User talk:Lilygreenberg

Welcome!
Hello, Lilygreenberg, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:30, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Non-reciprocity of edits/links
Hi, Lily. I have reverted some of your recent edits, mostly because of an issue with non-reciprocity. Case in point; while it is true that Latrodectus hesperus commonly preys on beetles and wasps, and while it IS appropriate to link to the beetle and wasp articles under such circumstances, the reverse is absolutely not true. They are generalist predators, not specialists, and there is no specific or unique interaction that would require a reciprocal link from either the beetle or wasp articles back to the Latrodectus hesperus article. Students in your class in past semesters have commonly made these sorts of errors in editing, and it is important to keep non-reciprocity in mind when editing. Perhaps it will help you to imagine how big a list would end up being if someone actually tried to link every potential item that could be in that list; for example, almost every bird species in the world will eat arthropods, but the arthropod article does not list every bird species in the world - that list would be impractically huge. It is more than enough if the article simply lists birds as one example of the organisms that commonly eat arthropods. Also, to continue that same example, there are lots of bird species that eat arthropods but for which you would not be able to track down a specific peer-reviewed publication with the data to support it; however, that does not mean that it does not occur, nor that one could not reasonably expect it. Finding a paper that says "X eats Y" does not mean that X only eats Y, or that Y is only eaten by X. As such, relationships that are trivial, and not specialized or unique, do not generally bear any explicit inclusion in Wikipedia. On the other hand, edits like the one you made at scramble competition are entirely appropriate, and that was a very positive contribution to the topic, and I would encourage you to focus on contributions of that sort, where there is a meaningful finding in a study, that can be placed into an appropriate article. Thanks. Dyanega (talk) 22:14, 14 December 2020 (UTC)