What sort of input would BugGuide.net like from "experts?"

Just to clear up the original intent of those sections:
1-References (print and Internet) fields were meant to serve as documentation for the information in the guide page above, allowing some annotation, such as noting which references have color photos, etc. This does somewhat duplicate the footnotes section, but that does not allow any description of the references. Both reference fields on guide pages could be called "annotated bibliography". If they look like add-ons, they are--they were not part of the original design. (They are my fault--I asked BugGuide founder Troy Bartlett to add them.)

2-The Links and Books tabs were the original means of organizing references relevant to the organism. It is nifty, in that there is a hierarchy based on the taxonomic level, with the most specific at the top. Links and books entered there show up on more than one taxonomic level, depending on the relevance. For example, go to the books tab for leaf beetles, Chrysomelidae. At the top of the list are references on that family, posted under the books tab at the family level. Further down the list are more general references on beetles, posted at the level of Coleoptera, but they show up, eventually, for all the "children" of coleoptera. That's how it works, ideally, the problem is that sometimes links and books are posted at the wrong level, and they are difficult to move.

It is a very elegant system for organizing references, but takes some time to understand.

This is more a pet peeve for others than me, but I might as well mention it: enough information about you on your user page to let us know what you know- without having to wander the internet digging up your background.

Those of us without entomological training need all the help we can get in assessing credibility: plausible misinformation is the Achilles' heel of this sort of site.

We've had to delete a good number of taxon pages because someone sounded like they knew what they were doing, but turned out to be really, really wrong when a genuine expert looked at the same images.

At the other extreme are images that sat in ID Request or at higher-taxon pages for months because no one realized that the person who IDed it to species was a taxonomist specializing in that group.

To me, the most useful information would be a description of visible diagnostic characters and anything else that might help to distinguish a species or genus from similar species/genera. Experts know this info; amateurs don't. Since almost every species has one or more look-alikes, having an expert attach a name to an image does not in itself help me identify future specimens; I also need to know which (if any) look-alikes occur in that geographic area, and how they differ from the named image. Unless and until I learn this, my own "identifications" are uncertain guesses based on an undefined resemblance to images identified by experts.

The other stuff (hosts, ranges, authors, synonyms, etc.) would be nice but not crucial because that info is usually available online - although often in scattered bits and pieces, so gathering them all together at BugGuide would be a bonus. These topics are discussed in an article about creating pages here.

I use the Internet and Print References sections for listing supporting documentation because I'm not an expert and have no authority myself. If by "links section" you mean the tab across the top named Links, I'm puzzled by it too, and never use it.

with us is an important consideration. We would love to know what insect you think it is and why. What do you see with your expert eye that we might not see with an amateur eye? If you have time to tell us more about the insect, where it lives and what it eats, that would all be gravy!

If you choose, you can ask John VanDyk to be registered as an editor, and then you can put all that information right on the info page for the species. Otherwise we have to hope that an editor sees the information and thinks to move it to INFO.

We would also be interested in species groups. If you can say that it must be one of these three species, but those cannot be told apart from an image, even that would be very useful information.

One other big request would be to look at the Taxonomy section of the guide for the Heteroptera in general and the MIridae in particular. Should we do something there that makes learning about mirids a little easier without adding layers of subfamilies or supergenera which might be too much for the average user (us!).

The bottom line for the two of us is the ability to learn about the ecology and life history of some of the things we and others photograph. We're certain others will have other requests for you, but for us whatever we can learn is great - that's why we're on BugGUide.