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The lead description of the spiders is a little too detailed – consider shortening to just a sentence or two about coloring and body shape.
This spider is unusual: slightly smaller; female and male slightly different colours; and longer legs. Some are easy (Portia fimbriata).
Lead image? And images in general – the hand-drawn pictures are okay, but they're generic and not especially eye-grabbing. Even including an image of another Portia sp. would be better than nothing, I think. I found thesetwo pictures under a CC license on Flickr; I'm not sure if they're P. schultzi, but they look reasonably appropriate – and kind of adorable, in a spidery way :) Damn noncommercial license! Boo. Okay, looks like this is the only Commons-friendly Portia sp. on Flickr.
The hand-drawn pictures are there to location the main features, and omit deals such as spines and hairs, which would cover up vital parts e.g. chelicerae and papls. Different readers prefer different inputs - words, images, etc. --Philcha (talk) 19:00, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of the text of this article is fairly generic to spiders or to Portia sp. You might consider moving some of the very broad stuff over to Portia (genus), which is short and underdeveloped in comparison. In this article, it would be nice to see more references to specific traits of P. schultzi or specific studies where P. schultzi were observed. I'm not saying the whole thing has to be entirely P. schultzi-focused (comparison to other species is nice). 60/40, perhaps :)
See Portia fimbriata, review by Kaldari, an expert on spiders. And Maevia inclemens and Phaeacius, review by general biology fans. In each of these, some readers will have negligible knowledge of jumping spiders, or of spiders on general.--Philcha (talk) 00:51, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's a good point, but I tend to think that anyone interested enough to search specifically for P. schultzi is going to have at least rudimentary background knowledge about jumping spiders. I suppose readers do hit the random article button sometimes, but probably not as often as doing specific Google/Wikipedia searches. I do defer to Kaldari's expertise, though – he is the jumping spider king :) Accedietalk to me19:51, 30 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I did Portia (genus) (the parts sourced) 2 year ago, as a note. I researched in spring 2011, and it's more complex. P. fimbriata has 4 subspecies with different tactics; and in particular, Queensland P. fimbriata is probably a distinct species from Sri Lankan P. fimbriata, as matings between the two groups are infertile. P. schultzi and P. labiata females try to kill their mates, but Queensland P. fimbriata does not (it prefers other spiders, with relish). P. labiata by the sea seen cleverer than that in the hills. While most jumping spiders focus accurately up to about 75 centimetres away, P. schultzi responds to a maximum of about 10 centimetres in good light, and ignores everything in very subdued light; and P. schultzi never plucks the prey's web as P. fimbriata goes. I've researched another Portia, and it seem to have its own tactics. There are 13 other species (!) that are just titles. I don't think this time is good for generalisations. --Philcha (talk) 00:51, 26 October 2011 (UTC) #In Reproduction and lifecycle: The male then walks with erect and displaying by waving his legs and palps. – with erect what?[reply]
Reproduction and lifecycle section is too choppy (I notice a few sentences were copied from the P. fimbriata article, which is fine but, again, could do with a bit of grounding in this particular species of spider). With some light pruning, this could easily be smoothed into a more readable, logical narrative (i.e., competition --> courtship --> egg-laying --> molting).
References section should be divided into Notes (footnotes in order of citation in article) and References (alphabetized list of references used). Since the Notes section is pretty long, it would look neater if it was divided into two columns (with {{Reflist|2}}).
I don't want readers to manually find the sources and then manually return to the article. At present I use Wikipedia:Cite#List-defined_references (LDR for short) with {{r}} - the latters shows page number (or range) in the text, and generates a ref that links directly to the source, e.g. Jackson & Hallas is cited 50 times. In the Sfn system (see Wikipedia:Cite#Shortened_footnotes), CITEREF puts a full citation in a list in "References" and {{sfn}}one uses a citation in the text - in principle like LDR, but the details as different. In either case, the reader can find a ref that links directly to the source - and then BACK button to return to the text. --Philcha (talk) 11:09, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I see what you mean. Aesthetically, I prefer Sfn, especially when there are this many citations, but navigability is good to keep in mind. I do have to say, looking through the article again, that you might consider condensing some of those citations – there are some paragraphs where every sentence has a footnote, which breaks up the reading flow and is visually confusing. Accedietalk to me20:00, 30 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
ETA: I think the section order would make more sense if it proceeded from general to specific, i.e., from taxonomy to ecology to description (a merged habits and senses + physical description section that was specific to P. schultzi) and lifecycle. I believe that's the standard way of outlining articles on species. Accedietalk to me21:42, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
"taxonomy" as first section may be ok for academics and their students, but would bore general readers, some of whom know nothing about jumping spiders, or of spiders in general. But I introduce this species quickly but gradually ("Body structure and appearance", "Movement", etc). "Ecology" in the main body is behind "Hunting tactics" and "Reproduction and lifecycle", which are the payload; but ecology is in the lead in pole position. --Philcha (talk) 17:00, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That makes sense. I was looking at articles on mammal species (like this one for example), and they tend to start from taxonomy and gradually go into species-specific characteristics. But since there's precedent for jumping spider articles to be structured the other way around, it's probably better to have consistency among them. Accedietalk to me23:44, 30 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
