User:Sabine's Sunbird/Writing Bird Articles

Writing articles on birds can be a daunting process. There is often a lot of information out there, much of which can be contradictory or confusing. Existing articles that you want to improve can be haphazardly arranged leaving you little idea how to progress. So what is a keen student of ornithology to do? Well, I'm here to help you on the basics of writing a good article about birds, starting with the basics and working towards the finer details. I'll mostly be avoiding the stuff covered in other tutorials in the Wiki proper, technical details about how to cite or the correct way to dot i's. I'll be dealing with the particulars about writing about birds (and for that matter other animals).

Choose your subject
An important place to start; what are you going to write about? This is more important that you think. Taking on just any bird article can be hard, some may lack sufficient info to make a good article out of. Others may be fiendishly complex. A good rule of thumb for a first time good article writer is too pick a species, not a family, genus or order. Higher order taxa articles badly need work but are much harder to write, as you have to balance the article to cover the whole family when info may only be available for a few species. This is particularly true where some species are found in the first world and others in the third world. You'll also find yourself typing "birds in the family x all do y, exception for exceptions a,b and c, which do z" and "some frigatebirds do this" and "most bango-birds sound like bangos" over and over and over which gets old very fast. Species, on the other hand, tend to be more conducive to sweeping statements like "Lesser Bango-birds live in Armenia and eat frogs and sound like a bango". Individual species can be tricky in situations where the taxonomy is disputed, you might find that you are writing about a species that is about to be split into three species, so try and write about a stable species. The people at WP:BIRD can help you with information about the likelihood of a split.

Do a search of Google and Google Scholar to see if there are lots of references to work with. Species found in the Americas will often have lots of journal articles that are available for free on a website called SORA, so search there too. And of course you can raid the library or your own bookshelves for information too. We keep list of information sources on our main page to help you.

Evaluating sources
Okay, so you have found a range potential sources of information. Unfortunately not all sources are created equal, and some won't be considered useful if you ever throw your article to the wolves at WP:FAC. So how do you evaluate all the potential sources of information? Well, here I can only offer guidelines. There are no hard and fast rules, ultimately you have to use some judgement.

As a very general rule, you can rank how good a references is in this ranking system


 * Top: Journal article, monograph, handbook,
 * High: Conference proceedings, government report, popular science book, ornithological association websites
 * Mid: Website run by university department, museum, government department, or charity
 * Poor:Website run by company, tourism board or individual

These are guidelines. There are websites run by individuals that punch above their weight (see here for an example), and there are journal articles that are flat out wrong. The website run by the IUCN is about as unimpeachable a resource as you could find. But as a general rule of thumb the higher up the list you are here the more the writer knew. The only real difference between high and top level sources is the amount of fact checking that would have had to have gone into them.

Journals
These are the fuel that powers the juggernaut of science. The important thing about them is that they are peer reviewed, a brutal scientific trial by fire that involves baseball bats with nails driven into them being applied to the article to make sure it passes muster. Most articles don't. I deal with journals below.

Monographs, textbooks and handbooks
What separates these types of books from the more usual books about birds you find in the bookstore is the intended audience, these are usually printed not for the masses but for the people in the field and the serious enthusiasts. You should be able to find them in really good bookstores or in some of the better libraries; university libraries in particular will have an eclectic collection on a range of families and species. While generally not peer reviewed they are generally secondary sources and don't need to be, but they are often written by the experts in the field. Their advantage over journal articles is their broader coverage, covering many more aspects of a birds life. They are often much easier to read as well. This makes them the best place to start your article. Their biggest disadvantage is that you generally can't get them online (although you can read snippets on Google Books). If you get seriously addicted to Wikipedia you'll find yourself haunting secondhand bookstores and AbeBooks looking for them.

Conference proceedings
Every year or couple of years groups of scientists in particular fields in particular areas of the world meet up in fancy hotels in places with cool nightlife and stand around boasting about what they have been up to for the last year. These collected boasts are often collected together as a summary of what the scientific community has been up to recently, and these are named conference proceedings. They resemble journal articles except they usually consist of just the abstract (making them easier to read) and haven't been peer reviewed, but are generally fine if taken with a pinch of salt. They are often found online which is an advantage.

Government reports
Government agencies responsible for looking after wildlife often write about their subjects. At length. In addition these agencies will contract out species assessment work to universities, charities and contractors and consultants, and these people will also write reports. These reports are often written for a variety of audiences, other agency scientists, bureaucrats, the public and politicians. And politicians are simple creatures who can often barely read, meaning that most of these reports have executive summaries at the start, which are kind of like abstracts if abstracts were written for coffee addled ADD sufferers. These reports often make their way onto the web (particularly in the US) and are valuable sources of information. They aren't peer reviewed, but they have been politically reviewed, so if a species is commercially important be aware that there may have been some shenanigans between the point where a well meaning scientists wrote it and the point where you read it.

Popular science books
Written for the general layman, these books bridge the yawning gap between the worthy higher end tomes and the more useless class of wildlife book you'll find in bargain booksellers. Popular science books are generally written by journalists, as opposed to scientists, who have taken the time to learn a bit about the field and try to explain it to the pondlife masses in simple words. The standards vary dramatically, particularly in actual readability, but the science is often good. Very good, in some cases. If you want to judge a popular science book have a look at the reviews it gets online; good books will get favourable reviews from the likes of Science, Nature, as well as organisations like Conservation International and the Sierra Club. Be aware that new books have lag time and reviews can take a number of months. Overall, depending on the author, these can be fairly trustworthy, but mistakes will creep in and shouldn't be used to settle an argument.

Websites
The world wide web has revolutionised the way people access information. Instead of having to go through the tedious process of acquiring a book and reading it (which may involve going outside, even if only to get the book you ordered on Amazon from your letterbox), you can now access information without leaving your room. Or parent's basement. The downside is quality control. When you pick up a book you know that the author had enough wit to convince a publisher to risk cash on publishing that book. But something you read on the internet could have been types by a slob with no other skill other than being able to click edit and then type and then click save page. You know, kinda like what I'm doing now. To judge whether the information is trustworthy you need to take a guess as to whether the person publishing it is a Nobel-winning scientist or an escaped mental patient that needs help dressing in the morning. There are clues you should look for...


 * Type of site: This one is crucial. Many university professors maintain websites detailing their research for interested members of the public. These are good. Government conservation bodies will often have outreach and education sites, and these are often good too. As are many sites run by the major ornithological unions and organisations. Be careful, particularly on sites run by very large organisations, because sometimes the job of running the website is given to the underpaid newbie interns who know more about computers than science.
 * Are they pushing a cause?: Not bad per se, but you should look for it and be aware of it. BirdLife International's website, for example, is pushing a point of view, the POV being "save birds!". As long as you are aware of that it may not be much of a problem. It doesn't affect a piece of information telling you that the Spatula Bird lives in Arid Highlands whether the site is pro or anti conservation. But if you go onto a hunting website that describes the prey of the Bold Hawk as "cute little critters and baby seals and orphaned baby otters" it would be important to know that the cause (hunting matters) has it in for birds of prey.
 * Are they trying to sell you something?: A subset of above. This is usually a bad sign, it doesn't have to be, but for example a site selling baby parrots is hardly going to paint the bird trade industry in a bad light. If possible avoid.
 * Is there obnoxious amounts of advertising? A subsubset of above. There is probably correlation between the amount of advertising the awfulness of the website. Avoid. Besides, hanging out in these kinds of sites is asking for viruses.
 * The article looks vaguely... familiar It is probably a mirror, a copy of the Wikipedia article you intend to edit that is hosted on another website. There are lots of these. It may be a copy of an older article - most mirrors and forks will state at the bottom that they came from Wikipedia. These, obviously, cannot be used.

Getting hold of them
Many journal articles are hidden behind subscription services and are harder to get on the internet than worthwhile content, with the added disadvantage that peer to peer services seldom stream illicit journal articles. But there are a number of ways of getting them. First off, ask. Many bird Wikipedians can get them for you and email them too you. If not, try your nearby university's library. Many of them stock the bigger journals and are often happy to let people wander around and photocopy articles. And as I've already mentioned many journals have older issues available for free, particularly in the US and New Zealand.

Once you got it!
Okay, straight up, journal articles are not easy. They may be one of the best sources you can use, but they read like the Wall Street Journal's more dense articles on subjects you don't care about. And that is if you can find them at all. But don't worry, I'm here to help you with them.

First off, it is worth noting that they shouldn't be your first port of call. You should start with more general references, books and websites, that can give you a broad understanding of the important details of a bird's life. Having painted broad strokes about the bird you can use journal articles to a) provide additional citations for facts you've found out and b) help flesh out interesting aspects in better detail. Going into a journal article with some information already means that you are better able to understand what they are saying and you'll know what you are looking for. This will be a big help.

The second and most important point is knowing how to read a journal article. There is a lot of stuff crammed into journal articles, and they get quite dense as space is at a premium. They are also not generally written for outsiders. But here is how a journal article is structured. It starts broad, painting a general picture, then narrows down to a question, then narrows down further to an experiment before broadening out with results, a discussion of those results and finally ending up where it started in a broad discussion of overall implications. The implications for you is that you are interested in the stuff at either ends, the broader stuff. You do not need to read the whole thing. Only tedious people who are doing PhDs and above have to read the whole thing. For the purposes of Wikipedia you need the abstract, which describes the whole paper in summary form, the introduction and the discussion. You won't even need all of them. You just need the bits that talk about the bird you are interested in. The introduction will have a summarised section about your species that draws on previous work. The discussion and abstract will have a summarised take home message about what that paper adds to the knowledge of that species. These are what you are looking for. Moreover the discussion and intro are usually much easier to read than the methods and results. So avoid the methods and results.

About structure
So you have managed to find lots and lots of information about a great cool species and you are raring to go. You go to the page, keen to get started, now what? Some people might get stumped here. There may be an almost blank canvas. There may be a mess of an article. There may be a fairly good bare bones of an article there. If you are in that position you won't need this next bit, but chances are you will.

The first stage of writing is structure. An article that is well structured is much easier to write. This may require you to beat some structure into the article, or it may require you to tinker with an existing structure. The structure is your skeleton around which you can build the rest of your article. It takes various related aspects of a birds biology and places them together coherently.

By way of an example, examine this version of the article on the Eurasian Coot. The main body of the text is one big chunk which is only very loosely organised. The following edit has several paragraphs moved around, some section breaks added for ease of reading, and a more obvious structure. Having added structure to the article I was then able to add content to the individual sections and improve the whole thing incrementally.

And the incremental addition of content is the easiest way to work. Having broken the article into sections you can now work on subsections. Read about the way it feeds, then add sentences here and there. You have some infor about which there isn't a section yet, so create that section and add the info. On section gets too big, so you split it. Watch as the article slowly swells.

An example of a structure for a bird article
There are any number of ways you can lay out your article, and I'm going to describe just one, my preferred one. It is based loosely on the structure used by the Handbook of the Birds of the World to describe bird families. You can adapt this to your needs and species you are writing about.


 * Lead: Per the Manual of Style this should summarise the article.
 * Taxonomy and evolution: This section describes the related subjects of where the bird falls on the tree of life, its relatives, and any information about its evolution and fossils. Depending on the species there may or may not be much information about this. This is also a good place to explain the origin of its scientific binomial name. Because these sections can be long, dense asnd dull some prefer to place them at the end.
 * Description, also called morphology or appearance. This is where you describe what the bird looks like, aspects of its body and the like. Good stuff to include here is adaptations towards its diet or behaviour, differences between the sexes, differences between juveniles and adults.
 * Voice: Tricky one this is, the songs and calls. It could arguably go here as a subset of what the bird is like or it could go in later on down as part of behaviour. I guess if the section is heavy on describing what the calls are like it goes here, if it describes what they do it should go with behaviour.
 * Distribution, habitat and migration: These three go naturally together. It explains where you'll find them, one geographically (which countries), one biographically (which types of ecosystems they occur in) and one temporally (species that shift around across the year). Depending on how much info is available you can split these into subsections. If a species wanders around without really migrating you can call the section movements instead.
 * Behaviour: This is a big one and has plenty of info usually. The first bit after the section can cover smaller points like sociality, whether the creature is nocturnal or diurnal, whether it is shy or bold, general aspects of its behaviour. Then come the two biggies.
 * Diet and feeding: This covers how the species stays alive by virtue of what it eats. This can cover both what it eats and how it gets it.
 * Breeding: This covers social systems, courtship, nest building, laying, incubation, hatching, chick raising and fledging. Phew! It may be that you can break this section up a bit into sub sub sections. The bird's life history can also be dealt with here, meaning how long it lives.
 * Ecology: How does this species interact with the greater ecology. Not really for every species, but can cover which species eats it and what parasites plague it.
 * Relationship with humans: This can usually be broken down into four sections, not all will be appropriate.
 * Exploitation: The species might be commercially important, either as a food source, in the pet trade, as a pest. Include historical exploitation.
 * Aviculture chances are if the species is a common pet the article already has too much information about this, badly written and in dire need of a weed whacker.
 * Cultural references: More than the above section this one attracts cruft. Feel free to blitz anything that isn't cited. Try and find citable cultural facts about the species to replace them. It is easier to delete someone's trivia that your species once appeared on an episode of Fanboys in Space if you can point to a well written well cited existing section.
 * Threats and conservation:These are linked sections on the impact humans are having on the species. In common species that are doing fine this is a really short section and can get tagged onto distribution.