Help:Contributions-Getting Started

You are one click away from an short introduction that can help you get started contributing to the Antwiki. Simply select one of the headings in the the Table of Contents to find information about adding the type kind of content you would like to contribute.

Species Pages
Adding text or photos to a page is easy if you are familiar with wiki software or, if you have never contributed to a wiki, should not take much time to learn the basic means of editing (=contributing) to a page. For a quick overview of how to edit a page, visit Simple Editing Basics. XXX I need to make a page that covers the basics XXX

We believe Antwiki species pages will be most useful if information is consistently presented across all the named pages. For this reason we strongly encourage the use of a suggested set of subheadings (shown here Species Page Headings). There is another page that provides a brief explanation of the type of information that fits under each heading (found here Species Page Headings Explained. You can see how this is put into practice on these exemplary species pages xxx, xxx and xxx.

Many species pages are Stubs. This means they contain a minimal amount of content and some text that encourages editor contributions. If you add a significant amount of information to a species page or, in cases where not much is known except for the taxonomic work and you have added all of this information, please remove or appropriately change these hints and suggestions, as explained |here

Go to the Named Pages section to learn about why we discourage the creation of new species pages.

Genus Pages
There are 300 valid, extant genera and each generic name has its own page. Adding text or photos to a page is easy if you are familiar with wiki software or, if you have never contributed to a wiki, will not take much effort to learn the basic means of editing (=contributing) to a page. For a quick overview of how to edit a page, visit Simple Editing Basics.

We believe Antwiki species pages will be most useful if information is consistently presented across all the named pages. For this reason we strongly encourage the use of a suggested set of subheadings (shown here Genus Page Headings). You can also take a look at these exemplary genus pages xxx, xxx and xxx.

Go to the Named Pages section to learn about why we discourage the creation of new genus pages.

Images
XXX Instruction for adding images XXX

Regional Lists
Gary Alpert has created a list of species for every country (the country list is based on the UN list of recognized countries). In many cases these lists are preliminary, at best. We encourage anyone that has specialized knowledge of the ant fauna for a country to edit the relevant country list to reflect our best understanding of what species occur there.

Lists and other regional project pages can also be created and are only limited by our editors interests (see the next section, Other Pages, to see how to create new pages). Divisions within countries, collections of countries or really any set of species can be created.

Creating New Pages
You are free to create new pages about any subject related to ants and their biology, with one caveat. We do not encourage the creation of new named (genus, species, etc.) pages, as discussed here.. Creating new pages is easy, as explained here Make a New Page.

Named (Species, Genera, Etc.) Pages
A named page exists for all valid ant names. These names are based on Barry Bolton's Catalogue, which is kept up to date in unpublished documents that are Barry graciously shares with us. Antwiki management policy provides for the administrators to keep these pages current to reflect newly published taxonomic work. Antwiki is also committed to maintaining a single page for each name across the various relevant Formicidae ranks (species, genus, etc.), with some special exceptions. From this management policy Antwiki discourages the creation of additional named pages. Our intention in creating this policy reflects a number of considerations. It is easier to find relevant information about a particular species (or other rank specific name) if that information is found on one page. The named species pages also serve as an important foundation for Antwiki. Other pages can be created about any other topic related to ants but many of these will include links to named pages. By having a single named page there is no confusion about what page to link too and no need to have to search for the true canonical page for a name.

One of the most common reason someone might want to initially create a new page for a species is to add information related to a regional species-list or regional project. If you would like to add name specific information for a particular region this can be done by adding a subheading under the biology section, as shown here and here.