User:AshLin

I am an army officer by profession and a proud Pune-ite (in Maharashtra, India on the Western Ghats). I'm interested in wildlife especially butterflies. Other interests include trekking, military history, astronomy, teaching, computers and technical writing. I'm a believer in the philosophy of the Commons as exemplified by Wikipedia, Gnu/Linux movement, environmentalism and good citizenship. I am happily married with a son aged 15 and daughter aged 10. They too share my interests. Till recently in Binnaguri, Duars, northern West Bengal, (India) with very slow and intermittent access to internet. Now in Pune on a long wiki-break to regain my health. My edits during this time may be sporadic.
Regards, AshLin

I'm interested in Indian butterflies, and am partnering users Viren Vaz, Shyamal and Vijay Barve in an endeavour to create a wikibase on Indian butterflies. The aim is to make the wikipedia section of Indian Butterflies useful to the amateur Indian naturalist.
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References

I'm using the following resources :-

• Butterflies.

• IUCN Red Book titled Threatened Swallowtails Butterflies of the World (1985).
• Brig WH Evans' Identification of Indian Butterflies (2/ed) (1932) Bombay Natural History Society.
• Col MA Wynter-Blyth's 'Butterflies of the Indian Region'.
• Krushnamegh Kunte's book 'Butterflies of Peninsular India', Universities Press.
• Meena Haribal's 'Butterflies of Sikkim', Sikkim Natural History Society.

Nature Loader

I operate a sock puppet account called Nature loader in Wikipedia and Wikimedia for loading photos for people who find it inconvenient to do it themselves. Please see image contributions of people uploaded by Nature Loader in Wikimedia Commons.

Any one interested may please leave a message for me on my talk page.

• See some of my work at List of butterflies of India.
• I'm a member of the following Wikiprojects :-
  • WikiProject Lepidoptera
  • WikiProject Arthropods
  • WikiProject Spiders
  • WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles
• My Images
  • My images
  • My snake images
• See what beautiful things can be created by contribution of various people :-

Bingham's Fauna of British India (Butterflies).

• Some other articles for which I am a major contributor are :-
  • Snake scales.GA
  • Buff-striped Keelback.

My travails (?) oops travels in Wikipedia

• My travels in wikipedia are to be found here.

The main problem being faced is in the lack of photographs. Contributions of photos will definitely get kind words and a drink if you are in town.

Please remember, this contribution is to Humanity and not to me. These sites belong to everybody. The photos remain your intellectual property even if you release them under a free licence.

The other problem is in authorship. Three of us to tackle approximately a thousand species makes the task a lifetime's endeavour. Many hands make light work. So am looking for partners to work alongwith. Moral support, help in learning Wikipedia ways, and becoming learned in Indian butterflies is guaranteed!

This need for images and authorship is felt by WikiProject Lepidoptera and WikiProject Arthropods also.

My belief is that information from published sources, usefully and elegantly paraphrased and carefully attributed is fair use for placing on Wikipages. I also completely endorse Wikipedia policies on the issues. Just to get my view validated, I sent an email to wikipedia help and was given a reply which I place below for your information.

Dear AshLin,

Thank you for your mail. AshLin wrote:

> Dear Administrator, >

>I'm user AshLin. With two other users I'm endeavouring to develop the Indian butterfly part of Wikipedia. The bulk of common information of Indian butterflies lies in two books i.e. Identication of Indian Butterflies - WH Evans (1927, 2nd ed 1932) and Butterflies of the Indian Region - MA Winter-Blyth (1957). These books were printed by the Bombay Natural History Society and have been classics for years as well as out of print. Recently, some Indian publishing houses have begun publishing reprints. I plan to add information about various species from these books. I plan to extract relevant info only and paraphrase it to make it coherent and readable. I plan to cite these books appropriately as per Wikimedia guidelines as references in each wikipedia page I so enrich.

>My question is, is such attribution adequate or do I need to get specific permission from the copyright holder? This has stopped us in our tracks. Please help us understand this issue.

Information cannot be copyrighted; the original writing can. As long as you rewrite the information in your own words, and cite the source of the information, you should be okay.

Yours sincerely, Andrew Gray -- Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org --