User talk:RedSiskin

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16:04, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia!

It appears you may have used a large language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, in your edits. While LLMs are powerful, machine-generated text often contains serious flaws. They may introduce bias, errors, plagiarism, libel, or even hoaxes. Specifically asking an LLM to "write a Wikipedia article" can sometimes cause the output to be outright fabrication, complete with fictitious references. Editors must verify all LLM-generated text before using it in an article. Completely LLM-generated articles may be quickly deleted. If you are unsure about your wording, an alternative is to suggest it on the talk page for another volunteer to look at it. If you are creating a new article, you may use the Articles for Creation process to get feedback on your work.

As you get started editing Wikipedia, you may find the pages below to be helpful:

If you still have questions, there is the Teahouse, or you can click here to ask a question on your talk page, and someone will be along to answer it shortly. In your messages, please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and a timestamp. Happy editing! --Gurkubondinn (talk) 11:44, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Gurkubondinn,

I in fact use it solely for turning information like references into the format of wikipedia. All the information input is my own, collected from original scientific literature. There will be literally no information taken from LLM, only the formatting.

RedSiskin RedSiskin (talk) 12:33, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The LLMs are actually quite awful with the WP:CS1 citation templates, and they make a lot of errors with them (maybe even more errors and hallucinations than they make in general). But these templates are actually not that hard to use, they are all very similar and very consistent. I would suggest that you take a look at the WP:REF guidelines and Template:Cite web documentation first, it is the most common one (a bit of an all-rounder, if you will). To cite a scientific journal for example, you would use Template:Cite journal, which shares most of it's parameters with {{Cite web}}. Once you get the hang of one of them, you've basically learned how to use all of them. There also guides like H:INTRO, but ymmv how useful you find it. There's also a better one somewhere I think, but I can't remember what it's called.

Wikipedia is not friendly to LLMs, and you are best served to stay away from them as much as possible when editing here. You will most likely face very stern resistance otherwise, and have problems getting your drafts accepts into mainspace. That is because these tools are antithetical to the purpose of Wikipedia. But to be honest, learning how to do this yourself is genuinely worth it. Since you seem like you might be an academic of some sorts, I'm fairly sure that you'd enjoy editing Wikipedia, and learning how it works. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 12:42, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, what do you suggest I should do with my draft, which took me quite some effort so far? It is appearantly black-marked at the top as having used LLM. I'm a bit disappointed, as I'm replacing literally everything by my own content, I'm not using LLM for information. RedSiskin (talk) 12:52, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

If you wrote the text in the draft yourself, then that's fine. If an LLM wrote only some parts, then I would suggest to simply re-write those parts yourself. I'd also go through all of the references that have been added, while looking at the corresponding Template:Cite web and correct errors and fill out any fields. Adding archive-url (along with archive-date and url-status) parameters is a good exercise in this, as it will take you through all of them (and you should WP:ALWAYSARCHIVE anyway).

Wikipedia might be hostile to LLMs, but it is also a very forgiving place that gives significant latitudes to editors and allows them a very broad room to improve and to correct mistakes. You (or your draft) are far from being "black-marketed". People here are much more interested in helping you write what you want, than trying to prevent you from doing it (over mistakes, misunderstanding or anything else). Nobody WP:OWNS anything here, people are just invested in ensuring the quality of the information stored here. You've clearly put significant efforts into this, and I want to see this make its way into mainspace. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 13:13, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I have now completed a complete overhaul of the webpage, changed all references to wikipedia style, checked all links, included my sources (you will see that they are a vast amount of scientific literature, and chatgpt is not one of them), and revised the table and introductory remarks. All content concerning description, distribution, and habitate for each subspecies I had already produced long before I started writing this webpage (and in fact long before chatgpt came into existence!). There is literally no line of LLM in this draft left, including formatting commands. You can check all links, and you can also convince yourself that you will not get even one correct sentence on this topic out of chatgpt, leave alone the information I have included in this webpage, which should convince you that chatgpt cannot possibly have been used to obtain this information. So, for me the question now arises if the black-mark on top of the page can be removed, because otherwise I may do useless work as the webpage will not be accepted by anyone. I had previously started to revise the original Common Pheasant wikipedia entry (where I had long ago contributed the classification table into subspecies groups), as someone else had added all 30 subspecies below my table and I felt this shoud go into a separate wikipedia page dealing with the 30 subspecies in due detail. The draft I'm working on still needs to incorporate the citations (I moved references into a bibliography for now) for the subspecies accounts, but I would first wait what the fate of this page might be. Also, can I safe this webpage content for myself in case it will be deleted by someone due to the doubts raised? RedSiskin (talk) 11:17, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect, and I'll remove the tag for you because I'm fully convinced by your reply here.

you will not get even one correct sentence on this topic out of chatgpt

This I very much agree with. In fact, that goes for most topics, these are not information retrieval systems, despite people's continued belief that they are.

Also, can I safe this webpage content for myself in case it will be deleted by someone due to the doubts raised?

You can copy it to your userspace (for example to User:RedSiskin/Subspecies of Phasianus colchicus), it probably won't be deleted there. But nothing is truly "safe", as in there are no guarantees. Personally I would save it on your computer as well (that's what I do). When you've put in a lot of effort into writing something, it makes sense to keep a copy for yourself somewhere.

--Gurkubondinn (talk) 11:33, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Done: Diff/1334077946. Thank you for taking the time to write this draft. After you submit for AfC, someone will take a look at it. I'm not an AfC reviewer myself (and my education is in mathematics, so I'm not all that knowledgeable about pheasants anyway), but I can't think of any reason that this wouldn't be accepted. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 11:37, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I've contributed some small fixes and improvements to your draft.

various degrees of clinal behavior

Is this a typo, should it say clinical behavior? --Gurkubondinn (talk) 11:47, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

No :-) it is clinal, see Cline

What means "AfC"? Appeal for Clemency? RedSiskin (talk) 12:28, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed the typo! I've also added a lot of wikilinks to other articles, can you take a look at them? A lot of them are to regions in Asia, which I am not familiar with, and some of them had different spelling, so check that I didn't link to the wrong region or something.

AfC stands for "Articles for Creation", it's the process of getting a reviewer to look at the draft and check that it is notable (in the Wikipedia definition of notability called WP:N) and ready for mainspace.

There might be a few more typos there somewhere (understandable, I make typos too), but that's not a problem (certainly not for AfC, if anything that just proves that an actual living and breathing person wrote this). I'll fix the ones I see. I also found a malformed reference and fixed that one for you as well (and then started reading an ornithological text from 1870, isn't Wikipedia fun??). --Gurkubondinn (talk) 12:42, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Oh shit, I misunderstood you and thought you were saying it was a typo! Read your reply too fast, I'll fix it immediately. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 12:51, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't a problem, but I've noticed that you are mixing both British english and American english spelling. For example you use the British spelling colour, but then you also use the American spelling color and coloration later in the article. So I'm guessing you're neither British nor American. :)

Articles are often tagged with either {{Use British english}} or {{Use American english}} (or {{Use Indian English}}), often depending on the subject of the article. If you prefer either British or American english, or one is more commonly used in ornithology, then you can tag the article with one of them. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 13:12, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

You should read WP:LEAD, because currently the leade is written as if it is an article for the common pheasant, when it is for subspecies of the common pheasant. Main it's the bolding in the first sentence, which is supposed to be either the name of the article or a redirect to the article. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 13:42, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

No, I'm German, but have spent 4 years in US and 9 years in UK, so I'm a hybrid ;-) British is perhaps better, as they have a very strong ornithological community. But American is fine with me too.

Yes, I will revise the lead paragraph, this should be about subspecies. In fact, I would like to have the link in the page of Common Pheasant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_pheasant to this page just replacing the lower part of the long table (from the part where it reads "Subspecies" inside the table, below the entry for the "Formosanus group", so that the main article has only the table with the main groups, and then a link to the webpage with the various subspecies accounts.

I saw that you included a picture at the top - could we chose one from its original range? The ones in Europe are almost all hybrids (although the one on the picture looks closely like torquatus). I didn't find a lot of nice subspecies pictures, this one would fit https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DX1_0326.jpg , it is subspecies pallasi from Amur.

I also have some detailed distribution maps which I created myself with the help of google maps, and which I wanted to include at some stage, but for this I need to first learn how to deal with all the copyright issues. RedSiskin (talk) 14:06, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Sure thing, I changed the image: Diff/1334095222. The description at commons was in russian, Google Translate told me that it means "far eastern pheasant", so I added that to the commons description along with the scientific name. I had just picked one of the higher-rated images on commons, that was the only reason I picked the other image.

To link to this article (once it is in mainspace) from common pheasant, you'd probably use either {{main}} or {{see also}} to create a "hatnote" in the relevant section. You could also put in the § See also section if that makes more sense, or work it somewhere into the prose.

For the Google Maps and copyright, you'd probably be better off using OpenStreetMap instead, since they are licenses under creative commons like Wikipedia. Or you can use some map templates to create a map, I recently did that on FBS BMVg article: Diff/1332193784. But that's pretty tricky (for me at least), I copied that from dewiki and fixed the parameters to work on enwiki.

I live in Germany, but I'm not German, and pretty hybrid as well. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 14:25, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't the first sentence now duplicated? RedSiskin (talk) 17:32, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Oops yes, I messed that up. Feel free to revert any of my changes if you don't believe them to be improvements. That was a clumsy error, but I think I have fixed it now. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 19:16, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hello RedSiskin – I've done a bit more copyediting on the Draft:Subspecies of Phasianus colchicus page; a few things I'd mention / suggest:

As already discussed above, the page needs to have consistent engvar; the parent common pheasant page is already at UK English rather than American, and UK English is the norm in Western Palaearctic faunistic texts, so I'd recommend following this (and have done so already, what I could find). This also needs attention to plant names (e.g. UK liquorice vs US licorice, UK bulrush vs US cattail, etc.) as a lot of European and Asian plant species have had their names changed in the USA.
All scientific names of plants, etc. need italics; I've done quite a few, but probably not picked up all of them.
'Coloration' is perhaps a bit over-used on the page; it's not a particularly common word normally. Very often, it, and 'colour', can simply be omitted, just say 'brown' rather than 'brown coloration' or 'brown colours'.
It's generally a good idea, though not essential, to use short generic names for the pheasant subspecies rather than bare subspecies names, i.e. P. c. torquatus rather than just torquatus; I've not done this, but would recommend it.

Hope this helps! - MPF (talk) 01:11, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]