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Title WikiProject Birds
Scope This WikiProject aims to help organise our rapidly growing collection of entries about birds.
Parentage This WikiProject is an offshoot of WikiProject Tree of Life
Descendant Wikiprojects No descendant WikiProjects have been defined.
It is worth keeping one eye on several Wikiprojects that overlap with this one, including Wikipedia:WikiProject Ecoregions, and WikiProject Conservation worldwide.
Bird entries can be on any level that makes sense in context. Most will be about particular taxa. For example:
In many cases, it makes sense to combine several taxonomic levels in a single article. For example, the order Sphenisiformes contains only one family, Spheniscidae, and all Spheniscidae are penguins, so the one article covers both levels.
Conversely, sometimes it is better to cover only a part of a taxon: kingfisher deals with three different (but related) families and ignores the other families in the order Coraciiformes.
Some large families such as the hummingbirds will also need a to be broken down at some stage because of the number of species.
There may be some merit for larger groups in starting from, say, a family page, and then splitting off genus and/or species accounts as the material builds.
At what level is it worth having a separate Wikipedia entry for a particular bird? Any level you like. If we try to do individual entries for all 9000-odd species, we will be at it for a long time! The simplest (and probably best) rule is to have no rule: if you have the the time and energy to write up some particularly obscure subspecies that most people have never even heard of, go to it!
As a general guideline, though, it's best to combine separate species into a single entry whenever it seems likely that there won't be enough text to make more than a short, unsatisfying stub otherwise. If the entry grows large enough to deserve splitting, that can always be done later.
What about extinct birds? At the very least, we should include birds that have become extinct within historical times—i.e., within the last 5000 years or so. There seems no obvious reason to exclude any birds: there is already a stub for Archaeopteryx; if an expert on fossil birds comes along and wants to contribute more, all the better.
It is important to link articles up and down at least, so that, say, a family article, like shrike, links back to passerine, and down to species accounts if they exist.
In general, use the formal common name for page titles.
Page title | make a redirect from |
---|---|
Common Blackbird | common blackbird |
White-necked Raven | white-necked raven |
Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike[?] | black-faced cuckoo-shrike[?] |
Prairie Warbler[?] | prairie warbler[?] |
The name of a species is always capitalised. This signals to the reader that we are indicating a particular, exact species. 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.
When you create a new entry for a species, make sure it is correctly capitalised and always create a redirect in the lower-case form. For example, name the entry 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. (See Wikipedia:How to use redirect pages)
Note that capitalisation for species applies to articles about fauna, not to the whole encyclopedia. We do not have the right to insist that contributors who specialise in any of the many other areas covered in the 'pedia (politics, music, sport, and so on) learn about or conform to the conventions of ornithology. If someone writing an entry on a baseball team called the "Christchurch King Penguins" wants to make an in-text link to king penguin[?] then they should be able to do so without having to worry about the details of species capitalisation rules. It is your responsibility to make the lower-case redirect.
Summary of naming guidelines common names:
Summary of naming guidelines: scientific names:
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 major official sources include:
There are also a number of family monographs, such as the Hayman "Shorebirds" and Harrison's "Seabirds", but these are not available on line, and although a mine of information reflect the author's idiosyncracies and soon become dated.
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Scientific classification | ||||||||||
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In general, bird entries should have taxobox. This is something we have inherited from the Tree of Life WikiProject. There are many examples there to look at. (The one at right is just an example and leaves quite a few genera out for space resons.)
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:
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