Talk:Magdalena Bermejo

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A fact from Magdalena Bermejo appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 23 November 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that of 143 gorillas studied by Magdalena Bermejo in October 2002, only 13 were still alive four months later?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2013/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Magdalena Bermejo.

Wikipedia

Problem with the wording of the intro

Magdalena (Magda) Bermejo (born c. 1962) is a Spanish primatologist and world authority on the western lowland gorilla. Since 1991 she has lived for long periods with her husband, German Illera, in the rainforests of the Republic of Congo, conducting research and becoming increasingly involved in gorilla conservation. She established that large number of chimpanzees had been killed by viruses, with as many as 5,500 gorillas dying from Ebola in Gabon and the Republic of Congo.[1]

Can I point out the gorillas and chimpanzees are two different things?

Here we have gorilla, gorilla, chimpanzee, gorilla with not indication that Bermejo researched two different species. You have jammed "chimpanzee" into the discussion of her work with gorillas as if it was all part of the same thing. In fact, the use of the expression "with as many as 5,500 gorillas etc" following directly on in the sentence, indicates that gorillas are a type of chimpanzee. Using the word "with" to join the two statements doesn't work, because it implies one is a subgroup of the other, separated by location.

If you want to include the information on chimpanzees in the lead, then it must be clear that there are two studies and species involved. e.g.:

Berejo's work with gorillas followed her study of chimpanzees in which she found.....
Berejo found that in Gabon etc, 5,500 gorillas died etc. She also established that chimpanzees etc... .

The expression is so poor that I checked to see if a vandal had come along and changed gorilla to chimpanzee.

Amandajm (talk) 09:23, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Amandajm, you're right - thanks for pointing that out. For now, I'm removing the mention of chimpanzees because there is no mention of their deaths in the article. Somewhere I came across an estimate of about 70% mortality for chimpanzees, then I couldn't find it again. I also changed the mortality figure to 5,000. It's one of the puzzling things about the sources - Bermejo herself, in her Science article, said 5,000, but several later sources say 5,500. I don't know where they got that number. RockMagnetist (talk) 15:17, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Either way, it's a distressing figure. Amandajm (talk) 01:57, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]