Talk:The Atlas of Australian Birds

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The Atlas of Australian Birds (reviewed version) has been listed as a good article under the good-article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a review.

[edit] GA on hold

This article will be put on hold (for 7 days) until these minor adjustments can be made :

1. Well written? OK (Just needs to work on the lead section)

2. Factually accurate? Pass

3. Broad in coverage? OK (don't know, waiting for answers)

4. Neutral point of view? Pass

5. Article stability? Pass

6. Images? Pass

Additional comments :

• To begin with, the lead is a tad short and missing the a period at the end.
• Are there any responses to these Atlasses? Do people buy them, is the company making money out of it.
• Are the atlassers paid workers? are they working for RAOU?
• Was there any attempt to make a repertory of birds in Australia prior to the frist published book? or before the '72 idea that they should do that?

The article sounds good and is well written, I was just wondering if it was broad enough and in such, I have placed questions here that one should answer to let me know how much that can be added in the article. For that time period, the article will be on hold. Good luck, Lincher 15:15, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I can respond to the above comments as follows:

• To begin with, the lead is a tad short and missing the a period at the end.

I have addressed this.

• Are there any responses to these Atlasses? Do people buy them, is the company making money out of it.

Yes, people do buy them. The first atlas book is out of print. The second is available in many bookshops. There is an attempt to cover the costs of publishing the books by sales but the RAOU is a not-for-profit organisation. While the books are probably the most visible part of the project to the public, in fact the most important product is the database. Various organisations such as environmental consultancies and local government authorities, purchase data from the database, and this helps support ongoing database maintenance.

• Are the atlassers paid workers? are they working for RAOU?

The atlassers (the people who did the bird surveys) are all volunteers. Many are members of the RAOU and other bird groups, but many are not and do it because they enjoy atlassing and feel that they are making a contribution to environmental conservation. The number of RAOU staff involved in coordinating the project at its peak and working on the database was never high.

• Was there any attempt to make a repertory of birds in Australia prior to the frist published book? or before the '72 idea that they should do that?

Essentially not. There were attempts at producing distribution maps for particular species, based on published and unpublished records, but these were unsatisfactory as much of the remoter area of Australia had not been surveyed for birds at all. The Atlas project was the first to get people to go out and get coverage of the whole continent, and preferably covering the different seasons of the year as well. Maias 01:15, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Being a descendant of a deceased atlasser I would consider the article to be a fair and reasonable encyclopedia article on the issue SatuSuro 01:24, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

I think it would be neat if this article showed one of the maps (there's a good fair use argumnet for using one) since the way they have collected and presented the data is (at least as far as I'm aware) pretty unique. --Peta 04:17, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Good suugestion. In fact the current illustration (of the front cover of the second atlas book) does show the map (at the bottom right of the image) of the distribution of the Budgerigar (the bird illustrated), though it is not easy to see the red dots on the map against the reddish colour of the background. Maias 05:27, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

I think that in addition to a map, an more detailed on how the data was collected would help highlight how and why this is a really in depth and interesting publication. --Peta 07:31, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lead section

I have changed the lead section so it would be in accordance with WP:LEAD in summarizing the article to come and not providing original material. Please feel free to copyedit it and modify it until it meets your view of what a lead should be like. You can revert it back to the one you created but that one didn't meet the requirements requested by GA. Lincher 15:40, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GA passed

Resquested comments have been taken into consideration and I now consider the article GA for it meets the GA requirements. Nice work, Lincher 11:37, 16 October 2006 (UTC)