User talk:Leuckartiara

Welcome!
Welcome to Wikipedia. Normally new editors are welcomed a bit sooner than I am doing now, but I just wanted to leave you a note to tell you that your additions to jellyfish have not gone unnoticed. Nice work. =) One thing you might want to do with all of the references you have been adding is to use the citation templates.  It does a lot of the formatting for you in the References section. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 08:02, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Uh - thanks. I'll look at it. Don't know anything about writing in Wikipedia, but following the sensationalist NYTimes article last week, I finally decided to do something about the Jellyfish article, which I've know for a long time has big problems (they seemed too big to try to deal with until that article came out and I figured a lot of people would be looking in Wiki). It seems unkind to just replace it wholesale with something "better", so I've been doing it in bits (and my whole first big edit - more than an hour's work - was tossed out and I didn't know how to bring it back. The Anatomy and Morphology and Body systems sections are still awful. Again, I feel strange throwing someone else's work out wholesale, so don't know what to do. I was just going to add a reference which is a website listing jellyfish articles in newspapers - maybe your templates include websites.Leuckartiara (talk) 17:29, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * If you need to get back to a previous version of a page to recover material, such as your lost edit, click on that page's "History" tab at the top. This will bring up a list of all the previous versions of that page, most recent first.  Find the version you need and click on its date, and the old version will be displayed.  You can then cut and paste stuff from it it you wish, or (if you're sure it's warranted, and it won't interfere with subsequent useful edits), you can revert to that version by clicking on "save", which will save the whole page as the current version again.  Nothing on Wikipedia is ever lost.


 * The citation templates do include websites. You can also easily enable a useful gadget to help you.  Click on "my preferences" (top right), then "gadgets", check the "refTools" box, and save.  A couple of extra buttons now apppear on your toolbar when you edit.  If you click the "cite" button, you are offered a choice of sources (book, journal, website, etc) and a handy form to fill in which then creates your formatted citation for you at the point where you click the cursor.   Ka renjc 21:02, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Jellyfish and Citations
Hi there. I reverted your edit to Jellyfish, since I didn't see any sourcing or citing for it. It seemed to drastically change the tone of that section, as well as removing some data without explanation.

Feel free to revert me if you feel that your edits do belong on that article. In the future, however, it may be worth citing a source or two when you add information like that. Wikipedia cannot accept original research.

Thanks, and have a good evening. 70.91.178.185 (talk) 23:14, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi,

I don't think that what I am writing represents original research, so much as great familiarity with the group (35 years of study). When people who don't know the group well make changes to these pages based mostly on naivete or what they read in a textbook written by a non-specialist, it vastly changes things. I am presently going through both Jellyfish and Ctenophores (and some related topics) and making changes to these articles that have been added by people who have sort of term-paper knowledge, but which doesn't really represent the group well. I wasn't signed in for some of the changes to I've made to Ctenophora tonight because I haven't been on Wiki for months and forgot to check to save my login.

The term-paper nature of some of these articles is very problematic, because even if the person has read widely, they make generalizations out of things that are not general and things just don't read right. The Ctenophore article received a huge amount of editing a couple of months ago from someone I've never heard of (he wrote to me to tell me he was doing it) and it summarizes a huge amount of literature that would take me (an "expert" to the extent that anyone is) months to verify. I am only correcting the easiest and most obvious (to me) generalizations, since he is basically right so far as I know, but some things just don't add up quite as they should.

Interesting that you caught this so fast. Thanks. You never know who I could be.Leuckartiara (talk) 05:36, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Re Hi there - Jellyfish blooms
I have replied on my talk page. William Avery (talk) 07:53, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Not a problem. You did say "07:51, 8 June 2009", which I should have spotted. William Avery (talk) 08:10, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Ctenophore
Hi, I suspected from the style of your edit summaries that you knew a lot about the subject. I've also just checked out your username - it's a hydroid genus. There are 2 types of topics we need to discuss: I look forward to seeing you around. --Philcha (talk) 08:16, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The critters. Until you get familiar with WP's mechanics I suggest you raise points at Talk:Ctenophore, so we can work out how to include them without undesirable side-effects.
 * The mechanics and rules of WP. While in theory it's "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", the early learning curve is quite steep. Feel free to ask me about anything that gives you trouble in non-ctenophore areas. You might find User:Philcha/Sandbox/Producing a Good Article useful as it explains things more concisely than most of the official "rules" pages, but links to them. Since you're strong in a subject area (invert zoo) but a WP newbie, you're the type of audience I was aiming at in that essay, so I'd welcome comments about my guide at User talk:Philcha/Sandbox/Producing a Good Article. BTW really new users are not allowed to create pages and User talk:Philcha/Sandbox/Producing a Good Article does not exist yet; if this hinders you, post to my Talk page and I'll paste it in.

PS your comment on another page, "or did you write one of the stories that I am trying to tell the reader might not be true", was not a good idea, as it's the kind of thing that leads to fights. A colleague I respect a lot summed it up as "focus on content, and avoid personalities and motives". You can get away with such comments as jokes with some editors, but only when you know them and already get on well with them; and then you have to be prepared for the retorts, which are sometimes witty :-) --Philcha (talk) 08:21, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

If you're aiming at "correcting flat-out errors or mythology", the article's Talk page is the right place to raise it.

A couple more bits of advice (I hope you don't mind, I'm tryig to save you trouble):
 * Avoid comments that may enable others to work out your real identity. It's best to pretend that "Leuckartiara" is a character in a cyber-adventure, who just happens to have expertise in certain subjects. Article content should be the only contact with the real world.
 * The tone of your comments was a bit emotional. Some over-sensitive souls will interpret that as aggressive (or claim to, as a ploy), while others will see it as a tactical weakness and try goad you into breaches of WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL (read those) - while there are a lot of very nice and very intelligent people around WP, unfortunately there are also a few packs of hyenas. Stick to the facts, and observe the behaviour of others in debates. That does not mean you have to be a pacifist, but for now you should seek advice if you think a conflict is developing - right now you're totally under-equipped for combat. --Philcha (talk) 08:46, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I welcome anything that makes articles more accurate, and am very glad to see someone who knows more about these animals than I do - while working on it I emailed an expert for comments at the time, but got no response. I found this article difficult to write because the phylum has high disparity but almost all the journal articles are about Pleurobrachia, Beroe and Mnemiopsis. I suspected that using a cydippid as a "model organism" was the way to go, but it took me a long time to find a citeable source to justify that approach (unlike with Mollusca, where textbooks explicitly start with the "Hypothetical Ancestral Mollusc" or "generalized mollusc" and I quickly found a review article that said this explicitly). However there are some things I think you need to keep in mind:
 * WP is a general encyclopedia, i.e. its primary audience is non-specialists,and IMO especially fairly young ones, e.g. 12 upwards. Sometimes that requires over-simplification, especially in wide-scope articles such as those about phyla.
 * Editing articles that have passed some sort of review is tricky. Under WP's rules it's quite easy for even an real expert to degrade such articles. The most common issue is failing to provide refs for statements that are totally obvious to an expert but not to a non-specialist.
 * You also need to consider the context in which you're adding / changing content. For example I've just removed a recent change that duplicated information already present in the same paragraph. That was an easy example, but you really need to read the whole article first, as the same point may be covered at least partially elsewhere in the article. If you think the omission is so serious that it may warrant re-structuring in order to accommodate it without duplication, you should post a comment on the Talk page and wait to see if anyone responds - responses will show up in your watchlist provided you're logged in (use the "watchlist" link at the top of each page, that's how I became aware of your contributions). --Philcha (talk) 10:00, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

PS I've just realised I missed out a very simple point. If you think some aspect of a lower-level taxon needs to be covered more thoroughly, you could do it at the article on the lower-level taxon, e.g. Lobata - see WP:SUMMARY. I like this type of "middle-up" approach because: the middle-level articles are easier to structure, especially in highly disparate phyla; it provides a stock of refs and text one can use (selectively) in the higher-level article; it makes it easier to see what is important enough to be covered in the higher-level article. In case you ask why I'm working on phylum articles without building up those on lower-level taxa first, it's because my objectives are different: invertebrate phyla -> protosomes and deuterostomes -> bilaterians -> Cambrian explosion. From that perspective phyla are mid-level topics - yes, fools rush in ... :-) --Philcha (talk) 11:57, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Months later after rereading this... Hi Philcha. Thanks for all of the advice. I don't really care if I am under-equipped for combat, as I am not into combat. I've been making a lot more small changes to Ctenophores (and other various jelly pages) - things that just aren't quite right. If you chose to edit them out, I'll just give up. It isn't worth the time spent. I'm trying to help and consider my efforts a public service. Few scientists who I know will even touch contributing to Wikipedia, as hours of work can go down the drain in either an instant or gradually over many months. Textbooks, which are your source for most things cited, are usually not written by experts on individual topics and the primary literature gets kind of smeared around in ways the original authors would never interpret their data. I consider a textbook citation almost useless for ultimate accuracy. I've added citations to things that seem worth citing in my additions. Not every statement that I consider needing a citation in the original article has one, anyway. I'm not being pissy, just matter of fact - please don't read any more into this than is stated - there is no unstated agenda here.

I would recommend wiping out the entire Ctenophore vision section, which I find pretty unlikely, but didn't, as I don't know enough to find a citation that actually says it is wrong. But aren't encyclopedias considered inadequate as citations for Wikipedia? I can't think of anyone who studies ctenophores who would include a section about vision in these animals.

One thing that I can't figure out is how to refer to a reference that is already in the list, when I am editing a section, without writing the whole ref. in another time, de novo. Where do the a,b,c's ... come from for a many-cited reference? Leuckartiara (talk) 10:01, 8 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi, Leuckartiara,thank for all the work you'd done in Ctenophora.
 * I've removed the bit about "Vision", as the only source used is a general encyclopedia.
 * To use a ref several times:
 * Make the main one
 * In other uses,
 * For formatting citations, I recommend RefToolbar - I've lost count of how of I've used it, it may be over a thousand. --Philcha (talk) 13:13, 8 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I've just seen your contributions to other zoology topics - thanks!
 * Was my explanation about and good enough for now, or to you need more info? I don't want to burden you with stuff you don't need at present.
 * All the best, --Philcha (talk) 05:42, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

ctenophore taxonomy
I think you might have mentioned ctenophore taxonomy as your profession, and also that there are merely 100-150 existing species (which sounds like a trivial number to catalogue). Can you recommend any good sources (e.g. book, website, or review paper of your field) for comb jelly identification? Cesiumfrog (talk) 04:02, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
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