User:Sabine's Sunbird/Writing Bird Articles

I CAN HAZ ARTICL?

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 arefound 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

I may look cool, but can you find out anything about me?

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 throuw 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. 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 infancy 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 assement 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 excecutive 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.

Dealing with journal articles

Getting hold of them

Many journal articles are hidden behind subscription services and are harder to get on the internet than porn, 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 experiement 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.