Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans

This WikiProject is about cetaceans - that's whales, dolphins and porpoises to you and me. The aim of the project is to write a good description of every known cetacean species out there (all 78, or 79, or 80,... however many there are :-)).

Announcements

• (27/11/2006) The Cetaceans Portal is now featured!
• (07/11/2006) Portal:Cetaceans is a featured portal candidate.
• (28/09/2006) Taxonomy templates created to ease taxonomic listing on pages.
• (10/06/2006) Redesigned layout of Cetaceans Portal
• (26/06/2005) Added a list of species (List of dolphins and whales)
• (26/02/2004) All species now have IUCN status and a range map in the taxobox
• (12/02/2004) All species now have an article or part of an article
• (05/02/2004) There is a vigourous debate going on at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life about whether and how taxoboxes should be extended to include there. General comments there and specific comments about how cetacean articles would be best served here are welcome.
• (30/12/2003) We now have an article on each of the species in the Cephalorhynchus genus.
• (28/11/2003) We now have an article on each of the species in the Ziphidae family.
• (26/11/2003) We now have an article on each of the porpoise species. Shame the Delphinidae are five times as numerous!
• (24/11/2003) We now have an article on everything in the Mysticeti suborder. Shame the toothies are five times as numerous!
• (20/11/2003) Rice's classification moved in full to Cetacea article. This is liable to more updates... every book/webpage claiming to reproduce his listing says something different

Queue

Put news stories here that perhaps should be integrated/referenced in appropriate articles (if you are really into this stuff, maybe get Google News Alerts for "whale", "dolphin", and "porpoise").

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4034383.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5066538.stm

http://news.scotsman.com/edinburgh.cfm?id=1044482006

Things to be done

Featured Article/Good Article Candidates

These articles are regarded as being comprehensive and may have been labelled as a good article or is a featured article; or may be good enough to almost be listed as either.

= Good Article candidate, = Featured Article candidate

• Baiji - Since its demise this article has improved a lot, with a bit more work could be GA.

Requests

Leave any requests you have or have found elsewhere here.

• Follow the Wikipedia:Manual_of_style#Capital_letters guidelines regarding capital letters, for consistency with the rest of Wikipedia. Example: "Killer Whale" should be "killer whale" (especially in text but in section headings and article titles too as precedent for text style). It is inappropriate for different sections of Wikipedia to follow different styles.
• List of extinct species --> already created: List of extinct cetaceans
• Gray's Paradox

Stubs

These articles are very short and may only include a sentence or two.

• Bolivian River Dolphin (new species)
• Cephalorhynchus
• Callosity
• Cetology - a few paragraphs long, but about 2,300 years out of date.

Expand

These articles are not listed as stubs but are only just about long enough to escape being so. Any help expanding these would be appreciated.

• Hector's Beaked Whale
• Ginkgo-toothed Beaked Whale
• Shepherd's Beaked Whale
• Archaeoceti
• Cumberland Sound Beluga
• Blubber
• Humpback Dolphins

Copyedit/Formatting

These articles may have enough text but are poorly formatted and may have spelling mistakes.

• Beached whale
• Beaked whale

Patrol for vandalism

Have a look at the recent changes for the Category:Cetaceans

Collaboration of the Month

The current Cetaceans Collaboration of the month is North Pacific right whale. To nominate or vote for an article visit the collaboration page.

The Cetaceans Collaboration of the Month is a collaborative effort to improve whale, porpoise and dolphin-related articles, in order to help them reach featured-article standards. Anyone, no matter what their level of knowledge about Cetacea, is welcome to lend a hand. Each month, an article is chosen by people interested in the topic, and for the next month the chosen article is worked on, under Wikipedia's principle of collaborative editing. This provides a single article for people to concentrate their efforts on collaboratively.

Article assessment

Article assessment is the process by which cetacean articles are sorted into different qualities. Assessment is done through the assessment page.

Article structure

Bowhead Whale
Conservation status
Conservation Dependent
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Subclass:	Eutheria
Order:	Cetacea
Suborder:	Mysticeti
Family:	Balaenidae
Genus:	Balaena
Species:	B. mysticetus
Binomial name
Balaena mysticetus Linnaeus, 1758
Bowhead Whale range

Articles on almost every species have now been started. Most species have their own article with the exception of Mesoplodont Whales - too little information known for separate articles - and Humpback Dolphins - the lack of consensus from the taxonomists makes difficult to know what species to choose. Better to do at the genus level to avoid making a judgement.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/taxobox usage for the details of how to construct a taxobox.

Images

An image in JPG or PNG format is very welcome, although the latter format is not as good for photographs. For public domain resources try the American National Oceanic and Atomospheric Administration, particularly the National Marine Fisheries Historic Image Collection.

Range maps

The basic template map is the world map without country borders that can be found at Wikipedia:Blank maps.

The blue colour shows where the species is (sometimes) present and white is where it is absent.

The grey colour has R:205 G:195 B:204 The blue colour has R:0 G:0 B:255 (:-))

If you edit a map, try to save at full-quality so that no blurring occurs at the edge of the countries - this blurring makes further editing of the map more difficult because the "fill" function of many image editing programs doesn't work with the blurred edges.

What to include

Some topics that might (and probably should) be written about are physical characteristics (birth size and weight, adult size and weight (male and female), life expectancy, gestation period, lactation period, baleen or toothed, colour, callosities, fins size shape and existence, speed, what do they eat, interaction with other species etc.) Population and distribution including changes over time. Distinguishing between one species and another. The relationship between this species and the whaling and whale-watching industries. The discoverer/describer of the species. Scientific names. Taxonomy debates. English meaning of Scientific name. This list is not exhaustive!

The study of whales is cetology. Some information is probably best described in an article outside a particular species e.g. baleen.

Articles at higher than species level

... check out Category:Cetaceans

Species

• See List of cetaceans.

References

There are huge numbers of books on the subject. The websites listed at cetacea may be useful for quick fact-verifying

• http://www.acsonline.org/ American Cetacean Society
• British Cetacean Site especially interesting is taxonomy
• Cetacea.org homepage
• Walker's Mammals of the World Online - Cetaceans (Unfortunately, the online edition of Walker's Mammals of the World is no longer available. The print edition may still be purchased through the Johns Hopkins University Press.)
• Cetacean Society International

Free pictures

The NOAA has some great cetacean photos on the web. It is a U.S. Federal Government department, so its photos are public domain. They're on many websites and can be tricky to find through searches. Here are some examples:

• http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/read/protspp/RightWhale/page3.html
• http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/mammals/cetaceans/

Participants

1. Belugaboy535136-Project Coordinator
2. User:Rav314
3. User:Pcb21 (Pete)
4. Tannin
5. Dante Alighieri | Talk (just the river dolphins, really)
6. Neutrality (talk)
7. Death Eater Dan #(Muahaha) Created the new article box on the portal main page
8. Chris_huh
9. UberScienceNerd
10. Belugaperson Edited Beluga page, which is rather fitting
11. User:Jimfbleak
12. User:NuclearWinner
13. Neil916 (Talk) Also a member of WikiProject Fishes
14. User:Clayoquot
15. User:SammytheSeal here and there
16. Pengo
17. User:Shirehorse Adding photographs (example Harbour Porpoise vs Bottlenose Dolphin)
18. István
19. User:FionaBlinco
20. User:Jonas Poole
21. User:Emperor13
22. User:Guidewell
23. User:Rlendog
24. User:SWF Trainer
25. User:Rav314
26. User:NPRW4ever North Pacific Right Whale
27. AUburnTiger (talk) 18:37, 23 January 2009 (UTC) Want to help anywhere I can.
28. User:Eliezg
29. Biriwilg
30. Frosted Orange
31. Elapied

Inactive

1. KJen74
2. 68.169.113.246
3. Akhampton

Other WikiProjects

Parents : Wikipedia:WikiProject Mammals, Wikipedia:WikiProject Marine life
Grandparents : Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life, Wikipedia:WikiProject Biology
Greatgrandparent : Wikipedia:WikiProject Science

Siblings : Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds (big sister!), Wikipedia:WikiProject Dog breeds (yapping little brother), Wikipedia:WikiProject Primates (big brother), Wikipedia:WikiProject Sharks (step-brother) Wikipedia:WikiProject Fishes (kissing cousin)

Things to be standardized

• Capitalisation: (discuss)

Templates

Talk page box

Add this template to the top of talk pages of any relevant articles. This will add a box at the top of the page:

Use: {{CetaTalk}}

Collaboration of the Month box

This template just displays the current collaboration of the month.

The current Cetaceans Collaboration of the month is North Pacific right whale. To nominate or vote for an article visit the collaboration page.

Use: {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans/Collaboration/CetaceansCOTM}}

Portal box

This can be placed on any cetacean based article to link to the cetaceans portal. Template:Cetaceaportal

Use: {{cetaceaportal}}

Userbox

If you want to add a userbox to your home page, letting everyone know about your interests in this project we have one.

This user is a member of
WikiProject Cetaceans.

Use: {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans/Userbox}}

Welcome message

If you see that someone has added themself to the contributors list or the userbox to their page, you can add this to their talk page.

Hello WikiProject Cetaceans. Thank you for your contribution to articles under the Cetaceans WikiProject! This project exists to enable interested users to collaborate on articles related to cetaceans. Should you be interested, there are many tasks where you can do to contribute:

Here are some Cetaceans WikiProject tasks you can do. Patrol: Look through the Category:Cetaceans for recent changes Assessment: Unassessed cetacea articles and unknown-importance cetacea articles. Copyedit/Formatting: Bottlenose dolphin, Beached whale, Cetacea Expand: Hector's beaked whale, Ginkgo-toothed beaked whale, Shepherd's beaked whale, Archaeoceti, Cumberland Sound beluga, Blubber, Baiji, Humpback dolphin, Amazon river dolphin Verify: Spinner dolphin, Whale, Dolphin, Cetacea Stubs: Bolivian river dolphin (new species), Cephalorhynchus Images: Pictures of the baiji are wanted.

We hope one of these will tempt you into considering joining this WikiProject. If you have any questions, feel free to ask one of our project contributors, or inquire on the project's talk page. Again, Thanks!

Use: {{subst:Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans/Welcome}}

Collaboration thanks

Add this to COTM voters' talk pages to thank them.

Thank you for your support of the WikiProject Cetaceans Collaboration. This month North Pacific right whale was selected to be improved to featured article status. Hope you can help.

Use: {{subst:Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans/Collaboration/Thanks}}