Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders

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WikiProject Spiders

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"Not long ago the spiders were the most neglected of the most interesting animals..." — Theodore Horace Savory, 1962

Welcome to WikiProject Spiders. If you plan to be active in editing articles relating to spiders, please add your name to the members list. Proposals, suggestions, and activities are discussed on the WikiProject Spiders talk page.

The WikiProject Spiders was formed in July 2006, to better organise efforts to create a spider section in Wikipedia that will be useful and enjoyable.

This page and its subpages contain many suggestions and ideas; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there.

For more information on WikiProjects, please see Wikipedia:WikiProject and Wikipedia:WikiProject/Best practices.

Scope

Articles

Hot articles

These are the articles that have been edited the most within the last seven days. Last updated 28 April 2026.

Update the table now
This table is generated by querying the database replica and is periodically updated by a bot.
Edits made within the table area will be removed on the next update!
Edits Article Rating
11 Pardosa pseudoannulata C
10 Habrocestum naivasha Stub
10 Rhene plumata Stub
9 Barronopsis jeffersi Stub
8 Habrocestum inquinatum Stub
8 Thyenula rufa Stub
7 Zodarion samos Stub
6 Pardosa ogudovi Stub
5 Thyenula cheliceroides Stub
4 Anansi Start
4 Campanicola Stub
4 Ceratogyrus marshalli Stub
4 Heteroscodra maculata C

∑ 13 items | Query runtime: 0.96 s | Last updated: 15:26, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

End of auto-generated report.

» Popular spider articles

Article alerts

Good article nominees

Articles for creation

Parentage

This WikiProject is an offshoot of WikiProject Tree of Life

WikiProject Science
WikiProject Biology
WikiProject Tree of Life
WikiProject Animals
WikiProject Arthropods
WikiProject Spiders

See Portal:Biology.

It is also worth keeping an eye on several Wikiprojects that are similar or overlap with this one, including WikiProject Lepidoptera, WikiProject Ecoregions, WikiProject Evolutionary biology, WikiProject Birds, WikiProject Cephalopods, WikiProject Gastropods.

Structure

See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Arthropods#Structure for an explanation of the structure of the spider section.

For a detailed article format on spiders, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/Article formats


Goals

One goal is to collect as much information about spiders and transform it into a form that is accessible to laymen, but also interesting to professionals.

Projects

it would be very nice to focus on at least one species of every one of the 114 families. That's a) a good motivation (clearly defined goal), and b) would help to seed the thought of diversity in the spider section :) These example species could then be linked into the Spider families table.
these could either be newly drawn, or fetched from open license publications (eg. Psyche, see Free license publications)

Tasks

  • It's still too long. split it into several sub-articles (eg. spider anatomy, spider taxonomy, spider evolution, spider bites, spiders in culture).
  • There should be very few pages now related to spiders that are not tagged, but if you do see a spider page without it, please add it and tell the page's creator about this practice.
  • there are loads of arachnological PDFs online. If one person attaches it to the fitting page, another person could extract the information into the article at a later time.
  • search for spider pictures with a free license, upload own pictures (and determine the type where possible); but it could also help to ask people that have nice pictures online if they are willing to publish them under an open license; example
  • People have put in loads of images with titles like "weird_spider.JPG" and very few images with the scientific names of spiders. See also WikiProject Spiders/Undetermined pictures.
  • There is also an unknown amount of spider pictures that are not linked into the commons Spiders category tree. If you spot one, please at least tag it with Category:Spiders. (or the respective family if you know about it)

General strategy and discussion forums

Other subpages

Templates

Infoboxes

Stub templates

Place these on any page that you think really needs to get fleshed out.

Other templates

Place this on top of a spider article's Talk page. What this template does:

  1. It will help to lead new editors to this project.
  2. If complete with quality and importance grading (see Article Classification), it helps us to stay on top of more than a thousand articles related to spiders.

This will insert a box with all spider families at the bottom of the page. At the moment, all 114 spider family pages have it (example).

Users with this template (which creates a userbox) on their User page will be automatically added to Category:WikiProject Spiders participants.

List of taxonomists

You can use the List of Arachnologists to easily wikify the describers of taxa.

Categories

The top category is

Put genus and species pages into the appropriate family category.

By year of description

Articles on species (but not other ranks) can be placed in "Category:Spiders described in YEAR", e.g. Category:Spiders described in 2017. "Described in" here means "first formally described in accordance with the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature". The World Spider Catalog is a reliable source of taxonomic information: start at the Search page. There are two main cases:

  1. The species is still in the original genus in which it was first described, e.g. Argiope aurantia Lucas, 1833. This will be shown by the absence of parentheses around the authority and date. So this species belongs in Category:Spiders described in 1833.
  2. The species has been moved from the original genus in which it was first described, e.g. Argiope aemula (Walckenaer, 1841). Walckenaer first described it as Epeira aemula in 1841; Thorell moved it to Argiope aemula in 1877, but this doesn't change the year of first description, so this species belongs in Category:Spiders described in 1841.

"Spiders described in YEAR" categories, such as Category:Spiders described in 1997, are placed in "Spiders described in CENTURY" categories, such as Category:Spiders described in the 20th century. The higher level categories should not contain articles. "Spiders described in YEAR" categories are also placed in "Animals described in YEAR" categories.

Redirects

Redirects should also be categorized, always by the appropriate "R cat template", and sometimes by other categories as well, such as by their taxonomic category or in the case of a species by the year of description.

Redirects not involving monotypic taxa

Redirect pages involving spider taxa should be placed into a "redirect category" using an appropriate "R cat template" as shown in the table below, unless the redirect is concerned with the accepted names of monotypic taxa. "Scientific name" is here interpreted broadly as meaning "Latin name", which may or may not be a valid taxonomic synonym.

To
Scientific nameEnglish name
FromScientific name{{R from alternative scientific name|spider}}*{{R from scientific name|spider}}*
English name{{R to scientific name|spider}}*See {{R template index}}

* Subcategorizing the redirect as a spider makes access and maintenance via the appropriate category easier.

Examples:

Redirects involving monotypic taxa

See WP:MONOTYPICFAUNA. Monotypic taxa should have one article at the lowest rank, but no lower than genus. So a family with one genus has an article at the genus; a genus with one species also has an article at the genus. The exception is when the genus needs disambiguation by adding "(spider)"; in this case the article on the genus and species is at the species. Redirects should be created for all the other taxa.

This will result in two cases:

These redirects should also be categorized by taxon rank, and in the case of a species, by year of description.

Lists

As of January 2026, consensus seems to be that these lists are outdated and redundant to maintain. The idea is to phase these out:

These lists were originally created from version 8.0 of Norman Platnick's World Spider Catalog, which forms kind of a common consensus on spider taxonomy amongst arachnologists. The World Spider Catalog (WSC) is now hosted at the Natural History Museum Bern; many species lists need to be updated to the latest version. For the sake of consistency, the spider section should adhere to the WSC wherever feasible. If you have a reason not to, please leave a note.

Regional species lists

List of common Australian spiders
List of spiders of India

Regional lists not in Wikipedia

Articles

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/Articles for an overview of existing articles, requests of articles that are needed, and specials like "Featured articles" and the like.

Resources

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/Resources.

Picture Liberation Project

This list's primary purpose is to coordinate the picture liberation quest ;). this way, people won't be bothered by multiple requests. To help out with this project, read through Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission. Some examples of emails sent to owners of pictures can be found here: Wikipedia:Example_requests_for_permission.

  • Michel Vuijlsteke
  • Tom Murray (would license the pictures under a non-commercial license)
  • Jeremy Miller (only with watermark)
  • Matjaž Kuntner (only non-commercial)
  • Bryan E. Reynolds, Jerome Rovner, Joseph Warfel, Fred Coyle, Bill Welch, K.N. Prestwich, Rick Vetter