Talk:Polistes instabilis

This article was the subject of an educational assignment in Fall 2014. Further details were available on the "Education Program:Washington University in St. Louis/Behavioral Ecology (Fall 2014)" page, which is now unavailable on the wiki.

Suggestions to Improve Article

Overall, I like your article. Particularly, the sections under the heading of "Behavior" are very detail and provide good background information on the species. I made some spelling changes throughout the article. I also connected some short sentences to make the writing less choppy. In addition, I also have some other structural suggestions for you. In the beginning of the article you mention the distribution of Polistes instabilis, but in the actual distribution section you mention a completely different range. This disagreement needs to be changed. In addition, I think your taxonomy and phylogeny section could be strengthened by a discussion of closely related species and common characteristics of the genus. Finally, I also think that some of your sections within behavior could be broken up and reorganized to provide some additional clarity. I think that your discussion of "Dominance Hierarchy" would be better suited under the heading of kin selection. Since you are explaining the behavior that causes there to be only one queen in the nest, this discussion would be better suited under a different section. Also under the heading of kin selection, I think it would be useful to add sections on relatedness and worker-queen conflict. Adding these sections would give a more complete understanding of the species. I hope that these comments can help strengthen your article. Amanda.Kalupa (talk) 7:57, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Some suggestions

First off, there were a number of grammar errors so I fixed them, and rearranged some of your sentence structures so your sections would have better flow. Also, I added some more info to the description overview section, so hopefully that that would give a better overview of your species. I also found that you didn't have info on who found the species (and when he did it), so I added binomial authority to the taxonomy box on the right. Additionally, your article was suggested to have more links to it so it would better integrate with the encyclopedia, so I added a number of links to your article. Lastly, I added the course banner for Behavioral Ecology 2014 on the talk page. Otherwise, great work! JackieOh0223 (talk) 20:14, 28 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback

First, I removed the banner at the top of the article that stated the article had no lead section and was an orphan. Assuming that the Overview is the equivalent to a lead section, the lead section was actually present. Also, I added internal links in the article so that the page could get more views. More views from interested readers could lead to more edits made that would improve the quality and accuracy of the page.

The Taxonomy and Phylogeny and Distribution and Habitat sections do not include much detail. I would recommend really trying to find sources that would make these sections more comprehensive. For example, adding the types of plant fibers that are typically used in nest production would be helpful in giving more detail to the habitat of P. instabilis. A possible addition to Taxonomy and Phylogeny would be included the most closely related Polistes species to P. instabilis based on an analysis of a phylogenetic tree. Explicitly relating P. instabilis to other related wasps could help the article get more views and improve the comprehensiveness and quality of the article. The Nest Activity subsection of Behavior is a little difficult to understand. Including very brief descriptions of what triggers antennating or fanning, as those are not activities with obvious purposes.

Overall, this article was very good in terms of detail and length. In the future, I would recommend using Wikipedia Citation Template to cite your sources. This may make the process of citing easier than the method you used. Sydney Joyner (talk) 04:10, 01 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Some Suggestions

This article is very strong. Particularly, I felt that your categories were well researched and provided useful and interesting facts about Polistes instabilis. While there were not many grammatical changes to be made, I corrected a couple spelling mistakes and combined some shorter sentences throughout to make the article flow better. I also have a couple additional suggestions. Firstly, I think your article could be more specific. For instance, you described your wasp as having “yellow, brown, and reddish markings”. This is not very descriptive as most wasps have these coloring patterns. Instead, it would be better to indicate where specifically these coloring patterns occur, perhaps on the thorax or mesoderm. By being more specific, I believe that your article will appear more credible and have more authority. Another suggestion I have is to increase your discussion about Taxonomy and Phylogeny. It would be interesting to know what other species Polistes instabilis is closely related to and some similarities between species in the genus. In addition, it would be helpful to describe in this section what an “independent founding swarm” is. Overall, this article is already complete and useful. I hope by implementing my suggestions your article cam be make even better.

Peer Review

Overall, this article has a lot of good information and was well written; there were few grammatical mistakes and all species and genus names were italicized. The main issue I found was that information was often repeated in different sections of the article. For example, in the “Communication” section, it says “Polistes instabilis is an example of these types of colonies, where a few dominant workers seem to induce others to forage. This occurs by dominance interactions mentioned in previous sections.” I don’t think it helps illustrate communication and could be deleted, especially since this was discussed in the section directly before. Also, I changed the capitalization of the headings so that only the first word is capitalized to follow Wikipedia style guidelines. Mayxac (talk) 05:27, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Overview

The first sentence begins with a lot of characteristics of the wasp. It might be less confusing to split this up into two sentences and to remove “(family Vespidae)” since it is in the taxo box. Similarly, since the second sentence talks about two different topics, it might be better to split that sentence into two. There were also a few grammatical mistakes that I fixed, such as adding a comma before which. I also added links to words like arthropods, predators, and morphological. Lastly, although it is good to give an introduction to the topics you’re going to talk about, I feel like it would be better to give a brief, general summary and not specific details you repeat later on. Mayxac (talk) 05:27, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Description and identification

It might not be necessary to include the yellow, brown, and reddish markings if you discuss it immediately after in the next section. I added the conversions to the measurements in this section. Mayxac (talk) 05:27, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Distribution and habitat

This section is a little short. You could include information about where they like to make nests, whether it is an aerial or subterranean nester, and specific examples of places that nests are often found. Mayxac (talk) 05:27, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

The article is lacking in areas around kin selection, dominance establishment, and mating behavior. Kin selection would be an important highlight of this article since the only female allowed to reproduce is the queen, as this would have an effect on the sex ratio of the hive due to the haploidodiploid hypothesis. User:Wdsieling (User talk:Wdsieling) 23.51, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Year of description

I edited the year of description of the specie, de Saussure had been long dead in 1953 -GBMorgagni on Wikipedia.it