Wikipedia:WikiProject Biology



Welcome to WikiProject Biology, a WikiProject for discussing biology-related articles, editing issues, projects, and guidelines. The purpose of this project is to provide common ground for editors working in all biology-related projects, for seeking advice or requesting help from a broader community of biology editors, and for coordinating the categorization of biology articles. Please join us for discussion!

Overview
WikiProject Biology serves as a metaproject coordinating multiple subprojects. As a whole, WikiProject Biology and its subprojects maintain tens of thousands of articles, categories, templates, and other pages. However, WikiProject Biology itself only directly tags articles which pertain to the science of biology as a whole, which are relevant across many disciplines, or in some cases those which represent the field of biology as a whole to the public.

Related WikiProjects
WikiProject Biology is a daughter project of WikiProject Science. We serve as a meta-project with several subprojects under our purview. The organization of these is presented below in a cladogram. WikiProject Molecular Biology is a proposed merger of WP:BIOP, WP:COMBIO, WP:GEN, and WP:MCB and their taskforces into a single project. This and other merges may change this diagram in the future. See discussion here.

To see activity levels and active editors for these projects, see the Wikiproject Directory tool and look for the project in question. Clicking on a project will give further information.

Potential projects or work groups:
 * WikiProject Reproduction
 * WikiProject Developmental biology
 * WikiProject Conservation biology
 * WikiProject Animal behavior (ethology)

Related non-biology projects (automated list):
 * WikiProject Agriculture
 * WikiProject Biography/Science and academia
 * WikiProject Environment
 * WikiProject Forestry
 * WikiProject Medicine
 * WikiProject Women scientists

Statistics
Hot articles

See also: WikiProject Biology/Popular pages



 Anatomy

 Animal anatomy

 Ecology

 Ecoregions

 Evolutionary Biology

 Extinction

 Neuroscience

 Palaeontology

 Physiology

 Tree of Life

 MCB

 Genetics

 Computational Biology

 Biophysics

 Cell signaling

Article assessment

 * Assessment – the assessment unit, which provides information about Biology articles rated by quality and importance, and the project's criteria for article quality grading.

Category maintenance
(All stats updated August 15, 2023)

PetScan results (union) for number of articles in English Wikipedia by depth (# subcats deep): 1, 1,580; 2, 15,681; 3, 66,174; 4, 446,785. There are deeper layers containing more articles

Many biology categories are in bad shape. They tend to fill up with articles on minor topics that are better placed in subcategories (or sub-subcategories, etc.). A little maintenance of the top category and 30 subcategories would go a long way towards keeping articles properly sorted. These are listed below.

Main category: Biology (39 C, 50 P)


 * Contains over 445,000 articles in all as of August 15, 2023.

Subcategories:

Container categories - they have no articles, only categories
 * Biology by continent (2 C)
 * Biology by country (133 C)
 * Biology by country subdivision (1 C)
 * Biology by dependent territory (5 C)
 * Biology by city (1 C)
 * Biology in fiction (1 C)
 * Works about biology (7 C)

Categories with sub-categories


 * Biocides (19 C, 22 P, 1 F)
 * Biological censuses (1 C, 14 P)
 * Biological classification (9 C, 48 P)
 * Biological concepts (7 C, 20 P)
 * Biologists (18 C, 3 P)
 * Biology-related lists (15 C, 107 P)
 * Biology awards (7 C, 121 P)
 * Biology conferences (1 C, 21 P)
 * Biology controversies (3 C, 20 P)
 * Biology and culture (11 C, 29 P)
 * Biological descriptions (3 C, 2 P)
 * Biological waste (3 C, 6 P)
 * Biology education (6 C, 20 P)
 * Biology images (2 C, 7 F)
 * Biology organizations (19 C, 43 P)
 * Biology stubs (25 C, 214 P)
 * Biological evolution (15 C, 38 P)
 * Biological interactions (7 C, 39 P)
 * Biological processes (12 C, 44 P)
 * Biological records (6 C, 21 P)
 * Biological rules (1 C, 14 P)
 * Biological systems (3 C, 26 P)
 * Biological techniques and tools (14 C, 81 P)
 * Biology terminology (7 C, 138 P)
 * Biotechnology (51 C, 420 P)
 * Category:Branches of biology (43 C, 42 P)
 * Eukaryote biology (4 C, 5 P)
 * History of biology (14 C, 46 P)
 * Organisms (39 C, 5 P)
 * Philosophy of biology (9 C, 40 P)
 * Unsolved problems in biology (2 C, 7 P)

Categories without sub-categories


 * Biomagnetics (5 P)
 * Quantum biology (16 P)

Deleted subcategories
 * Biology software merged to Science software
 * Bioscience education merged to Biology education
 * Standardized tests for Biology merged to Standardized tests and Biology education

Other biology-related categories:


 * Biogeography (23 C, 155 P)
 * Biology templates (31 C, 53 P)

Requests
See WikiProject Biology/Requests for details.

To do

 * Change overview to overview, scope, and goals (still called overview)
 * Fill in scope information
 * Add short/mid/long-term goals
 * Merge with the lede
 * Fill out cladogram with useful info for each project (Talk, Alerts, Activity)
 * Find a nicer way to list non-biology projects
 * consider including GMCB projects in the cladogram with a dotted line and a bar labeled GMCB instead of current layout
 * Sign up for discussions module
 * Set up WPX participant system
 * Port names over
 * Send out some messages
 * Turn see also into resources and flesh out
 * Help finding sources
 * Guides
 * Tools/gadgets
 * Getting started guide
 * Sign up for suggestbot and get task lists
 * Add maintenance schedule to main page
 * Set up main page image rotation WIP
 * Facelift to WPX layout with proper modules
 * Fix template section
 * Add a subsection in statistics for subprojects (html issues currently)

Participants
Feel free to add User WikiProject Biology to your userpage. To join, just add your name at the end of the list at the /Members subpage. For an automated list of active members of our WikiProject, use WikiProject Directory. For related WikiProjects, see all biology WikiProjects in the Directory tools.

Sourcing

 * How to use primary sources (biological sciences)
 * The Wikipedia Library
 * Notability (academics)

Useful Pages

 * Bibliography of biology
 * Outline of life forms
 * Bibliography of encyclopedias:_biology
 * Index of biology articles
 * List of biologists
 * Outline of biology
 * Manual of Style/Organisms

Tools

 * User:Evad37/rater--Used for assessment of articles, see WikiProject Biology/Assessment for details
 * HotCat--Used for editing categories on articles
 * PetScan--Used for analyzing and working with categories (but not editing)
 * User scripts/List--A full list of userscripts.
 * CladEd--Free tool for creating cladograms (like the one on this page!)
 * User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/SpeciesHelper For species articles, automatically adds the short description, speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template.

Templates

 *  provides a direct link to the Biology Portal and is added to the See also section of all biology-related articles, which produces:


 * WikiProject Biology is added to the top of talk pages of all biology-related articles, which produces:


 *   can be used to invite users to the project.


 * Template:User_WikiProject_Biology may be placed on a userpage to identify as a user of the WikiProject.