Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds/Outreach/Newsletter May 2008

Welcome to the third issue of the Birds WikiProject newsletter. Good news: we've finally eliminated our massive backlog of unassessed articles! Never fear though; we have plenty of new group tasks to keep us busy. See details below...

Articles of note

New featured articles and lists:

1. Emperor Penguin (April 5)
2. Red-billed Chough (April 10)

New good articles:

1. Cattle Egret (April 18)

Featured list review candidate

1. List of birds in Canada and the United States Needs to be sourced (see the list of citations requested here) to avoid being de-listed.

Welcome to our newest members

• jmgarg1 (talk · contribs)
• Lighthead (talk · contribs)
• OnorioCatenacci (talk · contribs)
• Rocky Mountain Goat (talk · contribs)

Welcome banner

We've got a new greeting, which can be put on the talk page of new members to welcome them to the project. To use it, simply paste {{subst:Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds/Outreach/Welcome|~~~~}} into the talk page.

Project news

• Last month's collaboration (Cattle Egret) was promoted to GA status before the month even ended! Help us do the same with Cockatiel, which is our current project collaboration. This is a good chance to help our Aviculture task force get their first project off the ground.
• On a related note, be sure to vote for June's collaboration, which will be chosen on 21 May. Nominations are listed on the collaboration page; feel free to add a new article to the list if there's one you'd especially like to see worked on.
• Thanks to tag team efforts by Maias (talk · contribs), Dixonsej (talk · contribs) and MeegsC (talk · contribs), all previously unassessed bird articles have now been assessed. Excellent work—thanks to all who helped with this massive task!
• A change in Wikipedia's taxobox setup has meant the removal of the IUCN status scale image from all articles. These will need to be re-added to all appropriate articles (that is, all articles for which the IUCN has a listing) by hand—unfortunately, the use of a bot to do this is apparently out of the question! To re-display the scale, add "| status_system = iucn3.1" to the taxobox parameters in the article.

Bird family article drive

A drive is on to bring all of our bird family articles up to at least start class. Currently, more than 40 families have only stub-class articles. See the list of families needing improvement here to help with the project.

Bird list template creation

As a first step in creating templates for the bird family headers used in various country/state/province birds lists, there's a page here to set up and edit the information we'll put in the templates. Please help to improve our lists by writing a short summary of a bird family or two. We have nearly 270 to do!

Got a suggestion? A correction? Something you'd like to see included in a future issue? Drop a note at the Tip Line with your ideas!

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