User talk:Speednat/Archive/2010/Jun

The Wikipedia Signpost: 31 May 2010
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The Wikipedia Signpost: 7 June 2010
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The Wikipedia Signpost: 14 June 2010
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You are now a Reviewer
Hello. Your account has been granted the "reviewer" userright, allowing you to review other users' edits on certain flagged pages. Pending changes, also known as flagged protection, is currently undergoing a two-month trial scheduled to end 15 August 2010.

Reviewers can review edits made by users who are not autoconfirmed to articles placed under pending changes. Pending changes is applied to only a small number of articles, similarly to how semi-protection is applied but in a more controlled way for the trial. The list of articles with pending changes awaiting review is located at Special:OldReviewedPages.

When reviewing, edits should be accepted if they are not obvious vandalism or BLP violations, and not clearly problematic in light of the reason given for protection (seeReviewing process). More detailed documentation and guidelines can be found here.

If you do not want this userright, you may ask any administrator to remove it for you at any time. Courcelles (talk) 17:57, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Signpost: 21 June 2010
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Literature+Tinamous
Regarding your question (yes, I know this reply is approaching WP:TLDR!): I have worked with Neotropical birds for many years, meaning that I have had a long time to get the literature, either buying it (in recent years mainly via amazon.com or nhbs.com; the latter is often more expensive but also has more specialist literature available) or getting it via contacts (e.g. as thanks for reviewing or helping with sections before a book is published). Secondly, being associated with the ornithological branch at a major natural history department is an advantage; if I am missing a certain book or paper, it is usually at our specialized library or I can check specimens if needed. There are relatively few departments with an ephasis on Neotropical ornithology (the major in USA are at LSU, AMNH, FMNH and SDSU with other significant being at Cornell, Smithsonian, Yale, etc). Unfortunately none are near you, but in any case access is usually restricted to people that are associated with the deparment or have a research matter that in some way relates to their collection. Beyond field guides that only treat a few species native to a region/country and mainly provide info that is of use in field identification (= description of main features, voice & habitat), little has been published in an easily available format on tinamous in the last few years, meaning that much widely available info is outdated. For example, for distributions of tinamous, the Clements list relies almost entirely on the info provided in Handbook of the Birds of the World vol. 1, which was published almost 20 years ago. This may change, as Thomas Schulenberg, the person now in charge of updating the Clements list, is an authority on Neotropical birds (he is also the person in charge of the recently startedNeotropical Birds at Cornell), but on the other hand it may not, as the Clements list primarily is a taxonomical work and distributions, while provided, are secondary. Davies has worked extensive with ratites and is a world authority on the group, but he has worked less with tinamous, meaning that the chapter on tinamous in his book Ratites and Tinamous (and in Grzimek's) rely almost entirely on work published earlier by others. He provides little new info and qoute several things now known to be mistaken, incl. some that easily could be avoided if he had more real-life experiance in the Neotropics. E.g. among nothuras alone, it fails to mention that the White-bellied Nothura has bright yellow legs (unlike all other nothuras), and it claims that N. maculosa cearensis is restricted to S. Ceará (it actually occurs more widely in NE Brazil). A somewhat comical example of outdated info can be seen in the current wiki article for the Grey-legged Tinamou, where it is stated that it "may" occur in Peru, while the photo used in taxobox was taken near Iquitos in Peru (where first discovered about 10 years ago)! Furthermore, this species is decidely tropical, being restricted to white sand forest and woodland in the NW Amazon Basin, and certainly does not occur in the subtropics anywhere. IUCN only have a few predetermined categories for habitats and rarely update pages for species that are not threatened. They should therefore not be relied upon, except in threatened species where they usually give more specific and correct info. There are numerous other examples of outdated info, and I just noticed you reverted an example here, though in fairness the recent record of that taxon has not been officially confirmed. On a related matter, he is working on the Red-legged Tinamou complex to more firmly establish the species level taxonomy. Regardless, I do hope the inaccuracies in some source and the overall lack of easily available sources do not discourage you. More sources are slowly becoming available, and for scientific papers it is always worth checking google scholar (using scientific rather than common name of the species, of course). • Rabo³  • 20:49, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Signpost: 28 June 2010
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