that is the correct term for the collective species in the order as a whole. About 20 years ago, when the order Mantodea only contained a single family, using the name "mantid" for the order would have been fine, and maybe that's when you learned the term (or when whatever reference you're using was first written), but ever since about 10-15 years ago there are now several families of mantises other than mantids. If you had read the article first, you would have seen that explanation, and saved yourself a lot of wasted effort making inappropriate and incorrect changes to the article. As for your edits to Chinese mantis, they were also reverted; one for the same reason as above, and the other because it is not verifiable - there are some 2,300 species of mantises, and to claim that "most of them" are cannibalistic would imply that someone has documented the behavior of over half of the 2,300 species - this is NOT supported by any published evidence. Only a small number of species have ever been studied, and only a fraction of those have ever been observed to be cannibalistic. Wikipedia requires that article content be verifiable, and that particular change you made was not verifiable, so it was also reverted. In the future, you might want to make sure that your edits are based only on reliable sources of information (hopefully better and newer than those listed at the bottom of an article), before attempting to make edits; if not, your edits are likely to be reverted. Peace, Dyanega (talk) 04:35, 18 March 2008 (UTC)