Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders

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WikiProject Spiders

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"Not long ago the spiders were the most neglected of the most interesting animals..." — Theodore Horace Savory, 1962

Welcome to WikiProject Spiders. If you plan to be active in editing articles relating to spiders, please add your name to the members list. Proposals, suggestions, and activities are discussed on the WikiProject Spiders talk page.

This is a WikiProject, an area for focused collaboration among Wikipedians. New participants are welcome; please feel free to participate!

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WP:SPID

The WikiProject Spiders was formed in July 2006, to better organise efforts to create a spider section in Wikipedia that will be useful and enjoyable.

This page and its subpages contain many suggestions and ideas; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there.

For more information on WikiProjects, please see Wikipedia:WikiProject and Wikipedia:WikiProject/Best practices.

Scope

Summarize all the information that is out there on spiders, link to it, and provide an easy and beautiful way to access it.

Articles

Hot articles

8 edits	Habronattus decorus
6 edits	Erigonops
5 edits	Otira (spider)
5 edits	Atrax
5 edits	Pholcus phalangioides
4 edits	Heteropoda venatoria
4 edits	Trap line (spiders)
4 edits	Steatoda grossa
4 edits	Okinawicius tekdi
3 edits	Lyssomanes

These are the articles that have been edited the most within the last seven days. Last updated 21 December 2024 by HotArticlesBot.

Spiders articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
Quality	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
FA			1				1
FM					19		19
GA	2	1	4	28			35
B	3	16	26	150			195
C	1	16	22	335			374
Start		63	59	886		2	1,010
Stub		24	18	9,357		8	9,407
List		1	70	79			150
Category					662		662
Disambig					11		11
File					11		11
Project					31		31
Redirect		3	6	94	1,042		1,145
Template					258		258
NA					73		73
Other					1		1
Assessed	6	124	206	10,929	2,108	10	13,383
Total	6	124	206	10,929	2,108	10	13,383
WikiWork factors (?)		ω = 63,643			Ω = 5.77

» Popular spider articles

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Parentage

This WikiProject is an offshoot of WikiProject Tree of Life

WikiProject Science

WikiProject Biology

WikiProject Tree of Life

WikiProject Animals

WikiProject Arthropods

WikiProject Spiders

Portal:Biology

Related WikiProjects

See Portal:Biology.

It is also worth keeping an eye on several Wikiprojects that are similar or overlap with this one, including WikiProject Lepidoptera, WikiProject Ecoregions, WikiProject Evolutionary biology, WikiProject Birds, WikiProject Cephalopods, WikiProject Gastropods.

Structure

See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Arthropods#Structure for an explanation of the structure of the spider section.

For a detailed article format on spiders, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/Article formats

Goals

One goal is to collect as much information about spiders and transform it into a form that is accessible to laymen, but also interesting to professionals.

Taxon pages: As of December 2015^[update], there are about 46,000 described spider species placed in 114 families. We need not create a page for every species, for now, but it would be really cool to at least provide pages for all commonly known spiders, and for every spider where anything interesting can be found (Loads of species are only known from dead specimens, and all that is known about them is that they differ by some technical microscopic feature from another species; it would probably be more interesting for now to focus on spiders with 'special' features :)
Anatomy: Explain every anatomical feature of spiders.
Behavior: Collect information on this much-neglected topic.
Find more people that are interested in spiders, and willing to help on this project.

Projects

find one example species for (almost) every spider family

it would be very nice to focus on at least one species of every one of the 114 families. That's a) a good motivation (clearly defined goal), and b) would help to seed the thought of diversity in the spider section :) These example species could then be linked into the Spider families table.

include extinct taxa into the systematic sections
synonyms: the World Spider Catalog has many synonyms for spider taxa; these could be incorporated at a later time.
Regional checklists: There already is a List of common Australian spiders, Spiders of New Zealand, and a List of spiders of India. This would be nice for other regions, too.
mine Psyche. This is an entomological (with spiders) journal that has all issues from 1957 to 2000 under a free license; that means, we can copy text and pictures as we wish, if we attribute it. Could be a nice resource.
produce diagrams. Examples:
- eye distribution on spider families
- abdominal markings
- ...

these could either be newly drawn, or fetched from open license publications (eg. Psyche, see Free license publications)

Tasks

clean up the article Spiders.

It's still too long. split it into several sub-articles (eg. spider anatomy, spider taxonomy, spider evolution, spider bites, spiders in culture).

put the {{WPSpiders}} template on the Talk pages of all spider related articles.

There should be very few pages now related to spiders that are not tagged, but if you do see a spider page without it, please add it and tell the page's creator about this practice.

find references on the web, and attach them to the fitting pages

there are loads of arachnological PDFs online. If one person attaches it to the fitting page, another person could extract the information into the article at a later time.

find, make, liberate pictures

search for spider pictures with a free license, upload own pictures (and determine the type where possible); but it could also help to ask people that have nice pictures online if they are willing to publish them under an open license; example

Mine the Commons for spider images (commons:Category:Unknown spiders).

People have put in loads of images with titles like "weird_spider.JPG" and very few images with the scientific names of spiders. See also WikiProject Spiders/Undetermined pictures.
There is also an unknown amount of spider pictures that are not linked into the commons Spiders category tree. If you spot one, please at least tag it with Category:Spiders. (or the respective family if you know about it)

provide distribution maps where data is available.

General strategy and discussion forums

/General - Check this page out, it contains many hints and suggestions that are currently being discussed.

Other subpages

Templates

Infoboxes

example genus taxobox
example species taxobox
Sesamehoneytart's Spider Genus Template™

Stub templates

{{arachnid-stub}} - spider stubs
{{Salticidae-stub}} - jumping spider stubs

Place these on any page that you think really needs to get fleshed out.

Other templates

{{WPSpiders}}

Place this on top of a spider article's Talk page. What this template does:

It will help to lead new editors to this project.
If complete with quality and importance grading (see Article Classification), it helps us to stay on top of more than a thousand articles related to spiders.

{{Araneae}}

This will insert a box with all spider families at the bottom of the page. At the moment, all 114 spider family pages have it (example).

{{User WPSpiders}}

Users with this template (which creates a userbox) on their User page will be automatically added to Category:WikiProject Spiders participants.

List of taxonomists

You can use the List of Arachnologists to easily wikify the describers of taxa.

Categories

The top category is

Category:Spiders

Put genus and species pages into the appropriate family category.

By year of description

Articles on species (but not other ranks) can be placed in "Category:Spiders described in YEAR", e.g. Category:Spiders described in 2017. "Described in" here means "first formally described in accordance with the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature". The World Spider Catalog is a reliable source of taxonomic information: start at the Search page. There are two main cases:

The species is still in the original genus in which it was first described, e.g. Argiope aurantia Lucas, 1833. This will be shown by the absence of parentheses around the authority and date. So this species belongs in Category:Spiders described in 1833.
The species has been moved from the original genus in which it was first described, e.g. Argiope aemula (Walckenaer, 1841). Walckenaer first described it as Epeira aemula in 1841; Thorell moved it to Argiope aemula in 1877, but this doesn't change the year of first description, so this species belongs in Category:Spiders described in 1841.

"Spiders described in YEAR" categories, such as Category:Spiders described in 1997, are placed in "Spiders described in CENTURY" categories, such as Category:Spiders described in the 20th century. The higher level categories should not contain articles. "Spiders described in YEAR" categories are also placed in "Animals described in YEAR" categories.

Redirects

Redirects should also be categorized, always by the appropriate "R cat template", and sometimes by other categories as well, such as by their taxonomic category or in the case of a species by the year of description.

Redirects not involving monotypic taxa

Redirect pages involving spider taxa should be placed into a "redirect category" using an appropriate "R cat template" as shown in the table below, unless the redirect is concerned with the accepted names of monotypic taxa. "Scientific name" is here interpreted broadly as meaning "Latin name", which may or may not be a valid taxonomic synonym.

		To
		Scientific name	English name
From	Scientific name	{{R from alternative scientific name\|spider}}*	{{R from scientific name\|spider}}*
From	English name	{{R to scientific name\|spider}}*	See {{R template index}}

* Subcategorizing the redirect as a spider makes access and maintenance via the appropriate category easier.

Examples:

Tetragnatha gibba is a redirect to Tetragnatha extensa, and has the template {{R from alternative scientific name|spider}}.
Crab spider redirects to Thomisidae, and has the template {{R to scientific name|spider}}.
Atrax robustus is a redirect to Sydney funnel-web spider, and has the template {{R from scientific name|spider}}.

Redirects involving monotypic taxa

See WP:MONOTYPICFAUNA. Monotypic taxa should have one article at the lowest rank, but no lower than genus. So a family with one genus has an article at the genus; a genus with one species also has an article at the genus. The exception is when the genus needs disambiguation by adding "(spider)"; in this case the article on the genus and species is at the species. Redirects should be created for all the other taxa.

This will result in two cases:

{{R to monotypic taxon|spider}} is used where the redirect is towards a monotypic taxon from its sole member; thus it will always be upwards. The template will place the redirect in Category:Redirects to monotypic taxa of spiders. Examples:

Fijocrypta vitilevu redirects to Fijocrypta – from the sole species in the genus to the monospecific genus.

{{R from monotypic taxon|spider}} is used where the redirect is from a monotypic taxon to its sole member; thus it will always be downwards. The template will place the redirect in Category:Redirects from monotypic taxa of spiders. Examples:

Holarchaeidae redirects to Holarchaea – from the monogeneric family to the sole genus.
Calculus (spider) redirects to Calculus bicolor, since the species epithet is a more natural disambiguator than "(spider)".

These redirects should also be categorized by taxon rank, and in the case of a species, by year of description.

Lists

Category:Lists of spider species has lists for all but the smallest spider families (and redirects for these).

These lists were originally created from version 8.0 of Norman Platnick's World Spider Catalog, which forms kind of a common consensus on spider taxonomy amongst arachnologists. The World Spider Catalog (WSC) is now hosted at the Natural History Museum Bern; many species lists need to be updated to the latest version. For the sake of consistency, the spider section should adhere to the WSC wherever feasible. If you have a reason not to, please leave a note.

Regional species lists

List of common Australian spiders

List of spiders of India

Regional lists not in Wikipedia

Spiders of North America Species List
Checklist of spiders from Singapore (2002) PDF Archived 2011-09-27 at the Wayback Machine
Checklist of Belgian and Dutch Spiders
Inventaire des araignées de Corse
Checklist of the spiders of Central Europe

Articles

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/Articles for an overview of existing articles, requests of articles that are needed, and specials like "Featured articles" and the like.

Resources

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/Resources.

Picture Liberation Project

This list's primary purpose is to coordinate the picture liberation quest ;). this way, people won't be bothered by multiple requests. To help out with this project, read through Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission. Some examples of emails sent to owners of pictures can be found here: Wikipedia:Example_requests_for_permission.

People from outside WP that have agreed to have their spider pictures under an open license:

Marshal Hedin [1] (pics on commons)
Thierry Gasnier
James Lindsey [2] — (pics on commons)
Herbert Walter Levi (pics on commons)
Akio Tanikawa (pics on commons — Spiders of Okinawa)

People that have been contacted, but did not (yet) reply:

Michel Vuijlsteke [3]
Tom Murray [4] (would license the pictures under a non-commercial license)

People that won't license their pictures for WP:

Jeremy Miller (only with watermark)
Matjaž Kuntner (only non-commercial)

People not yet asked, with a sample page of pictures:

Bryan E. Reynolds, Jerome Rovner, Joseph Warfel, Fred Coyle, Bill Welch, K.N. Prestwich, Rick Vetter [5]

Sister project links