Template:Did you know nominations/Gregarious slender salamander

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Hawkeye7 (talk) 11:04, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Gregarious slender salamander

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... that female gregarious slender salamanders often lay their eggs in communal nests?

Reviewed: Yalçın Granit

5x expanded by Cwmhiraeth (talk). Self nominated at 12:52, 6 May 2014 (UTC).

Date, hook and length of expansion are fine. All sections are referenced with no apparent copyvio. I added an inline cite after the hook fact per DYK rules. QPQ is done. 97198 (talk) 13:15, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

I'm fine with the hook and all the rest, but the article's wording in the area of the hook fact struck me as problematic. The article says "communal nests containing up to 300 eggs which may have been deposited there by as many as 18 females or even more"; the source says "to > 300 eggs, which were attributed to > 18 females". The article does not accurately reflect the source, which is saying over 300 eggs by over 18 females. I think "attributed to" is key: they don't know, and my guess is that they're estimating the number of females needed to lay that many eggs based on nest sizes nearby (probably a northern nest, if so). However, the article needs to be careful about what it says and what generalizations it makes based on the sourcing. BlueMoonset (talk) 16:08, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

You are right. I muddled >300 with <300 . I have corrected the article now. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 18:27, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

I did a further edit which I hope clarifies things a bit more. Let me know if it's inaccurate or otherwise problematic. Was there a reason you didn't differentiate between the northern and southern populations? (Northern: larger clutches and presumably larger salamanders and longer gestation times; Southern: smaller clutches (by over 50%) and shorter gestation times.) BlueMoonset (talk) 21:34, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

No special reason for omitting clutch size information and I have added it now. I thought the variation in gestation times was not sufficient to be worth mentioning. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:22, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

That's fine about the gestation. Since the mean size of the clutches is an average, I think it needs to include the decimal from the source, since it's giving an exact number, even if individual clutches obviously have to be whole numbers. If that's okay, I think we can finish this. BlueMoonset (talk) 07:07, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

That's fine. Thanks. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 07:46, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Wording issues addressed; restoring approval per original review by 97198. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)