User talk:Tony Wills

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Edits to Pukeko

With regard to this, the problem wit citing Britannica is that I can't check the fact. It flies in the face of everything I know about the species (and I am an ornithologist living in New Zealand who studies insular changes, including flightlessness, in the native avifauna). Moreover I can find no other evidence for this fact in journals or the Handbook of the Birds of the World (so I guess I'll have to wander over to the library and check HANZAB, sigh) but I'd suggest that just because Britannica says it is so don't make it so. Sabine's Sunbird talk 00:24, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I realise that, and was making no judgement about whether it was true :-). It is a pity that Britannica don't cite references for everything like a real encyclopaedia ;-). Perhaps just change the wording to 'it is claimed ...' or similar, until a more authoritative source is found? (Keep up the good work :-) --Tony Wills (talk) 00:33, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

I'd be inclined to leave it out. No sense in being wrong on account of our rivals. As for the good work, I'm not lifting a finger more than I have to to to improve Pukeko. I've decided instead to improve Purple Swamphen. You know, the proper article. ;) I figure that is the best way to get rid of Pukeko. Sabine's Sunbird talk 00:38, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't want you to be accused of original research, perhaps you should publish a paper on the subject of Purplkeko flying abilities in different regions, then we will include that :-). Good luck on getting rid of the Pukeko, they're a pretty hardy breed, and just seem to keep popping back up (I think the Purple Swampchicken article may have started out as a Pukeko one) - even if you manage to annihilate the Pukeko you will no doubt have to go on forever fighting the same battle (pretty tenacious invasive species ;-) --Tony Wills (talk) 00:46, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi Tony, Just a note in this regard. Certainly, it would be extremely difficult to find any studies examining the proposition of increasing degrees of flightlessness over the short spans of time with which we humans have been attempting to quantify such things. It would be extremely difficult for me to even imagine how one would go about setting up some sort of short-term experimental system with this intention. As an ornithologist, I am sure that you know of the general tendancy of most Rallidae evolving over time to decreasing degrees of flight ability, in particular, in insular environments, such as is New Zealand. The high incidence of so many of the endemic birds, extinct or still extant, in New Zealand, pre-rattus, and other ground-foraging placental mammals, having been or being tendentially flightless might infer that this could also be the case here. So, the proposition itself of decreasing flight ability would not surprise me, however, how to obtain hard evidence attesting to this fact is another question! In fact, the only possible thing that I could think of from which anyone might have attempted to draw certain conclusions would be possible findings of pre-fossil wing bones and an attempted extrapolative morphometry done on them, which however still might present problems such as the projections of sure assignation of developmental stage, sex, and indeed, of same species!--Steve Pryor (talk) 19:35, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Morebook

Hi Tony. I agree that is a better picture, but that is just our (unpublished) opinion ;-) I went with the one that had a good caption. If I had my druthers, I would use an "illustration"; it is likely that an RS has commented on one. Do you know if Gould did a zoological illustration? Anyway ... with the benefit of hindsight I can now state that my choice was right, I posted on the talk page about this. Regards, cygnis insignis 23:10, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

It is now your published opinion . I agree an illustration is often better than a photo, but it is hard to persuade photographers of that :-). I'll look out for one :-) --Tony Wills (talk) 03:49, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Fantails

I've removed the inappropriate images (makes it sound dirty don't it?) from the respective articles. I'll make some more changes as they occur to me (I think it needs to be made clear that Pied Fantail is the name used for one of the morphs rather than the whole species - although it is the most common morph. I wish we saw the Black fantails in Wellington.). Sabine's Sunbird talk 23:17, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Lazy Fliers redux

Tony, I do have the family monograph by Taylor. I will try and find time to have a look and see if there is anything specifically mentioning the NZ ranger there. I gather you had already checked out the HBW, which I also have, but if you have already checked I won't bother.--Steve Pryor (talk) 21:26, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Wellington meetup

Hey, Looking for your feedback regarding a date/time for the Wellington meetup. Happy New Year :) Lanma726 (talk) 16:04, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Thank you for your help with the gorse article- how embarrassing! I'll get it checked out further if I can. Much obliged. sonia♫ 08:57, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

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May 2013

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Thank you kind little bot for following me around and spotting my typos, I'll recomend that you get an extra allocation of oil for all your hard work ;-) --Tony Wills (talk) 11:42, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Tony Wills. You have new messages at Talk:House Sparrow.
Message added 15:52, 12 August 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

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Re: Whitehead

Do you not see the existing link to Wiktionary? The box at the top right? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 22:06, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. If people are looking for "whitehead" in this context, they propably already know what it is (they've been told they have "whiteheads"), and are looking for more information, not the dictionary definition. --Tony Wills (talk) 22:20, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

The new link you added, comedo, provides that. The earlier one, to pimple, didn't, which is why I had removed it. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 22:24, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

The orginal entry that you removed also linked to Acne vulgaris, which mentions whitehead in the second line of the article. The pimple article indeed doesn't have the word whitehead but does include blackhead - this is perhaps a deficiency of the article rather than an error in disambigurement :-) --Tony Wills (talk) 22:35, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

That definitely didn't fit in with WP:DABMENTION. Whoever is looking for "whitehead" would expect that we take them to an article that at least mentions them :) Ideally you'd create some logical redirect such as whitehead (comedo) or whitehead (skin) or whitehead (pore) or whatever seems the clearest, and then link that from the disambiguation page. That way, if ambiguous links are made in other articles in reference to this term, people who disambiguate them don't have to use unintuitive pipe links ([[comedo|whitehead]]), instead they can use that ([[whitehead (skin)|]]).

BTW you should tell people on top of your talk page that you'll respond to messages here, not elsewhere. I happened to check your user talk after replying, but I would have missed it otherwise. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 14:50, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

I'll leave it to someone who actually is interested in whitehead (skin) to do that ;-). As for wiki talk protocol, I can't imagine why people carry out conversations across multiple talk pages, and figure that if people are at all interested they will check back sometime :-). For that matter I suppose this conversation should have taken place on Talk:Whitehead, but that's my mistake :-) --Tony Wills (talk) 09:32, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Category sorting

Do you have a link to a discussion or guideline on sorting in bird-by-country categories? There wasn't any consistency in the first place (see Category:Birds of Japan, hardly any are sorted by common name) and most of the sorting by common name happened in 2007, so I assumed it was out of date. —Xezbeth (talk) 12:18, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by 'hardly any sorted by common name', as that is the default (they are sorted by the name of the article, which is the common name)? The piped sort attributes that you removed try to sort by the type of bird (eg goose in your Japanese example), which is more useful than sorting on the common name which is not very standard between countries. For a relevant discussion see [1] - using "defaultsort" saves having to do it for each category, you just add a "piped" sort to the exceptions. eg

For the Kelp gull one would add

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gull, Kelp}} [[:Category:Larus|Kelp gull]] [[:Category:Birds of New Zealand]] [[:Category:Birds of South Africa]] [[:Category:Birds of South Australia]]

You could {{DEFAULTSORT:gull, Kelp}}, and that would add an additional category group of lowercase "g" (whereas all the birds not yet sorted by type but starting with "G" would be in a different group under that capital "G") - but probably best to discuss before starting such a new convention.

Deleting long standing entries without an edit comment or discussion, doesn't seem to be appropriate. Also separating other than trivial edits from the downcasing edits would be useful otherwise they will be overlooked due to the wave of those edits going on at present (ie help people maintaining those pages by putting non downcasing edits as a separate edit). --Tony Wills (talk) 21:23, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Red Admiral

Looks as if it's been undone. I have to say that Lepidoptera pages seem to show a complete disregard for MoS, with a mix of binomials, capped common and lc common names. Jimfbleak - talk to me? 13:44, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

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THANK YOU

Thanks so much for all your work getting lists of common species observed in naturewatchNZ for the #NZspecies Editathon. I VERY much appreciate it! I'll begin working my way through it both for the Editathon and also for future Wikipedia work. Ambrosia10 (talk) 01:04, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

Focus Stacking Talk

Please see the response to your "range of focus" talk section of focus stacking. I've added my reasons for the changes. If you agree, please unrevert. Let me know of any other concerns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Focus_stacking#.22range_of_focus.22 Thank you. Edmarchant (talk) 22:51, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

I have been unable to find a reliable source that states that focus stacking is a digital process, or even a computational process. Have you had any luck?

I've responded to your 28 June 2016 input to the "range of focus" talk section of focus stacking. Do you have an opinion for the best phrase to use instead of the undesireable use of "depth of field"?

Edmarchant (talk) 23:57, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, sorry didn't see your update, have replied there --Tony Wills (talk) 12:21, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

New response. If you agree you should make the appropriate changes. There is a third item (picture caption) for improvement that you might want to consider.

Edmarchant (talk) 01:13, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

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See Alsos

Hi Tony, I don't want to get into an edit war, especially over such a nice article, but please have a look at MOS:SEEALSO where it says (inter alia): As a general rule, the "See also" section should not repeat links that appear in the article's body or its navigation boxes." ... I can't see why this would be an exception to this general rule, which seems to work quite well elsewhere in Wikipedia? Best wishes DBaK (talk) 13:04, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

If you don't want to get into an edit war, then don't re-remove content, then enter discussion afterwards, it's an 'I know best' approach and doesn't go down well ;-) But I think the discussion should go to the talk page of the article so I will start one there :-) --Tony Wills (talk) 21:08, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Doesn't go down well? Neither did your strangely smug and hostile response to a friendly edit. But I think I will leave you to it with your article. Enjoy. DBaK (talk) 21:39, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Sorry that you thought that was strangely smug and hostile. But generally if I change something, and it gets changed back, I discuss first rather than trying to insist on my change. So sorry again if my response sounded really hostile, the ';-)' (crooked smile or wink) and ':-)' are trying to keep this discussion light - obviously I failed :-(. It appears that I'm out of practice at wiki communication :-). --Tony Wills (talk) 22:16, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

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