User:PoetaCorvi

Invertebrate keeper and cockatiel parent. I primarily work with live arthropods sold as pets. I am most knowledgeable in terrestrial isopods, millipedes, darkling beetles, and termites, but have varied experience with plenty of other invertebrates.

I encourage anyone who has issues with or questions about my edits/contributions to communicate on my talk page!

Care Guide Removals

Aside from editing and adding to invertebrate pages, my main focus is changing or removing care guides. Care guides on animal pages appears to be a long term common occurrence, but it is objectively against policies, and IMO has the potential to be incredibly harmful. People tend to look at Wikipedia as a source of objective information. Even when subjective topics are discussed, they should still be presented in an objective manner:

"[Relevant and significant individual/group] has argued that [xyz]," is acceptable. "You should do [xyz]" is not.

WP:NOTAGUIDE is the main policy that addresses this issue. A Wikipedia article should not be written in the imperative mood. Animal husbandry is constantly evolving, and is incredibly far from objective, a direct care tutorial should never appear on a Wikipedia page.

Many pages also contain care guides that are either uncited, or use unreliable resources. Pet store websites, forum posts, blog sites, pet care articles, and popular pet creators are not reliable sources.

If an appropriate source is found, it should not be used for a care guide. Instead of writing "You should provide this fish with temperatures of 65-80 degrees Fahrenheit", add "[researcher/publication/etc] found that these fish thrive most in temperatures of 65-80 degrees Fahrenheit."

These policies/pages are relevant to most corrective edits I make, and may offer guidance:

WP:NOTAGUIDE (Elaborates on why guides, tutorials, etc. are not permitted on Wikipedia)

WP:V (Guidelines on determining whether a source is reliable)

WP:CITE (Guidelines on how to add citations/determining when citations are needed; also see: WP:WHEN)

WP:NOR (Elaborates on the "no original research" rule)

WP:BURDEN (Elaborates on the "burden of proof" rule)