Talk:Hawaiian stilt

Name and classification
A search on scholar.google.com of recent articles about this bird shows an overwhelming preference in recent decades for Himantopus mexicanus knudseni over Himantopus knudseni and other synonyms, and for the common name "Hawaiian stilt" over "Ae'o" and other common names. I see that the article wavered on this point, and these issues can be a close (even arbitrary) call in many cases, but in this case there seems to be a clear consensus in scholarly literature on both counts. I am going to change the article accordingly, and list citations.

In the future, I'd suggest either checking with a reputable, well-referenced website and defer to its opinion, or go to http://scholar.google.com/ and type in competing names of a species, within double quotes (") if it's more than one word, and casually scan through the first 50 or so matches for the different terms to get a feel for how commonly they're used, and in what era. There is no fool-proof test, so you still have to use your judgment; if a species was redescribed very recently, then the past usage history may be irrelevant – expert opinion can change quickly, especially if it's based on detailed genetic analysis.

--Agyle (talk) 08:28, 10 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Made changes, and have provided citations for about half the content of the article. Remaining unverified information is indicated with refneeded tags, so others are able to help provide sources on the remaining unsourced material, but I'll work on it some more as well. --Agyle (talk) 12:02, 10 January 2014 (UTC)