Talk:Poço das Antas Biological Reserve

Location
The article stated that the reserve was located in southern Brazil, near the cities of Garibaldi and Lajeado. That location is in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, hundreds of miles from the actual location of the reserve, in the state of Rio de Janeiro (southeastern Brazil). There is indeed a homonymous locality in Rio Grande do Sul, but it has nothing to do with the article's subject. Poço das Antas means "pool of the tapirs" in Portuguese (poço actually means "well of water," but it is also used in the sense of a natural pool or small lake). Since tapirs can be found in most of Brazil and they are semi-aquatic animals, it's easy to name places with pools where they often bathe or drink water accordingly. There are probably many more localities with that name in Brazil.

Apparently, someone found the southern locality on Google Maps and "corrected" the article. Someone else (correctly) reverted that edit, but the reversal itself was undone because the latter person was not logged in and only the IP address was recorded, so the edit was suspected to be vandalism. But it had been a legitimate edit, and an anonymous edit is not necessarily invalid or vandalism. In this case, the anonymous user even correctly commented and explained the edit in the proper field. I have made many such edits myself, when it was a small thing and I thought it was not worth the trouble of logging in. Both the zealous "geographer" who introduced the mistake and the user who undid the correction erred by not checking the information.

The GeoHack link points to the correct location of the reserve. It is often in the Brazilian news and it is really in the state of Rio de Janeiro - the golden lion tamarin that is the reserve's highlight is not found anywhere else, as can be checked in the corresponding article and its references. The references given here in the article about the reserve also mention the correct location.

I took the information about the municipalities and the distance to Rio de Janeiro city from the Portuguese-language version of this article on Wikipedia. I have also removed the reference previously given to a satellite map of the unrelated southern Poço das Antas. --UrsoBR (talk) 18:55, 8 June 2013 (UTC)