Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spiders

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Thanks. — Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 09:42, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)

Hallo, I'm not a spider expert but the white-knuckled wolf spider's rediscovery in the UK featured on the BBC news today so I've created its article including a taxobox. It would be good if someone would check it over and see that I've got it right! I found it in Wikidata OK. PamD 10:41, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

There's the added complication that this says it's IUCN Critically Endangered, but I can't find it at https://www.iucnredlist.org/. Any thoughts? PamD 11:26, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

I think that is an assessment using the IUCN criteria, but not actually done by the IUCN. Here is A review of the scarce and threatened spiders (Araneae) of Great Britain: Species Status No.22 which lists Aulonia albimana as CR. It's also a regional assessment for a non-endemic so shouldn't be put in the taxobox.  —  Jts1882 | talk  11:50, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, I've added info from that source. PamD 12:17, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Really nice :) I cleaned it up and added some content and photos from iNaturalist. Generally, I put the references at the end, so they don't clutter the text, among other reasons. Sarefo (talk) 14:46, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

I've added some taxonomy to both Aulonia and Aulonia albimana. I've had some e-mail correspondence with the World Spider Catalog; their entry for the genus has now been updated to say that it was initially described as a subgenus. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:52, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

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@Peter coxhead:@Plantdrew:@Sarefo: Sarefo recently brought an issue to my attention involving good faith edits being reverted. From what I understand, the issue seems to be two style guidelines that oppose each other: WP:INLINECLUTTER and WP:CITEVARNO. Personally, I feel like the use of WP:INLINECLUTTER is subjective, but that's what I'd like to discuss here.

There have been several discussions about this already spread out between several user talk pages (See here and here for examples), and I think the best course of action is to discuss it here and decide what our official stance as a group is before this discussion gets too spread out among various user talk pages. Depending on the outcome, it could also give Sarefo a reference to send anyone who reverts these edits.

Personally, the biggest issue I have with moving references to their own section is that it prevents users who prefer using the visual editor from modifying references. The Visual Editor exists as an alternative to those who find inline citation confusing, but there's no alternative for modifying citations using the Visual Editor once they've been moved to their own section. That seems reason enough to me to keep citations inline, but I'd like to hear everyone else's stance as well. Sesamehoneytart 07:07, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

@Sesamehoneytart: a factual question first – I have never used the Visual Editor, but I understood that if {{Reflist}} is used, it won't edit references, but I thought it would if the <references> tag is used, as at, say, the current version of Abba transversa. Is this correct? Peter coxhead (talk) 07:57, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks Sesame for bringing us together here :)

So I just tried it, and afaics the references edit just fine in the visual editor, as long as <references> is used. So I think I'm actual doing a service by cleaning up pages I edit for other reasons by replacing "reflist" with "references", ensuring there's a clean slate that is accessible to all.

From my perspective, CITEVARNO serves a valid purpose in general; but in our specific case, this is about paying a tech debt from decades ago, when it was just easier to dump references inline when writing scripts (I did that myself when creating the salticid genera in 2006 or so). Then others picked that style up by emulating these. From what I'm seeing, contributors generally either use the visual editor, or prefer them clearly organized at the end (not sure about you Sesame).

I honestly can't imagine a scenario where anyone would want to revert to an inline style in the future. Happy to hear otherwise.

My current project would be overhauling the spider genera: first I'll try to get photos (with permissible license) from iNat into the pages where available, and add an iNat "external link" where any photos exist. To prepare for this, I think I just linked all spider genera with iNat via Wikidata, where an iNat ID exists.

I fullheartedly believe that cleaning up the often mixed ref styles once will help new and old editors to have a better time editing these articles in the future. Instead, I'm being told by powerful and well-connected users that are not actually involved in the spider section that I'm lazy and only think about myself. From my perspective, we're volunteers contributing with our expertise, time and energy for free. Why that should mean hindering us from making editing less frustrating, if it's to nobody's detriment, just completely eludes me. Rules exist for a reason. If the reason is not actually addressed by enforcing the rule in a specific context, there should be enough pragmatism to let the best outcome for the entire system to happen.

I'm obviously not good with wiki politics, so I'm having a hard time emotionally dealing with these things. Being stonewalled without any attempt at assistance or even explanation takes entire days off my emotional wellbeing, where my mind spirals into extremely stressed territory. I'm just mentioning this because in the end, I might just not be made for this and leave Wikipedia for good again, because I just can't handle this. I'm not fishing for sympathy or flirting with leaving or anything here, that's just the reality I'm dealing with.

The admin who's currently stonewalling me alleges my work would "lead to more chaos", but refuses to elaborate. I'm fully convinced he's acting in good faith, but the entire situation to me is a case where a general rule (CITEVARNO) is destructive to the actual situation at hand. I feel like we're being indefinitely punished by having to retain bad design choices from decades ago that were made purely for technical reasons (it was hard to write references to the end section, easier to add them inline). (The reason I'm not including him here is that he's clearly not interested; as I mentioned, I suck at Wikipedia politics etc., probably for neurodivergent reasons, so let me know if that's not how to do this)

What I'm currently doing, and would like to continue, is to run pages I think are either mixed messy, or abandoned, through a cleaning script when editing them for other purposes. That currently puts the references at the end in a "references" section that seems editable by all. This script also adds fields for two images to the taxobox. I think this will help people add photos that are not well-versed in wiki syntax: they only have to enter the image name + caption, without having to learn the syntax. I'll leave alone pages with content that seems to have been created by actual people who are still maintaining the page. For example, there's one contributor who writes long articles on African salticids, using their own style (I can't find them at the moment).

Alright, I hope I laid out my view on this without oversharing ;) In short, here's why I think fixing this once will be beneficial, off the top of my head:

• clean format works for visual and source editors
• present new editors with a clear guideline. when I started, I found the wild mix of standards confusing and energy-consuming. afaics, it would also benefit existing editors to encounter a consistent format on most pages
• easy to locate references, especially if they're used multiple times
• enforces ref names, making it easier to use them multiple times (new editors are still free to add their own unnamed inline refs if they choose so)
• much easier for source code editing contributors to edit. I can't imagine I'm the only one literally giving up on trying to just fix typos in wiki articles because one sentence is cluttered with 5+ refs, each covering three lines or so.

Sarefo (talk) 20:01, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

On the main question, if I create an article, or come across one with highly confused styles, I am a strong supporter of WP:INLINECLUTTER, so I will use list-defined references. But I accept that WP:CITEVARNO currently 'outranks' WP:INLINECLUTTER, so if an article has a more-or-less consistent inline references style, I leave it that way, although like Sarefo, I strongly prefer list-defined references. If we tried to have project-specific guidance, it couldn't over-ride general policies and guidelines. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:57, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

I think you are correct about {{reflist}} and Visual Editor (I don't use it either). Apparently {{reflist|refs=...}} is being replaced with <references>...</references> to help Visual Editor compatibility (see Template_talk:Reflist#reflist_template_is_being_systematically_removed). If I understand correctly, this wouldn't help with inline references.  —  Jts1882 | talk  14:35, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead:You're right- it is just the ref template that's an issue. The reference tag works just fine. I think the easiest way to see the difference is to edit the page in an incognito tab. Without the user info, you should get a prompt for the visual editor, then click on a reference to edit it. If there's a ref template, you get something like "This reference is defined in a template or other generated block, and for now can only be edited in source mode." Quick example links: Page with ref template, cant modify in visual editor & Page with ref template, no problem in visual editor

I agree that CITEVARNO outranks INLINE CLUTTER, but in this case, we never really came to a consensus for what the standard reference structure should be. I think the spirit behind CITEVARNO is to keep related pages formatted the same and to prevent a single person from changing everything to their own personal preferences if it's against what the group decided is best.

However, in this case, we've never really discussed what's best, so it doesn't make sense to me to continue using whatever random style I happened to choose simply because I arrived here first, especially if there's a format that works better for our group. If we all agree that a certain format is best (and if Sarefo doesn't mind going through aaalllll those pages), I think we're still following CITEVARNO as long as every page uses the same format.

I believe the reference tag is the best solution for us as a whole. You and Sarefo both prefer references moved to their own section, and reference tags still allow visual editors to contribute, which was my only objection. Sesamehoneytart 19:53, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

I'd be happy to take an effort to approach this if there's any interest. Alas, it seems the Wikipedia immune system extremely rejects this. So for me, in order of preference

1. I'll go through all genus pages for now, going for a consistent style
2. *if* there's actually interest, I'm happy to think about how to achieve a consistent style for species pages too
3. leaving the citation mess as it is now would be a very unfortunate outcome in my opinion, locking in tech debt from decades ago

Sarefo (talk) 20:05, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

I was pinged, but don't really consider myself a spider editor (plants first, then all other organisms more or less equally). But Peter coxhead, Sarefo and Sesamehoneytart really are the spider editor community such as it is.

I can kind of see CITEVARNO outranking INLINECLUTTER, but they are both shortcuts to the same guideline (WP:IAR is a policy and I guess Wiki-lawyers would say that policies outrank guidelines, although I don't think that is really a productive line of argument).

CITEVARNO is a recently created shortcut (June 2025), although the language it points to has been in place for awhile. 5 of the 14 links to CITEVARNO are specifically about spider references. IF you scroll up a bit from CITEVARNO (or go to WP:CITEVAR), you get "without first seeking consensus for the change". So CITEVARs aren't set in stone and can be changed by consensus. I think it is a little misleading that following a CITEVARNO link goes to a section where there is no mention of "consensus for the change" (some of the links to CITEVARNO are in fact in the context of discussions on more watched articles seeking consensus to change the cite variety).

This seems like the logical place to seek consensus for a change, although maybe Tree of Life and UtherSRG should be brought in (note that UtherSRG is no longer an admin). The alternative would be for Sarefo to post message on the mostly unwatched talk pages of all the articles they want to change, and wait a week or so with no responses before making the changes.

For my part, I don't use Visual Editor. I use list defined references in the (few) articles I have created in the last several years, and I convert to list defined rather than inline when the citation style is inconsistent (I had been using {{Reflist}}, but wasn't aware of the problems it caused with Visual Editor until recently). I'm fine with spider articles being converted to list defined references (although I have no interest in working on that myself). Plantdrew (talk) 22:31, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your input! afaics, the reason we're here is that UtherSRG is extremely adamant in blocking me from proceeding with this and is completely stonewalling any of my attempts of constructive exchange. I have no idea what's the background for this kind of behavior, but I don't really see them interested in accommodating the situation in any way. At the moment, as I see it, there seems to be a consensus on WP:Spiders that I'm okay to proceed. But I don't want to be pulled in front of some tribunal again and be told how selfish I am :P

All articles I touched in the last hours were only touched by Sesame + Peter (apart from bots). If I encounter other contributors, I'll try to notify them first.

And again, if anybody can explain to me any actual problems my approach might result in, I'm happy to hear about them. UsherSRG didn't bother other than claiming it "increases chaos", apparently without actually having been involved in the spider section at any point in time (they do primates, which are also awesome, but I imagine have a very different mix of contributor dynamics). Sarefo (talk) 02:25, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

@Sarefo:

If you'll let me be frank here for a moment, I don't believe that what you're doing is "cleaning up" or "fixing" the references because they weren't messy or broken to begin with. Jumping spiders aside (because I largely ignored them), the ref styles were already consistent at the genus level before you started modifying them. I did use a lot of copying and pasting, but I didn't use a script or a bot, and inline sources had nothing to do with a supposed "tech debt" we need to repay.

I understand that you can't imagine anyone preferring inline citations, but I'm right here in front of you. Hello, I prefer inline citations. I like that you don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the source details. I like that you can see the entire reference when just editing a section without opening up another tab to view the references. I like that. I prefer that. The difference between us is that I'm not using my personal preference as a supporting argument. I'm choosing to listen to your side of the argument and find a compromise, though I'm starting to get the feeling that you'll continue doing whatever you feel like doing regardless of any decisions made here.

What really concerns me is that throughout all these talk page discussions, I haven't seen a single admission on your end that the edits in question violated the cited guideline, which they absolutely did. You've used your own personal disagreement or inability to understand the reasoning behind the rule as a justification to continue violating it. You've used everything from your personal life to your mental state as an excuse to avoid confronting the issue, and even now, I believe you're trying to use us as a shield instead of actually facing the problem yourself, and I don't appreciate that. I haven't seen any evidence that you've taken into account anyone's response if it doesn't support what you want. Your attitude so far has been that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong, just on principle, because you know what's best for everyone.

Six different people have answered your question about why your edits are considered problematic, including both myself and Peter, yet you continue to say that the answer eludes you. The admin you claim is stonewalling you isn't "refusing to elaborate"; you asked a question and it was answered. It may not have been the answer you wanted, but asking different people until you get the answer you want is not the right way to handle this Sesamehoneytart 04:50, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

I'll add myself as someone with a strong preference for inline references. When adding a reference to a section, what is the advantage of being forced to edit another section? Despite my preference, I understand why WP:CITEVARNO is a fair policy. It applies at the article level and I'm not sure project guidelines should override it.  —  Jts1882 | talk  12:55, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

If a certain style is a better fit for a project than the style it is currently using, I don't think we should prevent changing it simply because an editor who arrived earlier established a certain style. I think the spirit of the guideline is closer to "don't change the style without a good reason", so my goal here was more or less to decide whether or not there is a good reason to overhaul the references. Sesamehoneytart 18:11, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

Jts: I'm still on a fact-finding mission here, so don't read anything else into this please. My experience is that when editing only a section, there's a good chance the reference in there is actually defined in a different (random) section, which I would find even more confusing. But you're referring to references you want to add yourself; I don't know what the policy is here, but personally I would not mind editors adding inline references to a list-defined article. That can always cleaned up by the next editor. That might be one factor of what Usher cryptically called "adding more chaos". I'm still of the opinion that having list-style as the default would benefit the spider section, as this is not a highly frequented part of Wikipedia, with most articles seeing very few edits over the years.

The reason why I'm so adamant in having a consistent, legible style, is that it's extremely cumbersome to update thousands of articles when they're not conforming to any standard. That's not just a matter of preference, but feasibility. If it takes three times longer to do something, the best option might be not to do it. My feeling is that using two incompatible styles is like a city allowing people to drive on the left or on the right, because "none is better". The result is very slow traffic and generally frustrated participants. As I'm looking at a spider section that has had very little activity since 2019 or so, I reckoned there'd be general support for a cleanup push that makes present and future work more feasible. Alas, Wikipedia is a complex society, and I've now learned that there seem to be other priorities.

Just a few thoughts that came up during another sleepless night over this. I think I have now said everything that's relevant to the situation. Sarefo (talk) 18:40, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

so, I read your previous messages in the total opposite way :P my bad. I'm really trying to find a consensus here, but I'm obviously bad at getting this through via text. sorry about that. now that you're saying you actually prefer inline citations, that totally changes the picture. but to be fair, if I'm not mistaken you said you don't earlier on in this very thread. I heard you Sesame even suggesting that we overhaul the entire spider section to conform to end of section referencing (in the 19:53, 28 January 2026 (UTC) post; that wasn't originally my idea). color me confused. I was under the impression that you guys are fine with end of section references, hence imo rendering CITEVARNO to be secondary here. what you're writing now totally changes the picture. I'll reconsider my approach.

And regarding my mental state: not an excuse for anything. It's just that I keep getting responses which I just don't understand, no matter how much I try. That's because we experience the world differently. I'd love to be able to change that, but haven't been able to. Let's just try to not read too much into the other person's words, it's likely to be just a projection of your own world experience. Sarefo (talk) 14:39, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

I do appreciate that you've stopped modifying references while we resolve this, that hasn't gone unnoticed.

If you're referring to the statement: "I believe the reference tag is the best solution for us as a whole", This does not reflect my personal preference; it's what I believe is a good compromise for this group and this situation. I'm not deciding my preference just now; I told you what my preference was the first time you contacted me. "Truthfully, I prefer the inline citations" is in the first paragraph of my response at 1:10 am, Yesterday (UTC−6)

It's not the first time I've decided or declared my stance; it's just the first time you've acknowledged that I've said it. Sesamehoneytart 18:32, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes, and after we clarified that end of text does not interfere with visual editors when using <references>, you seemed to have changed your stance:

• »I believe the reference tag is the best solution for us as a whole. You and Sarefo both prefer references moved to their own section, and reference tags still allow visual editors to contribute, which was my only objection«

It's okay to change your stance again ("no objection" > does not prefer something else), but I can only actually work with what's written here, at the time it is written. Doesn't sound fair to blame me for that.

So anyway, I'm going to take a step back for a while. There are other venues where I can invest my effort that are less conflict-prone. In case you interpret it like this, this is not at all some "bad loser" thing. I tried to state my case for what I still believe is for the best of the project and the people involved. If you guys prefer inline refs, that's fine. I don't think they scale at all: it's a major hassle to pick the ref raisin out of the cake every time one needs it in a longer text that's cluttered with inlines. Visual editor opens the entire file anyway.

So I'll keep adding photos from iNaturalist. But I won't update species lists from the WSC, as I flat out refuse to burn myself out dealing with the inconsistencies of spider taxon pages as they are now. If anybody can think of a solution that works for all, I'll be here. For example, there could be a hybrid approach, where I add the WSC link into a <references> section at the end, but leave the existing inline references as they are. Sarefo (talk) 22:53, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I still think that UtherSRG is right to claim that, under current policies/guidelines, citation/reference style consistency applies to the article level. (Compare the English variant issue at MOS:RETAIN.) This is the only outcome I recall seeing in any discussion of citation/reference style consistency. I would prefer to see consistency across a wikiproject, but I think all we can say is that for new articles or for articles with inconsistent styling, here is the wikiproject preference. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:02, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

there's something I haven't been able to understand yet: as I understand the dominant policies, it's not okay to change the citation style of an article just for the sake of it, if it's consistent. but what if I overhaul and expand the article?

I'm of course willing to deal with the given constraints, but I need to know what the actual constraints are. I'm quite conflict-averse, so being able to work within clear boundaries would help me keep my energy levels up.

So here's where I have questions:

• if an article has mixed styles, is it okay to clean it up using list-defined style? for example, if at least one ref is already in a list?
• when there's a stub with just one line and one ref, would it be acceptable to change the article to list-defined if it gets expanded? by how much?

Sarefo (talk) 23:00, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

@Sarefo: these are good questions, but there's no written guidance that I can find, so I can only judge based on experience of discussions or disputes:

• I don't think that expanding an article counts. The tradition seems to be (as is made explicit for English variants and date formats) that the existing style, often that set by the creator of the article, should be retained regardless of the degree of expansion.
• You need to use your judgement on mixed styles. The question is probably whether an editor that disliked list-defined styles and wanted to revert changes to this style would accept that the existing style wasn't clear. One list-defined ref with multiple in-text refs wouldn't be convincing.
• Sometimes mixed styles seem to be what has been used apparently deliberately, e.g. single use refs are in-text but multiple use refs are list-defined.

Nothing stops you from being WP:BOLD, but you have to be prepared to give way if challenged on changing ref style. Annoying, but this is how I've found it. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:57, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

thanks, that's helpful insight! Sarefo (talk) 18:17, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Recent changes to the website of the WSC appear to include changes to URLs that link to various kinds of webpage, which means that some references no longer seem to work. As of now, the approaches that do work in references are:

• For a brief summary of a genus, which includes links to its species list and genus catalog, it seems best to use the URN-style URL. Thus for the genus Leucognatha (which I've just been working on), use https://wsc.nmbe.ch/lsid/urn:lsid:nmbe.ch:spidergen:04813 in a reference.
• For the brief species list for a genus, you can either use a full URL like https://wsc.nmbe.ch/species-list/4874/Leucognatha or omit the genus name as in https://wsc.nmbe.ch/species-list/4874. In the past, at least, omitting the genus name was useful because the same number appeared to be used when synonymized so the name changed.
• For the full 'genus catalog', i.e. a more detailed species list for a genus, there's currently an oddity. A full URL like https://wsc.nmbe.ch/genus-catalog/4874/Leucognatha works. Omitting the genus name does not: https://wsc.nmbe.ch/genus-catalog/4874. Putting anything as the genus name works: https://wsc.nmbe.ch/genus-catalog/4874/X. This seems to me to be a bug.
• For a species, it's safest I think to use the URN-style URL, e.g. for Leucognatha acoreensis: https://wsc.nmbe.ch/lsid/urn:lsid:nmbe.ch:spidersp:013842

Peter coxhead (talk) 10:15, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

it's probably safest to always use the LSID links, as they might choose to change the ones still working in the future. Sarefo (talk) 13:57, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

In principle, I agree, but the genus LSID link doesn't list the species, so isn't ideal for sourcing species lists or numbers. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:46, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

yeah… I wouldn't call the current WSC version an improvement, but they probably know what they're doing. I'm thinking they might not be done (hence some of the old-style links still working, and also breaking in the future). I'm having a hard time even accessing the species list (with details) from the new pages, not sure it's possible. Hopefully this is just a clean bare-bones new version that they'll flesh out later. Otherwise, we might have to create species lists per family here on Wikipedia (just kidding :P ) Anyway, not my problem for the foreseeable future, I don't see me significantly editing wiki again anytime soon. Sarefo (talk) 23:00, 28 February 2026 (UTC)