Talk:Polybia emaciata

Recommendations

1. Include the Wikiprojects Vespidae banner on your talk page. 2. Make sure to read the message from Wikipedia. They want you add more links to other articles to help integrate it into the encyclopedia. 3. More words to other Wikipedia pages

• a. Besides two linked words under the Overview section, no other words in the article are linked. Linking words can help the reader understand the material a lot better. It also engages them as well.

4. References

• a. I would highly suggest looking over your citation format again. A lot of them have red errors. It looks like your common problem is with dates. Check out this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:CS1_errors#bad_date or ask your Wikipedia expert for help.

5. Grammar

• a. In the “Taxonomy and phylogeny” section, the last two sentences, “other than its use of mud in nest making it is similar in appearance to many other species in the genus. Other wasps in the species use plant resources to build their nest.” are a bit awkward. Try rewording it and vary the sentence structure.
• b. In the “Description and identification” section, the beginning of this sentence: “It is its nest which is famous for its closed pear shape and single circular opening at the bottom” is awkward.

6. Need more information in each sections

• a. A lot of your sections are very minimal with only a couple of sentences. For example, your subsection on “predators” only consists of two sentences. I would recommend finding more sources to complement what your already have or combine some of the subsections into one section. For example, you can combine the subsections, “workers,” “queens,” and “males” as one subsection. They don’t all necessarily have to have their own section.

7. Vary sentence structure

• a. Under the section, “Interaction with other species”, each subsection starts off with “Polybia emaciata…”. Because your sections are so short, having the same sentence structure makes your article dull and disengages the reader.

8. Other

• a. Is there a source backing up this information found under the “Habitat” subsection of “Distribution and habitat” - “They are found in many South American countries such as Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina.”. If it is not common knowledge, there needs to be an inline citation indicating the correct source.

9. General Thoughts

• a. Great organization and information on your species! However, I would suggest working on some of the areas mentioned above.

Elee715 (talk) 01:09, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Some suggestions

First off, I like that that article provides a lot of different information regarding the species. However, I found each section to be either lacking in detail or depth. Therefore, I would recommend adding more information to each section so it would give a more comprehensive and detailed account of the species. Regarding the ‘Descriptive overview’ section, I thought that the sentence “There are 56 species in the genus Polybia” to be not so necessary, so I would rather add its nesting information and other interesting behavioral activities instead. On a similar note, I’m not quite sure whether the ‘Occurrence’ subsection is really necessary under the ‘Distribution and habitat’ section considering that the only information presented in the subsection is that it is a fairly common species. Therefore, I would consider adding that information in the ‘Descriptive overview’ instead. In terms of writing, I thought the article could benefit from a more formal, grammatically correct and clear style of writing. For instance, the introductory sentence of the ‘Description and identification’ section was a little repetitive and wordy, so I edited the sentences so they would be more concise and have more clarity. Additionally, there were a number of run-on sentences and grammatical mistakes in the ‘Behavior’ section, so I edited and rewrote such sentences. There were also a number of typos and awkward sentence structures, so I would recommend going through sentence by sentence and improving the overall writing quality of the article. Lastly, I would like to point out that there is no reference on the subsection ‘Dominance hierarchy’ so I would add a superscript that shows where the information came from. But all in all, I found the current draft to be a solid start to being a comprehensive account of this wasp, so I would definitely improve this draft by editing the writing and expanding on the information given in the article by adding more details. JackieOh0223 (talk) 23:43, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions and Comments

The content of this article was its biggest strength. It was very well organized and was equally doled out among the sections. However a big weakness was in the grammar. There were a few instances where rearrangement of the sentences provided a clearer picture of the information, particularly in the section on Males and Reproductive Dominance, so I made a couple of revisions where I saw issues. The article when I first read it also lacked linked words, so I added a few, especially in areas where I felt big vocabulary concepts could use the back-referral. Lastly, I feel that though the few sentences included under the subheadings for Distribution and Habitat may concisely summarize the information available researchers on the subject, a few more sentences under each of those subheadings, either to support or elaborate on those themes, would benefit the article greatly. Otherwise, these sections may be better done without or compiled into something larger. - VGurusamy (talk) 20:21, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Class Comments/Suggestions

Overall, this article was well written. In order to improve the article, I suggest revising the overview section. It would be more helpful to include a sentence about the colony cycle or division of labor rather than the sentence “there are 56 species in the genus Polybia.” These are relevant points of your paper that would be useful to understand the general structure of the rest of your article. Also, I changed the first sentence under the ‘Colony Initiation’ section, which originally read “New colonies are founded by new queens and hundreds of workers moving a finding a new nest site”. I changed it to “…hundreds of workers moving to find a new nest site.” Jazdeb (talk) 22:25, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Comments

The article lacks a thorough taxonomy and phylogeny section. You should consider what attributes define the genus and species.

In the description section, try to describe the wasp itself. Rather than saying the wasp looks similar to Polybia singularis, add additional information about its morphology.

The nest section could benefit from additional information such as number of sheets, combs, etc.

The colony cycle section could have more of a timeline. For example, I would like to know the month when the queen initially founds the nest, the first wave of workers hatch, when the queen dies, etc. Peivaz (talk)

Comments

This is a very interesting species, and I think that this article is a great starting point. I do think that it could be expanded, and a few more sentences added to each section. I added the Project Vespidae banner to your talk page, and rewrote the lead section for your article to include additional information about the behavior of this species. I also noticed some instances where the species name was capitalized or where the genus name was not capitalized, so I fixed those. I edited the Taxonomy and Phylogeny section for clarity, and added some additional information. In the Description section, I added information to the section about workers and also provided links to information about polygyny. I rewrote the Nests section for clarity, and under Behavior I added a link for kin selection. This is an interesting species, and if you add some additional information I'd love to read it! Ruaha (talk) 06:05, 21 November 2014 (UTC)