User talk:Gerryvt

Welcome!
Hello Gerryvt, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
 * Introduction and Getting started
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
 * Simplified Manual of Style

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Loopy30 (talk) 15:17, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Image placements
Hi Gerryvt, when placing a species image into an article that does not have one yet, it is good to place the first image directly in the taxobox. You can use either the visual editor or the source editor to do so.

In the visual editor, you can click on the taxobox and then select the "Edit" box that appears. Once open, you can add the filename to the image field. You only need the name and not the "File:" at the start (eg. "Hyypolux grayii.jpg"). Then select "Apply changes" to exit the taxobox, and "Publish changes" to save the page

In the source editor, you can add to the line image within the taxobox information (which starts and ends with two curly brackets). Again, you only need the filename and not the "File:" at the start.

You can view your previous contributions by selecting the tab at the top right of the page. I have already moved the image to the taxobox on a couple of pages as a start (example here). Loopy30 (talk) 13:56, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Lack of citations
Hi. While I recognize that you are eager to contribute your personal knowledge of the moths of Suriname, WP policy prohibits the addition of material that is based solely on personal knowledge. If you wish to contribute information, you must provide a citation giving a reliable source for that information. It appears that you have not provided any reliable sources for any of your recent additions, and this is a violation of WP policy. I will politely ask that you stop making additional edits until and unless you can provide citations or links to sources that support the information you are adding, at a bare minimum. Additionally, it is not helpful to add the name of a single country as the distribution of a species when the known distribution is much larger, or to add information on only one species in a genus in the absence of information on the other species; if there is information only on species X, then that information should appear in the article for species X, rather than in the article for the genus. Thanks. Dyanega (talk) 21:40, 7 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Following up: I've seen your message on my talk page, and appreciate your taking the time to give a detailed response. Do understand, new contributors run a wide range, and it is certainly helpful to know your background and motivation; similar encounters with new contributors often proved to be someone who found a single source (either print or online) and then proceeded to uncritically try to add content from that source to Wikipedia (sometimes this can work, other times it can fail). In such cases, failure to properly cite the source is not uncommon, so once the scope of your postings became evident, I decided it was better to reach out directly rather than simply continue reverting all of your postings, though I could not tell if there was an external source involved, or just personal knowledge. If you're interested in learning how to better navigate the technical aspects (like adding images) and the policy aspects, then I'd be happy to help out, and you can e-mail me at my institutional address if you'd like. I do not want to be even partially responsible for driving away a potentially valuable contributor, and I'm sorry if you got the impression I was asking you to leave; a request for you to stop editing, at least until we could discuss the problems with the edits, seemed like a prudent first step. I know most of the experts you refer to, and most of them know me, and there is some room for incorporating information from iNaturalist into Wikipedia, though there are some nuances to doing so, and we can discuss this. I am somewhat busy today, but very briefly, the use of external resources in the form of identified images is less rigidly controlled than other forms of content, even though that may not seem purely objective (i.e., while it's fine to link to a Commons image of a moth and say it is species X and the photo was taken in Suriname, it is not equally fine to add text saying "Species X occurs in Suriname" without a citation). As for why this distinction exists, and how to navigate it, this is something we can discuss. Again, my intention was not to drive you away, but to call for a pause until some issues could be addressed. If you're willing to work with me, I'm willing to reciprocate; it stands to be mutually beneficial. As a further aside, I'll note that my expertise is rather broader than hymenopterans, and I spent several years rearing a variety of moths and beetles in Brazil, and am especially well-versed in the arctiine and bombycoid fauna of the region, in particular. Thanks, Dyanega (talk) 20:42, 9 April 2021 (UTC)