Talk:Information centre hypothesis

Some suggestions

Here are some thoughts to get this article ready for main space:

• No level 1 (or any level) section headers on the lead section.
• The lead should not contain any unique info not already detailed in the body of the article. See WP:LEAD. The lead merely summarizes the most important info from the article.
• Per WP:FIRSTSENTENCE, If its subject is definable, then the first sentence should give a concise definition: where possible, one that puts the article in context for the nonspecialist. Similarly, if the title is a specialised term, provide the context as early as possible. You start off by saying what it states; how about saying what it is (I know nothing about the topic, but it sounds to me like it is a theory about birds which exhibit communal behavior... or, ...why birds join communal groups (don't use my words, I'm just going by the rest of the article; it's up to you to find a good definition, which is backed up by reliable sources. But the bottom line, is that it is a theory about bird behavior... so maybe that's a good place to start.
• The article is currently an WP:ORPHAN, because it has no in-links. Find some articles on Wikipedia which already mention the theory, and turn the mentions into wikilinks. If not mentioned anywhere, consider adding the title term to articles where it would make sense, and add a link. At the outside, you could find articles related to the topic, and simply add a link in a bullet in the See also section of other articles. Aim for at least three in-links.
• While your references look good at first glance, they lack specificity because it looks like the page numbers reference the page range for the entire article. Please add specific page numbers. This doesn't necessarily mean the same page range for the whole article, for every single footnote: it means, just the page (or pages) where the source article (or book) verifies the claim you are making in the text. See also {{rp}} for how to reuse named references that in footnotes that refer to different page numbers.
• While it's not required, it's a good idea to add a See also section. See MOS:ORDER for exactly where to place this section. If you can, link a few other articles on Wikipedia, one article link per bullet, from this section. The convention is, if the article is already linked in the body of your article, then it does not belong in the See also links.
• Another optional section is Further reading, where, if you want, you can link other articles and books which have important information on the topic of the article, but which you did not specifically use in footnotes. See MOS:ORDER.

There's more, but this should keep you busy for a bit. You're on the right track, now tidy it up a bit more, and you're almost ready for prime time! Cordially, Mathglot (talk) 01:22, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Communal roosting covers much of the same ground

See my bullet point above about inlinks and WP:ORPHAN. I found an inlink for you, to de-orphan your article, and I was going to just hint at it, and see if you could find it yourself. But in fact, I can't do that; I have to tell you which article it is, because there's an overlap issue concerning the two articles that needs to be resolved. It's the Communal roosting article.

When writing a brand new article at Wikipedia, you should always check whether someone else might have already written it, or included it as part of some other article. In this case, Communal roosting has extensive information about ICH. That doesn't mean you absolutely can't create your article as a new article, but it does mean that probably other editors should get involved, have a look at your article, and decide whether your content should be merged into that one, whether you should create the new article anyway and some of the content tjere should be merged into this one, leaving a summary there, or what exactly. Pinging Ian (Wiki Ed) to alert him to this situation. Mathglot (talk) 05:09, 20 March 2018 (UTC)