User:Rileyregular18/sandbox

Article evaluation
The article I chose to evaluate was on Operant conditioning. This article overall is well done and has been consistently edited and commented on by various wiki users since it is a popular article. The article does a good job in covering in detail the subject of operant conditioning with sections on B.F skinner and various terminology regarding the subject. Towards the end of the article though it does begin to stray off from the subject area a little bit with short additions about vague topics. For this article it is somewhat hard to be biased, outside the fact that you could not agree with this form of conditioning, also as I said before this article is always being reviewed due to its popularity which makes the likelihood of it be biased low. no viewpoints are really overrepresented, the one place in which I think there could be some additions is the the animal training section. While, It does have a link to another article it could benefit from having more in this article itself. After checking so of the citations within the article it seems to be that they do provide supporting information and the links do work. while for the most part the citations are linked to legit scientific journals, others aren't so good and only refer to websites and blogs. Other problems include some old references and other places in which no citation is currently there and therefore needs to be added (a possibility for one the the future wiki assignments). Moving into the talk page which I've briefly mentioned before, which is very active people seem to be always editing and making suggestions on how to improve the article. interestingly enough this article is also the subject of another university wiki project which makes it reflect well to what we've discussed so far on the subject in class.

The Beau Geste Hypothesis
In animal behaviour,The Beau Geste Hypothesis is the hypothesis which tries to explain why some avian species have such elaborate song repertoires, for the purpose of territorial defence. The Hypothesis's name comes from the 1924 book Beau Geste. Which, tells a story of how a group of French legionnaires, masked their lack of soldiers by propping up the dead and wounded to give the illusion that the fort they were protecting was well defended. The name of this hypothesis was first coined by John Krebs in 1977. Where it was hypothesized that it is an evolutionary advantage for some avian species to have a large song repertories. So that they can create the illusion that there is a larger number of animals in the area by producing different songs in different areas

The Beau Geste hypothesis which was coined by John Krebs in 1977 to explain why various avian species have such large song repertories The hypothesis discusses that avian species untilize such large song repertories for potentially a number of reasons such as for territorial defence and to test the competition within a new habitat (?). The Name of the hypothesis comes from the book which was originally published in 1924 "Beau Geste". Where the book tells the story of three English brothers which all enlisted in the French legionnaires and ended up in a desert battle against the Arab army. But, they were greatly out numbered and in order to create the illusion that they had more men then they actually did, they took whatever dead soldiers they could find and propped them up. This made the approaching Arab army think they were out numbered and ultimately let to the French legionnaires winning the battle.

How this relates to animal behaviour is that various species have been found to exhibit a similar behaviour to defend and invade territories. Various avian and non-avian species are thought to have evolved to have large vocal repertories to give the illusion that there are more competitors in a given territory which may lead to a new individual being turned away from entering the territory. Often times, a male will produce a wide variety of vocalizations to protect a larger area of territory

Some examples of the avian species which provide some support for the Beau Geste hypothesis include the Red-winged Blackbirds. While Krebs had originally proposed this hypothesis for the explanation of Avian song repertories, there has been examples of this hypothesis extending outside of the the avian realm with amphibian and invertebrate species

Beau Geste Hypothesis in Avian species
The Red-winged Blackbird are one of the most well studied groups for this hypothesis due to the complex song repertories these birds produce in the protection of there territory. What some studies have found is that there are positive correlations between the density of song repertories and the density of males found within an area. But did not find a negative correlation between the number of trespassing birds in a males area and the density of the songs made which means that the based on this study there is only some support for this hypothesis. Another interesting study which looked at Red-winged Blackbird's which lived in urban areas found that their song repertories were reduced due to the amount of noise which was found in the urban area. This lead to an interesting view point on the beau geste hypothesis, where it was found that the birds still produced a variety of songs in protect a area, but the area and the number of songs which were produced were much smaller.

The beau Geste Hypothesis and non-avian species
The original hypothesis was made for the purpose of avian species, but as this hypothesis becomes more popular it is beginning to find a place outside of ornithology. Vocalizations are not limited to avian species which gives the Beau Geste hypothesis the ability too be applied to other species.

There has been mention of this hypothesis in places such as research into amphibian vocalizations, in the Boophis madagascariensis an endemic tree frog species found in Madagascar (4). Where the Beau Geste hypothesis is used to give one explanation of why the species has such a large vocal repertories.

and also in invertebrate species such as bush crickets