User:Shyamal/todo

Birds of the Indian region

Many sources are hard to find, especially to Internet researchers and to general seekers of information. Nearly all the recent bird guides are aimed at tourist audiences with a focus on nomenclatural and taxonomic changes; rough distributions; and are written without sufficient field effort, lack literature reviews or bibliographies with little coverage on ecological and cultural aspects that are potentially important for conservation. These publications cost a lot and public libraries stocking them are non-existent in many tropical region. The idea here (and hopefully numerous others will join in as others have done in some parts of the world) is to bring some balance, review the available literature and make Wikipedia articles useful for serious researchers as well as people living in India who might look up information on the birds around them.

The ticks indicates that key sources have been examined and information has been incorporated into the Wikipedia article. This would also mean that key references that are available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library are linked and key references found via Google Scholar have been examined. There are always unpublished theses, expensive books (like the Handbook of the Birds of the World) and new research that may need to be looked up periodically. Those without ticks have not been reviewed by me. Regardless of the ticks, all articles can do with additional copy-editing, sourcing and updates. The species list below begins with the commoner birds although some rare and enigmatic birds jump the priority queue.

Persons adding images (especially overenthusiastic Indians) should do so with knowledge and care. Ideally they should know the biology of the species and ensure that there is some significance to the image and be reasonable. There really are too many images of some of the commoner species and merely adding another, especially one that you took, is hardly helpful. Captioning them as "Shot in X location" or "Close-up" usually suggests that the photographer knows little about the bird and are indications that the image is worthy of removal. Wikipedia is not a photography gallery and photographs lacking any explicit pedagogical value are best retained in a gallery on Wikimedia Commons. Location information, dates and context are however important to include as descriptions associated with the file on Commons - images lacking location and date are of dubious value - as can be shown by numerous images imported from Flickr which are unusable without metadata.

- the ones I think are especially well worked and possibly better than accounts published just about anywhere else.

• Viewership for Sarus crane - breeding season conspicuousness?

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.

The following are grouped for convenience of editing.