Help:Regional Projects

A "Regional Project" is a set of pages that focus on a particular geographic region. In general, these pages will provide an overview of the fauna of the region and provide species lists and keys to the taxa found within the region. No new taxon pages are created as these are shared across the entire Antwiki site. Any regional-specific information about specific species should be added to their single global pages. The region covered by the project can be any area from an entire biogeographic region to a small nature reserve.

Regional Project Pages

As with any publication, it is highly desirable to present information in as consistent a manner as possible, and Antwiki is no exception. This makes it easier for users to navigate and find information, and also for those wanting to harvest information to develop parsing tools that work across as many pages as possible. To this end, we suggest the following page titles and content. This is intended to represent the "core" pages that should be in common to most regional projects, but is in no way meant to restrict creating additional pages that are important to a particular project. In this example "Australia" will be used but any region name can be substituted.

Project Homepage

Australian Ants - This is the main page and acts as the starting point, or homepage, for the project. It can be helpful to first provide some introductory text about the regional ant fauna and perhaps some background about the project. Following this text, links to lists of taxa and any ant keys (both of which are explained in more detail below) should be included. Other links and additional project related webpages should also be listed and linked. Additionally, the last line of the page should indicate this is a Regional Project homepage. Adding the following text to the last line in the page editing window: [[Category:Regional Project]] will add the project homepage to the Regional Projects page.

Taxa Pages

These pages provide lists of taxa found within the region. In the case of Australia, lists of subfamilies and genera are provided, but because there are over 1300 species a species list page would be exceptionally long and hard to use. Instead, species lists are provided for each genus (for example, List of Australian Aphaenogaster Species). The actual list can contain only taxon names (see New Caledonia), taxon names with distribution references and/or notes (Norfolk Island) or can contain links to additional information. In all cases the taxon names should link to the relevant taxon home pages. A table of contents can easily be autogenerated by creating multiple sections ("==Formicinae==" "==Myrmicinae=="). The actual table of contents is floated to the right of the page by adding this line of text to the first line in the page edit window: "<div style="float:right; margin: 10px;">__TOC__</div>" (see the example at Categories Template). Finally, add the category "[[Category:Regional Taxon List|Australian Subfamilies]]" to the bottom of the page so it will be included on the Category:Regional Taxon List page. (Note: The text after the "|" us used to sort the entries on the category page. If it's not included the page will sort under "L" as the page name starts with "List of ...".)

Ant Keys Pages

Key to Australian Aphaenogaster Species - The webpage for any ant key should be named using the region, taxon name and rank being keyed. The format of the key is currently under development and can be as simple or complex as you would like to create. Please add the category "[[Category:Identification key|Aphaenogaster]]", with the taxon name after the "|" so it won't sort under "Key to ...", to the bottom of the page so it will be included on the Category:Identification key page.

Please note that if you DON'T use these suggested page naming conventions some nice Antwiki editor may well change them for you :-).