Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds/Outreach/Newsletter May 2008

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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...

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; 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:

• {{User|jmgarg1}}
• {{User|Lighthead}}
• {{User|OnorioCatenacci}}
• {{User|Rocky Mountain Goat}}

; 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

Image:Cockatielfemale.jpg

• 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 {{User|Maias}}, {{User|Dixonsej}} and {{User|MeegsC}}, 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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