Talk:Plant strategies

Note

Hello. As part of a graduate level "Plant Ecology" course, we are editing and/or developing Wikipedia pages. We've started the "Plant strategies" page to include various alternatives to Grime's CSR triangle (UAST), which is currently the only strategy associated with plant strategies on Wikipedia. If you have any suggestions or recommendations, please share them here. There is a slightly more detailed outline also available on User:kkl456 sandbox. Feel free to add edits there as well. Kkl456 (talk) 20:38, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

• I will help create and expand this content. (QuercusMaximus (talk) 20:01, 8 December 2015 (UTC))

General Outline

Below is a brief outline for the "Plant Strategies" page.

Lead Paragraph

• Explain what a plant strategy is.
• Include historical timeline and notable contributors of plant strategy definitions.

Background

• What does plant strategy include? Ecological strategy? Defensive strategy? Reproductive strategy? Resource-utilization strategy?
• Include how plant traits (functional traits) influence plant strategies.
• Discuss plant trade-offs in allocation and resource utilization.

Grime’s CSR

• Summarize Grime's triangle.
• Link to UAST page.
• Include diagram of CSR triangle.

Tilman’s R*

• Summarize Tilman's theory.
• Link to R* rule page.
• Brief mention of I*.

Westoby’s LHS

• Summarize Westoby's theory.
• In-text citation of Westoby's paper.
• Briefly mention Wright’s (2004) leaf economic spectrum theory (builds on Westoby).

r/K Selection

• Summarize reproductive strategy.
• Link to r/K page.

Summary

• Bring together all sections and summarize plant strategies as a whole.

Further reading

Links

References — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kkl456 (talk • contribs) 20:14, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Course

@Kkl456: WikiPedia has a lot of advice for students and instructors which can make things go more smoothly when students are editing Wikipedia for a course assignment. Please see Wikipedia:School and university projects and encourage your instructor to read it too. It is helpful for other editors if each student project page is tagged with the template I've used above, and better if a course page is created so that editors can see what it is going on and offer help as needed.

For example, it is not Wikipedia practice to add a sentence like "This article will be expanded" in the text. There is a template available, which I've added, to say that the article is under construction. But it's even better to make sure that when you first create the article you include some content, referenced to Reliable Sources. This stub is probably eligible for "Speedy Deletion" under criterion A-3: articles ... consisting only of external links, category tags and "See also" sections, a rephrasing of the title, attempts to correspond with the person or group named by its title, a question that should have been asked at the help or reference desks, chat-like comments, template tags, and/or images. (my emphasis). Because you sensibly put this note on the talk page I gave you the benefit of the doubt and did not nominate this page for Speedy Deletion, but other editors might not be so charitable: students do not get a free pass. This stub may not survive unless you add some serious content to it (remembering that it must all be sourced and that you should not include Original Research or your own Synthesis.

There is a lot to learn about editing Wikipedia, but it's an interesting journey. It can be difficult for coursework students, who inevitably arrive with an agenda of "Do what the instructor requires, to pass the course", while most of the rest of us are here to "Build the encyclopedia", but students can make a very valuable contribution as long as they work within Wikipedias rules and guidelines and remember that this is an encyclopedia and not a student lab. Happy Editing! PamD 07:54, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi! Instructor here. I've read the resources (though this is my first time using Wikipedia in the classroom) and I'm aware that there have been issues in the past. Thanks for giving us the benefit of the doubt! Because this group is starting a new page, rather than editing an existing page, we wanted to make sure there was a talk page available so that they could share and discuss their proposed edits for comment. There are a number of stubs on Wikipedia so it didn't occur to me that there would be a problem with that.

They'll be building the page in a sandbox, but is there a place you'd prefer they start a conversation about this page (i.e., a related page)? Or does it make more sense to just start by adding content here?

I appreciate the feedback! IceAgeDoc (talk) 11:34, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Editing

Please look at other articles to see how to edit - eg finding the template for "Main article", and noting that we don't add bolding to section titles (I was wrong in saying that they're bolded automatically, but the standard format is standard, you don't need to make your article non-standard by bolding section headings). PamD 18:35, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Refrences

Hallo, good to see that you're adding proper references, but you could make them even better by using more of the power of the "Cite" templates. For a book, if you add the isbn it automatically links to a resource which offers searches of libraries etc; for journals, it's better to use the specific fields for "volume=" "issue=" and "pages=" rather than bundle them in with the journal title. If any of your cited authors is lucky enough to have a WP article (eg Grime), you can use "authorlink=" to link to their article. See all the info in glorious detail at Template:Cite_journal. Happy Editing, PamD 09:30, 18 December 2015 (UTC)