Wikipedia:WikiProject Gastropods/Checking an article

How to check and fix up a gastropod article:
Check to see how the article looks, and then fix it accordingly. Most of these instructions apply to articles about individual taxa (in other words articles about a species, genus, family etc.) By the end of 2012 most of our stubs had been fixed up already to a very basic level.

Update: For marine species (sea snails and sea slugs) we use the online database WoRMS as our "bible". WoRMS is not complete yet, but for the species it already has there is usually quite a lot of info. In recent years, numerous stubs are being created for our project by bot using info gleaned from WoRMS.

1. If it is a genus or species article that uses the Latin name as the title, is the title in italics?

2. Is the taxobox properly updated (according to Bouchet & Rocroi )? If you want to replace outdated taxonomy, or add in any missing taxonomy, go up one by one through the taxonomic levels that are linked in the taxobox, until you reach family level. Go to the family article in order to copy the taxonomic levels there, and slot the relevant pieces into the taxobox of the article you started on.

3. Does any taxonomy which is mentioned in the intro (and elsewhere in the body of the article) also agree with the B&R taxonomy? if not, change it.

4. Does the taxon have an authority listed right after it in the taxobox, like for example Bloggs, 1899? This is the name of the scientist who first described and named the taxon, and the year is the year the type description was published.

If an article is lacking the authority altogether, it's usually possible to find this out by doing a Google search using the scientific name. If there are parentheses, keep them, they are important. Authorities for genus articles can be found by a search here:

If there is an authority listed already, is there a date? And is the person's name a wikilink? If not, then please make it into a link, preferably using the full name of the scientist if you can be bothered to do this. To find the full name, use this online resource. Fill in the full name like this: Bloggs, 1899 ... If you don't have the time to find out the full name, you can make the person's last name into a link, although if that leads to a disambiguation page it might be better not to link it and leave it for someone else to research.

If all this is too complicated, don't bother with it. Leave it for someone else to do, no problem!

5. Does the list of species or genera in the body of the article need a heading and/or an short intro sentence? Add both if they are lacking.

6. Does the article at least have a heading for the References section and, even if there aren't any references yet?

7. If it's a stub, does it have a tag at the bottom that says: gastropod-stub or a stub for the family or superfamily?

8. Turn any sentence fragments into whole sentences. Any other obvious prose errors or typos that you see, go ahead and fix.

9. Is this a species article, and is the genus article a redlink? If so please quickly create a genus article based on the species article but pruned down but with a species section added. As of the end of 2012, we were up to date with genus articles, but that probably will change.

10. Talk page: Does the article talk page have the gastropod template on it?

11. Talk page: is the gastropod project template filled out all the way, with class, importance, and needs photo (or not)?

Once you have fixed up even one article, then celebrate! Yay! This will pay dividends in the future. Time spent now is time saved in the future as articles rapidly multiply.

Best wishes, Invertzoo (talk) 18:35, 14 August 2009 (UTC). Updated Invertzoo (talk) 22:17, 7 January 2013 (UTC)