Lady Arachnophile

Spider Baby, etc.

Hello. I'm working on the WP article 'Cultural depictions of spiders', and when I googled "Arachnophile" your user page popped up. If you wish to "help with spider-related articles ... time permitting", then take a look at the article and see what you might be able to help with. Right now, I'm researching old movies, especially 'B' cult films such as Spider Baby (starring Lon Chaney Jr and featuring an arachnophile orphan who likes to play spider games - thus my googling the term, and finding your page) - which spawned a punk-rock musical:[1]

Anyway... I'm also researching spiders in philosophy, and anything else I can think of. Ideas, suggestions and/or sources would be appreciated. Also feel free to edit the article at will. ~Thanks, ~Eric F 74.60.29.141 (talk) 07:56, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Araneus diadematus

Hi Lady Arachnophile,

You have recently removed two pictures from Araneus diadematus for the reason of being of the wrong species (this one and this one). Are you sure of that? Please look at this other spider, from Bug Guide: http://bugguide.net/node/view/594167. Very similar, is it not? Best regards, Alvesgaspar (talk) 21:56, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it is somewhat similar-looking, but I am 100% sure it is not the same species (I have almost 10 years experience studying and observing spiders, including the common Araneus diadematus). Besides that, even if it were some very rare color form, it does not accurately represent what the species commonly looks like and would not be helpful to those trying to identify their own. Where were the photos taken, out of curiosity? I could probably tell you what species of Araneus it is instead. I can tell just from your ventral image that the epigynum is definitely not A. diadematus. There is no scape at all (A. diadematus has a long "tongue-like" projection on its epigyne, as in this image: http://bugguide.net/node/view/346422/bgimage). Your images are excellent and I wish they really were A. diadematus, but I couldn't leave them there once I saw they were misplaced (as so many spiders are in Wikipedia). --Lady Arachnophile (talk) 22:17, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I just saw that there was Google mapping available for your images... Portugal, correct? That would make this Araneus pallidus instead. They are excellent shots, so if there isn't a wiki page for that species yet, someone should make one and add your images. I haven't learned how to do everything here yet, so won't be trying to make the page myself. --Lady Arachnophile (talk) 22:36, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

• Thank you very much for your expertise! Yes, I will try to gather some informtion about the A. pallidus in order to start an article. In the meantime, could you please take a look at the spiders in here? Some are unidentified and others have probably the wrong ID. The Salticidae are one of the most difficult families. Alvesgaspar (talk) 11:56, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Categorization

Categorization on Wikipedia can be a tricky area, but one principle is not to put an article in a category and one of the category's direct ancestor categories. So since Category:British arachnologists has Category:Arachnologists as one grandparent category, both aren't needed on an article. See Wikipedia:Categorization#Categorizing pages.

Good to see an editor working on spiders – more knowledgeable spider editors are badly needed! Peter coxhead (talk) 15:11, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh, crap, I didn't realize, sorry! I shouldn't have started doing that without reading more about it. I added a lot of arachnologists to that category last night, actually. Eek. I was trying to build up the Category:Arachnologists page to be more all-inclusive, as opposed to someone needing to know the arachnologists' nationality in order to find them in the Categories style pages. I know this is separate from Wikipedia (kind of? not too clear on that, actually) - https://species.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Arachnologists&from=H - but that one is all-inclusive and is basically what I was hoping the Wikipedia Category:Arachnologists would be like someday. I like separation by nationality, as well, though. So I thought adding ALL of them to Category:Arachnologists while still categorizing them in their respective nationality Category would do the trick. Lady Arachnophile (talk) 15:34, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

I find categorization in the English Wikipedia tricky, and I continue to struggle to understand what a "non-diffusing category" is. At WP:DUPCAT it says "Subcategories defined by ... ethnicity ... should almost always be non-diffusing subcategories" (and ethnicity seems to include nationality if you look at the examples). So this suggests that, say, Category:British arachnologists could be labelled {{Non-diffusing subcategory}} and then an article about an arachnologist could be put into both Category:Arachnologists and Category:British arachnologists. However, starting at Category:American scientists (as it's likely to be the largest), I couldn't find any subcategory which has been treated as non-diffusing, so I think that custom and practice for scientists by nationality is to treat them as a subcategory of that kind of scientist.

Another possibility would be to have a list article, i.e. "List of arachnologists", although the problem then is referencing to show that someone counts as an arachnologist. It's a pity the World Spider Catalog doesn't allow querying by taxon authors. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:46, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Okay, thanks! I need to spend some more focused time learning about these types of things before I jump in like that. I like your idea of a "List of arachnologists." That would be great! (I think that was part of my original oversight; I basically thought that was already what that Category section was.) The WSC does let you search by authority, actually; on its search tab, the drop-down option on the lower left has "Spec Author" and "Gen Author" (species author, genus author). Only search by last name, though, otherwise the results might not be accurate. I've been studying spiders for a little over a decade now, and often know (or recognize) the majority of the last names by memory. I work on a couple websites where I've been listing taxon authors, so I usually use the Wiki pages to copy and paste the author's full name since I sometimes forget the first/middle names... which is actually why I was adding arachnologists to that Category (it was kind of a self-serving endeavor gone wrong, haha). If anyone did start such a list of arachnologists, I'd be happy to help somehow in my free time. I'm just still a wiki-noob, more-or-less, so I'd be hesitant to start such a page myself. I'm only used to making minor edits here and there and, what I know, I've only learned from looking at the pages in edit mode, so I can see how things are marked-up, etc. Lady Arachnophile (talk) 05:47, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, excellent! I'd never looked at the drop-down options.

There's a starting point for a list of arachnologists at Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/List of Arachnologists – it's just meant as a resource for spider editors to add wikilinks, so it doesn't need referencing.

Difficulties still remain with sourcing a list. Consider the pages listing botanists which start at List of botanists by author abbreviation. There we can provide a general reference, the International Plant Names Index, because if you go to the IPNI search page and search for an author, you get their full name and dates. So it's only necessary to independently source a few bits of information not yet in IPNI (and they are good at updating it if told). Using the WSC, if I look up say "Roewer" as a species author, I get a list of species names (some synonyms not authored by Roewer). Following one of these through as far as the bibliographic reference tells me that his initials are "C. F.", so I can add "C. F. Roewer" as an arachnologist based on WSC. But this isn't quite enough for the list – we need actual names and dates, and there's no single source for these, unlike botanical authors. It's highly likely that "C. F. Roewer" is Carl Friedrich Roewer (1881–1963), but not certain without a separate source. If you look at List of authors of names published under the ICZN, it's flagged at the top as needing a source; someone could propose it for deletion since it's remained unsourced for so long. I wouldn't want the same problem to arise at a List of arachnologists. But maybe I'm being too cautious.

As an interim measure, do please add names to Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/List of Arachnologists. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:15, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Here's an example of the difficulty in finding information. "Westring" is the author of 100-odd species names and several genus names. I can get as far as "N. Westring", but no full name or dates. "N. Westring (fl. 1850-1870)" isn't much for a list and certainly not for an article. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:36, 23 April 2016 (UTC)