U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.
There is a current proposal to change an animal-related naming convention, which directly effects the the Manual of Style guideline, and the naming conventions policy. If you are interested, your input would be appreciated. Justin chat 06:32, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Please provide input at Talk:Orca#Requested_move regarding proposal to use MSW3 common name of "Killer Whale". Rgrds. -- Tombstone ( talk) 14:10, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
Please provide input at Talk:Bottlenose Dolphin#Requested_move (2). Cheers, Jack ( talk) 14:45, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
I just put up the article, Australodelphis, I have been working up for the last couple of days. Would several people review the article before I put it up for DYK. Thanks -- Kevmin ( talk) 21:38, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.
All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot ( Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 05:05, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
This is a notice to let you know about Article alerts, a fully-automated subscription-based news delivery system designed to notify WikiProjects and Taskforces when articles are entering Articles for deletion, Requests for comment, Peer review and other workflows ( full list). The reports are updated on a daily basis, and provide brief summaries of what happened, with relevant links to discussion or results when possible. A certain degree of customization is available; WikiProjects and Taskforces can choose which workflows to include, have individual reports generated for each workflow, have deletion discussion transcluded on the reports, and so on. An example of a customized report can be found here.
If you are already subscribed to Article Alerts, it is now easier to
report bugs and
request new features. We are also in the process of implementing a
"news system", which would let projects know about ongoing discussions on a wikipedia-wide level, and other things of interest. The developers also note that some subscribing WikiProjects and Taskforces use the display=none
parameter, but forget to give a link to their alert page. Your alert page should be located at "Wikipedia:PROJECT-OR-TASKFORCE-HOMEPAGE/Article alerts". Questions and feedback should be left at
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Message sent by User:Addbot to all active wiki projects per request, Comments on the message and bot are welcome here.
Thanks. — Headbomb { ταλκ κοντριβς – WP Physics} 08:56, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)
After a recent request on my talk page, I added the Cetaceans project to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans/Popular pages.
The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. I can also provide the full data for any project covered by the bot if requested, though I normally don't keep it for much longer than a week after the list is generated. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! (note that there is an encoding issue with some non-ascii titles, this will be fixed in the next update). Mr. Z-man 19:09, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
Someone should make use of the following news about North Atlantic Right Whales:
NOAA (2009-05-21). "NOAA Expedition Hears Endangered North Atlantic Right Whales off Greenland". National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrration. Retrieved 2009-05-21.-- DThomsen8 ( talk) 01:44, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
In 2005 a study was done which isolated the Bolivian River Dolphin as a new species. I've separated it from Amazon River Dolphin and further separated Inia, but it's a rather sloppy job, since I'm pressed for time lately. Can someone clean the three articles up? Thanks. It should be noted that most of the facts regarding the Amazon River Dolphin likely apply to the entire genus, and the map has been moved to the genus page, since it was created without the knowledge of the division. Bob the Wikipedian ( talk • contribs) 21:26, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
I have nominated Whale song for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Tom B ( talk) 21:00, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
There are a few important changes to the popular pages system. A quick summary:
-- Mr. Z-man 23:53, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
I have conducted a reassessment of the above article as part of the GA Sweeps process. I have found some concerns which you can see at Talk:Dolphinarium/GA1. I have placed the article on hold whilst these are fixed. Thanks. Jezhotwells ( talk) 21:26, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
This is ridiculous. Since when does WP dictate English usage? Usual usage is no caps. Leave it. TREKphiler hit me ♠ 00:05, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Capitalization: There was once a long debate about the capitalization of bird species on Wikipedia. The debate was backed by lots of research on both sides, but also became quite acrimonious. Call me a great wet lettuce (or Lettuce) but I for one hope to avoid repeating that debate, and get on with article-writing. Thus I propose we just borrow the convention from the bird project and then not worry about it too much. That is, capitalize species names when you write them in articles, e.g.
and when you create an article for the species, create it with caps in the title and then immediately create a redirect from the lower-case version of the same name. (N.B.: I didn't take part in the original debate and don't particularly care what the standard is, but standards are often useful and many people want standards, so I am proposing this one).
One wrinkle: it is common practice in the cetacean literature to shorten e.g 'Southern Right Whales have no dorsal fin' to 'Southern Rights have no dorsal fin' i.e. drop 'Whale' as obvious. Two heavyweight books in the area are the Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals (which does this) and the National Audubon Society Guide to Marine Mammals of the World (which doesn't). I propose we allow (but not require) the shortening... it is better to avoid being unnecessarily prescriptive, and having two choices should make for less repetitious prose.
Spellings in taxonomy ( 'i' or 'ii', '-i' or 'es'): This seems to be inconsistent within the literature. Maybe we should have all article names in English, and make all common spellings of the Scientific version redirect to the English. I am thinking about sub-orders and families here; e.g. Mysticeti redirects to baleen whale.
The name of a group of species is not capitalised; birds, thrush family, kingfishers, turtle doves, marsh harriers.
It seems there never was any consensus on this. I'm not sure how wise it is to rely on sister projects for standards on cetaceans. Nor should we come up with our own interpretations of what is useful, aesthetically pleasing, or good in some other way.
One argument for title casing is that it is less ambiguous. Establishing a useful standard casing scheme is, however, not within the scope of Wikipedia. It could be, but isn't any more than refining definitions. The task is to reflect usage. For this, we should see if there is any consensus for the use of these species names in the expert community. Rracecarr provides a good link above. Expanding on that methodology:
I didn't bother going any further as the trend seems clear (348 vs. 2). I can't really think of an argument for going up against the scientific community but would be happy to hear any suggestions. -- Swift ( talk) 22:08, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
I've put up an overview at User:Swift/CETA and notice on User:Swift/CETA-case that can be easily subst-ed onto talk pages. Please feel free to edit either. -- Swift ( talk) 22:20, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
Comment. I came here from Wikipedia:Featured article review/Killer Whale/archive1. As someone who does not know anything about cetaceans (until now I didn't know even how to spell "cetacean"!) I found the weird use of title-case in Killer Whale to be off-putting: it gave the article a pompous air, with the implication that this kind of animal is more important than anything else the reader might be interested in. The scholarly literature (as indicated by Google Scholar) uniformly says "killer whale" instead of "Killer Whale". If a few guides, for their own reasons, want to say "Killer Whale" that shouldn't overturn the mainstream consensus. I don't know why the bird folks decided otherwise but that's not our problem here. Eubulides ( talk) 16:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
For busy contributors wanting a quick summary of the discussion above: The majority of Cetacean species articles use title case for the species names. The majority of literature on the topic, however, uses sentence case. The exception seems to be in field guides but this is the vast minority. Encyclopedic content predominantly uses sentence case as do scientific journals near-universally. See the discussion above for examples and feel free to join the discussion or add your comments below. -- Swift ( talk) 20:18, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
I have a feeling this issue will very shortly be discussed on WikiProject Mammals so maybe we should settle this issue once and for all and get it made into a policy any ideas on how to go about this??? Zoo Pro 12:31, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
Now that killer whale has been moved, all cetacean talk pages tagged to gain as wide an audience as possible and consensus has been reached, I've requested a mass move over at Talk:Bowhead_Whale#Requested_move. Things are moving slowly but surely. -- Swift ( talk) 01:33, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
I wish to suggest a merge between WikiProject Mammals and WikiProject Cetaceans to combine resources, members, task groups and ensure both groups remain as active as possible, It has been a very common problem of late that alot of WikiProjects are falling into dire straights and becoming inactive, Myself and a number of other users have in the past months rescued a number of projects. Just something to think about. I have created this page to allow for a complete discussion and vote if need be. Zoo Pro 06:12, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
A few days ago, Belugaboy535136 ( talk · contribs), a rather new user (fourty edits in three days at the time) labeled himself "Project Coordinator". I and later ZooPro noted that it was a bit out of the ordinary. Then, three days later, he told ZooPro that he had, in fact, been voted as co-ordinator, adding that "It was a one day vote that you probably didn't catch."
I've not noticed such a vote, am curious as to where it is to have taken place, how that could have happened without even a mention on this talk page, how a single day may have sufficed and how any Wikipedian can reasonably have judged Belugaboy535136's abilities in his short time since signing up. Rather than prejudge his intentions on these missing pieces, I figured I'd give Belugaboy535136 a chance to clarify these points. -- Swift ( talk) 20:42, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
Now this explains what Belugaboy535136 is talking about on my talk page. My only concern was his experience and did the project need a coordinator. I was aware that a vote didnt take place (contrary to what he told me), however i left this unchecked as i was wanting to see how it played out. As i did mention to another editor I would have stepped in and stopped any actions that would have harmed the project as i had been keeping a close eye on Belugaboy. Never a dull moment thats for sure. Oh and just as a tagalong to my above suggestion of a merge i have no intention of converting anyone or stuff like that i am more after opinions and such as it will help scope out how active the projects are. Zoo Pro 06:47, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
Nice to see the updating Swift. Zoo Pro 21:07, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.
There is a current proposal to change an animal-related naming convention, which directly effects the the Manual of Style guideline, and the naming conventions policy. If you are interested, your input would be appreciated. Justin chat 06:32, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Please provide input at Talk:Orca#Requested_move regarding proposal to use MSW3 common name of "Killer Whale". Rgrds. -- Tombstone ( talk) 14:10, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
Please provide input at Talk:Bottlenose Dolphin#Requested_move (2). Cheers, Jack ( talk) 14:45, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
I just put up the article, Australodelphis, I have been working up for the last couple of days. Would several people review the article before I put it up for DYK. Thanks -- Kevmin ( talk) 21:38, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.
All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot ( Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 05:05, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
This is a notice to let you know about Article alerts, a fully-automated subscription-based news delivery system designed to notify WikiProjects and Taskforces when articles are entering Articles for deletion, Requests for comment, Peer review and other workflows ( full list). The reports are updated on a daily basis, and provide brief summaries of what happened, with relevant links to discussion or results when possible. A certain degree of customization is available; WikiProjects and Taskforces can choose which workflows to include, have individual reports generated for each workflow, have deletion discussion transcluded on the reports, and so on. An example of a customized report can be found here.
If you are already subscribed to Article Alerts, it is now easier to
report bugs and
request new features. We are also in the process of implementing a
"news system", which would let projects know about ongoing discussions on a wikipedia-wide level, and other things of interest. The developers also note that some subscribing WikiProjects and Taskforces use the display=none
parameter, but forget to give a link to their alert page. Your alert page should be located at "Wikipedia:PROJECT-OR-TASKFORCE-HOMEPAGE/Article alerts". Questions and feedback should be left at
Wikipedia talk:Article alerts.
Message sent by User:Addbot to all active wiki projects per request, Comments on the message and bot are welcome here.
Thanks. — Headbomb { ταλκ κοντριβς – WP Physics} 08:56, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)
After a recent request on my talk page, I added the Cetaceans project to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans/Popular pages.
The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. I can also provide the full data for any project covered by the bot if requested, though I normally don't keep it for much longer than a week after the list is generated. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! (note that there is an encoding issue with some non-ascii titles, this will be fixed in the next update). Mr. Z-man 19:09, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
Someone should make use of the following news about North Atlantic Right Whales:
NOAA (2009-05-21). "NOAA Expedition Hears Endangered North Atlantic Right Whales off Greenland". National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrration. Retrieved 2009-05-21.-- DThomsen8 ( talk) 01:44, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
In 2005 a study was done which isolated the Bolivian River Dolphin as a new species. I've separated it from Amazon River Dolphin and further separated Inia, but it's a rather sloppy job, since I'm pressed for time lately. Can someone clean the three articles up? Thanks. It should be noted that most of the facts regarding the Amazon River Dolphin likely apply to the entire genus, and the map has been moved to the genus page, since it was created without the knowledge of the division. Bob the Wikipedian ( talk • contribs) 21:26, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
I have nominated Whale song for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Tom B ( talk) 21:00, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
There are a few important changes to the popular pages system. A quick summary:
-- Mr. Z-man 23:53, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
I have conducted a reassessment of the above article as part of the GA Sweeps process. I have found some concerns which you can see at Talk:Dolphinarium/GA1. I have placed the article on hold whilst these are fixed. Thanks. Jezhotwells ( talk) 21:26, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
This is ridiculous. Since when does WP dictate English usage? Usual usage is no caps. Leave it. TREKphiler hit me ♠ 00:05, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Capitalization: There was once a long debate about the capitalization of bird species on Wikipedia. The debate was backed by lots of research on both sides, but also became quite acrimonious. Call me a great wet lettuce (or Lettuce) but I for one hope to avoid repeating that debate, and get on with article-writing. Thus I propose we just borrow the convention from the bird project and then not worry about it too much. That is, capitalize species names when you write them in articles, e.g.
and when you create an article for the species, create it with caps in the title and then immediately create a redirect from the lower-case version of the same name. (N.B.: I didn't take part in the original debate and don't particularly care what the standard is, but standards are often useful and many people want standards, so I am proposing this one).
One wrinkle: it is common practice in the cetacean literature to shorten e.g 'Southern Right Whales have no dorsal fin' to 'Southern Rights have no dorsal fin' i.e. drop 'Whale' as obvious. Two heavyweight books in the area are the Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals (which does this) and the National Audubon Society Guide to Marine Mammals of the World (which doesn't). I propose we allow (but not require) the shortening... it is better to avoid being unnecessarily prescriptive, and having two choices should make for less repetitious prose.
Spellings in taxonomy ( 'i' or 'ii', '-i' or 'es'): This seems to be inconsistent within the literature. Maybe we should have all article names in English, and make all common spellings of the Scientific version redirect to the English. I am thinking about sub-orders and families here; e.g. Mysticeti redirects to baleen whale.
The name of a group of species is not capitalised; birds, thrush family, kingfishers, turtle doves, marsh harriers.
It seems there never was any consensus on this. I'm not sure how wise it is to rely on sister projects for standards on cetaceans. Nor should we come up with our own interpretations of what is useful, aesthetically pleasing, or good in some other way.
One argument for title casing is that it is less ambiguous. Establishing a useful standard casing scheme is, however, not within the scope of Wikipedia. It could be, but isn't any more than refining definitions. The task is to reflect usage. For this, we should see if there is any consensus for the use of these species names in the expert community. Rracecarr provides a good link above. Expanding on that methodology:
I didn't bother going any further as the trend seems clear (348 vs. 2). I can't really think of an argument for going up against the scientific community but would be happy to hear any suggestions. -- Swift ( talk) 22:08, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
I've put up an overview at User:Swift/CETA and notice on User:Swift/CETA-case that can be easily subst-ed onto talk pages. Please feel free to edit either. -- Swift ( talk) 22:20, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
Comment. I came here from Wikipedia:Featured article review/Killer Whale/archive1. As someone who does not know anything about cetaceans (until now I didn't know even how to spell "cetacean"!) I found the weird use of title-case in Killer Whale to be off-putting: it gave the article a pompous air, with the implication that this kind of animal is more important than anything else the reader might be interested in. The scholarly literature (as indicated by Google Scholar) uniformly says "killer whale" instead of "Killer Whale". If a few guides, for their own reasons, want to say "Killer Whale" that shouldn't overturn the mainstream consensus. I don't know why the bird folks decided otherwise but that's not our problem here. Eubulides ( talk) 16:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
For busy contributors wanting a quick summary of the discussion above: The majority of Cetacean species articles use title case for the species names. The majority of literature on the topic, however, uses sentence case. The exception seems to be in field guides but this is the vast minority. Encyclopedic content predominantly uses sentence case as do scientific journals near-universally. See the discussion above for examples and feel free to join the discussion or add your comments below. -- Swift ( talk) 20:18, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
I have a feeling this issue will very shortly be discussed on WikiProject Mammals so maybe we should settle this issue once and for all and get it made into a policy any ideas on how to go about this??? Zoo Pro 12:31, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
Now that killer whale has been moved, all cetacean talk pages tagged to gain as wide an audience as possible and consensus has been reached, I've requested a mass move over at Talk:Bowhead_Whale#Requested_move. Things are moving slowly but surely. -- Swift ( talk) 01:33, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
I wish to suggest a merge between WikiProject Mammals and WikiProject Cetaceans to combine resources, members, task groups and ensure both groups remain as active as possible, It has been a very common problem of late that alot of WikiProjects are falling into dire straights and becoming inactive, Myself and a number of other users have in the past months rescued a number of projects. Just something to think about. I have created this page to allow for a complete discussion and vote if need be. Zoo Pro 06:12, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
A few days ago, Belugaboy535136 ( talk · contribs), a rather new user (fourty edits in three days at the time) labeled himself "Project Coordinator". I and later ZooPro noted that it was a bit out of the ordinary. Then, three days later, he told ZooPro that he had, in fact, been voted as co-ordinator, adding that "It was a one day vote that you probably didn't catch."
I've not noticed such a vote, am curious as to where it is to have taken place, how that could have happened without even a mention on this talk page, how a single day may have sufficed and how any Wikipedian can reasonably have judged Belugaboy535136's abilities in his short time since signing up. Rather than prejudge his intentions on these missing pieces, I figured I'd give Belugaboy535136 a chance to clarify these points. -- Swift ( talk) 20:42, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
Now this explains what Belugaboy535136 is talking about on my talk page. My only concern was his experience and did the project need a coordinator. I was aware that a vote didnt take place (contrary to what he told me), however i left this unchecked as i was wanting to see how it played out. As i did mention to another editor I would have stepped in and stopped any actions that would have harmed the project as i had been keeping a close eye on Belugaboy. Never a dull moment thats for sure. Oh and just as a tagalong to my above suggestion of a merge i have no intention of converting anyone or stuff like that i am more after opinions and such as it will help scope out how active the projects are. Zoo Pro 06:47, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
Nice to see the updating Swift. Zoo Pro 21:07, 29 December 2009 (UTC)