Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds

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WP:BIRD

The aim of this WikiProject is to set out broad suggestions about how we organize data in the bird articles. In general, these are only suggestions, and you shouldn't feel obliged to follow them.

Contents

[edit] Scope

This WikiProject aims to help organise our rapidly growing collection of articles about birds.

[edit] Parentage

This WikiProject is an offshoot of WikiProject Tree of Life

WikiProject Biology.
WikiProject Tree of Life
WikiProject Animals
(WikiProject Dinosaurs, if you're a cladist)
WikiProject Birds

There are no descendant WikiProjects at this time.

[edit] Related Wikiprojects

It is worth keeping one eye on several Wikiprojects that are related, including Wikipedia:WikiProject Agriculture, Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans, Wikipedia:WikiProject Ecoregions and Wikipedia:WikiProject Dinosaurs.

See also Wikiproject Birds at Wikimedia Commons.

[edit] Participants

[edit] Featured and Good Articles

[edit] Featured Articles (37)

Albatross · American Black Vulture · American Goldfinch · Andean Condor · Archaeopteryx · Arctic Tern · Bald Eagle · Barn Swallow · Bird · Blackbird · California Condor . Cattle Egret · Chiffchaff · Common Raven · Common Treecreeper · Elfin-woods Warbler · Emperor Penguin · Emu · Flight feather · Georg Forster · House Martin · Kakapo · King Vulture · Mourning Dove · Northern Pintail · Peregrine Falcon · Procellariidae · Red-billed Chough · Red-tailed Black Cockatoo · Red-winged Fairy-wren · Seabird · Splendid Fairy-wren · Song Thrush · Superb Fairy-wren · Turkey Vulture · Variegated Fairy-wren · White-winged Fairy-wren

[edit] Featured Article candidates

none currently

[edit] Good Articles (27)

Aerodramus · American Crow · American Robin · Atlas of Australian Birds · Australian Ringneck · Bird collections · British Birds Rarities Committee · Bugun Liocichla · Crested Shelduck · Dodo · Dusky Woodswallow · European Robin · Fauna of Scotland · Flammulated Flycatcher · Greater Yellow-headed Vulture · Hooded Crow · Kererū · Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture · Northern Cardinal · Osprey . Pamela C. Rasmussen . Puerto Rican Amazon · Red-tailed Hawk · Rock Pigeon · Storm-petrel · White-eyed River Martin · Wood Thrush

[edit] Featured Lists (15)

Belize birds · California birds · Cuban birds · Egypt birds · Florida birds · Kansas birds · Massachusetts birds · New Jersey birds · North American birds · North Carolina birds · Nicaragua birds · Oklahoma birds · Puerto Rican birds · Thailand birds · Vieques birds

[edit] FA/GA help

The following are available to offer assistance with improving articles towards Good Article and Featured Article standard. Casliber · Jimfbleak (not graphics or maps) · MeegsC · Sabine's Sunbird . Shyamal (SVG illustrations) · SP-KP

[edit] Wikiproject Birds Userbox

{{User WP Birds Userbox}}

results in:

 This user is a member of
WikiProject Birds



[edit] Bird names and article titles

In general, use the formal common name for article titles.

Sometimes exceptions need to be made; some individual creatures (usually newly discovered ones) do not yet have a formal common name. Some distinct groups are known only by their scientific name. Dicruridae, for example, is a much better title than monarch flycatchers, flycatchers, fantails, drongos and the Magpie-lark.

The common name of a species is always capitalised to differentiate it from more general terms.[1] The phrase "in Australia there are many Common Starlings" indicates a large number of Sturnus vulgaris. In contrast, the phrase "in Australia there are many common starlings" indicates several different types of starling. This topic has been discussed often before and discussions may be found in the archives. (Examples: 10-1, 7-1, 7-2, 2-1, 2-2, 2-3). There is also a global committee set up as part of the International Ornithological Congress (http://www.worldbirdnames.org/) which has tried to standardize the English names of birds. (http://www.worldbirdnames.org/principles.html)

Article title make a redirect from
White-necked Raven white-necked raven
Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike black-faced cuckoo-shrike
Prairie Warbler prairie warbler

When creating a new article for a species, make sure the title is correctly capitalised and always create a redirect from the uncapitalised form. For example, name the article Bald Eagle but create a redirect to it from bald eagle. See the table at right for more examples. Creating the redirect is not optional.

Note that the convention for capitalisation of names applies primarily to articles about birds, not to the whole encyclopedia. Contributors to other areas of the 'pedia (politics, music, sport, and so on) cannot be expected to know or conform to the conventions of ornithology. Someone writing on a sports team called the "Christchurch King Penguins" may refer to "king penguins" without worrying about species capitalisation rules. And if they make an in-text link to king penguin, it should be redirected to King Penguin. It is the responsibility of the writer on King Penguins, not the writer on sports, to make the redirect.

Also, this convention does not necessarily apply to articles on taxa other than birds.

Summary of naming guidelines - common names

  • The name of a particular species is always capitalised; Common Blackbird, Metallic Starling, Emu, Ostrich, Western Marsh Harrier.
  • The word immediately following a hyphen in a species name is not capitalised; Red-winged Blackbird, Black-faced Butcherbird, Splendid Fairy-wren.
  • The name of a group of species is not capitalised; birds, thrush family, kingfishers, turtle doves, marsh harriers.
  • Alternative names should be mentioned where appropriate; with bold type in the opening line of the article if they are in wide use, elsewhere in the article (with or without the bold type) if they are less-used. This is usually a matter for individual judgement.

Summary of naming guidelines - scientific names

  • Orders, families and other taxa above genus level are written with an initial capital and in roman (not italic) text: bats belong to the class Chiroptera; rats and mice are members of the family Muridae and the order Rodentia.
  • The names of genera are always italicised and capitalised: Turdus, Falco, Anas.
  • Species epithets are never capitalised, always italicised, and always preceded by either the genus name or a one-letter abbreviation of it: Alcedo pusilla or A. pusilla, Cisticola juncidis or C. juncidis. The abbreviation is used only when it is unambiguous in the context of the article.

[edit] Regional lists

It is recommended that regional lists are named as List of birds of _REGION_ rather than to use List of _REGION_ADJECTIVE_ birds for the sake of consistency.

[edit] Article sections

Most of the bird species articles have a common structure which include various combinations of the following:

  • Identification or Description
  • Taxonomy and systematics
  • Distribution and habitat
  • Behaviour
    • Food and feeding
    • Breeding
  • In culture or Relationship to humans
  • Status

Additional sections may be included to cover aspects that are particularly interesting or well studied in that species.

[edit] Taxonomy and references

This is likely to be the single most difficult part of the project. Not only does bird taxonomy vary significantly from one authority to another, but it is in a state of constant change. There is no single authority to rely on; no one list can claim to be the list.

The de facto standard for Wikipedia bird articles is Handbook of Birds of the World (HBW) for the northern hemisphere, and the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (HANZAB) for groups from that region. These should be used for all articles except for those dealing with a country or region, where the appropriate local official list should be used, as in List of North American birds and British Birds.

The major official sources include:

  • For Africa Roberts' Birds of Southern Africa has been recognised as the authoritative book on southern Africa's birds since its first publication in 1940. A new edition has been published. The list is available online here.
  • For Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa (i.e. the Western Palearctic), the nine-volume BWP or Birds of the Western Palearctic is considered the standard reference. It is also available as a two-volume concise edition. (See the publisher's site.) BirdGuides has combined the text of BWP, the text and plates of the concise edition, with text from the BWP Update journal, images, video and sound recordings into Birds of the Western Palearctic interactive DVD-ROM. The list does not seem to be available online, however.

There are also a number of family monographs (such as the Hayman "Shorebirds" and Harrison's "Seabirds" in the Helm Identification Guides series) but these are not available on line, and although a mine of information reflect the author's idiosyncrasies and soon become dated.

[edit] Online resources

A number of useful free to view online resources exist that are useful in writing bird-related articles:

Referencing (free scientific articles from ornithological journals etc.)

  • FreeFullText Alphabetical list of scientific journals with free full-text articles.
  • Ornithological books online by Tommy Tyrberg
  • SORA Searchable online research archive, University of New Mexico. This site has decades worth of archives of the American ornithology journals, such as Auk, Condor, Journal of Field Ornithology, Ornitologia Neotropical, Studies in Avian Biology Pacific Coast Avifauna, and the Wilson Bulletin. Coverage ends around 2000, but still extremely useful. The ability to search almost all journals and browse issues exists on the front page.
  • Royal Society of New Zealand Free archive of several interesting journals until 2004. Link to Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand archive 1868-1961.
  • PALMM Textual Collections a State University of Florida project. Several monographs available via All Collections search, such as Pierce Brodkorb's "Catalogue of Fossil Birds".
  • Forktail Oriental Bird Club journal. Deals with South, East and Southeast Asia and surroundings. Several complete issues available.
  • New Zealand Journal of Ecology Often publishes bird-related articles. Like Notornis concerns itself with New Zealand and surrounding areas.
  • Marine Ornitholgy published by the numerous Seabird Research Groups, it is specific but goes back many years.
  • Notornis the journal of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand. Covers New Zealand and the South Pacific.
  • Ornithological Worldwide Literature Searchable reference database. Successor to Recent Ornithological Literature; no actual articles.
  • Birds of North America, Cornell University's massive project collecting information on all bird species breeding in the ABA area. It isn't free, but available for 40 USD a year. Access is sometimes available via university libraries.
  • Malimbus, The Journal of the West African Ornithological Society; as well as the even older Bulletin of the Nigerian Ornithologists' Society. Mostly covers bird distribution in sites across the area, but also notes on behaviour and ecology of obscure birds from a little studied part of the world. The Journal is bilingual and several articles are in French.

Conservation status

  • BirdLife International The Data Zone has species accounts for every species, although only threatened species have any detail beyond status and evaluation. But there is still a lot of information to be had there.

Taxonomy

Images

Miscellaneous

[edit] Use a taxobox

Torresian Crow

Conservation status
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Corvidae
Genus: Corvus
Species: C. orru
Binomial name
Corvus orru
Bonaparte, 1850
Distribution of the Torresian Crow.
Distribution of the Torresian Crow.

In general, bird articles should have taxoboxes. This is something we have inherited from the Tree of Life WikiProject. There are many examples there to look at.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/taxobox usage for the full details on constructing a taxobox.

Taxoboxes on the bird pages vary quite a bit from one another and could perhaps be standardised more than they are right now. This may or may not be a good thing. Discussion of this is welcome.

There are several example bird taxoboxes, suitable for cut and paste insertion into entries:

[edit] Distribution maps

A good way to show a bird's area of occurrence is to add a distribution map; see the above example on how. Species with tiny areas of occurrence should get larger maps which are displayed thumbnailed.

As for colors, the following are generally accepted as literature standard, for example by the Handbook of Birds of the World:

  • yellow for summer only
  • (dark) blue for winter only
  • green for all-year range

For species that do not migrate, a single color can be used as in the example. At-sea range of birds like albatrosses is usually marked in darker or lighter blue. Small islands can be marked with a larger dot and/or shown magnified in inserts. Migration flyways are often indicated with arrows. Areas of irruptive occurrence- more regular and plentiful than casual vagrancy, such as in crossbill species - can be indicated by colored stippling.

It is good to use basic, web-safe colors. If using nonstandard coloration (e.g. Arctic Tern or Silvery Pigeon), it is important to annotate them. Former ranges of extinct birds can be indicated in dark grey (HBW standard) or red (many other), the former is probably preferable due to unambiguity.

The "HBW standard" colors have one major advantage: they can also, due to differences in brightness, be distinguished by almost all people with some sort of color blindness.

[edit] Tasklist

Article requests go here

[edit] Species lists with redlinks

These are mainly missing redirects. Synonyms should be also added in the species' taxobox.

[edit] Bird familes with stub articles (37)

  • Bring following articles up to start class:
Non-passerines Part 1
Non-passerines Part 2
Passerines Part 1
Passerines Part 2

[edit] Standing list of articles with several images but little text

Here is a list of short articles which have had images added and could benefit being beefed up with text to balance the image content. Please help if you can. Also, all are potentially easy DYK noms (hint hint) :) Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 11:44, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Standing list of articles with quality pictorial content

Here is a list of articles with either a Featured Picture, or a variety of pictures available, such as chicks, eggs, variant colour forms etc, which would be really done justice by a larger article.

[edit] Former Featured Articles

[edit] Former Good Articles

[edit] Reference

  1. ^ (1998) in Josep del Hoyo, Andrew Elliott & Jordi Sargatal: Handbook of the Birds of the World, Volume 1: Ostrich to Ducks. Barcelona: Lynx Edicions, p. 25.