Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds#Repetitive work

I just noticed this old discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Deceased_Wikipedians#Pvmoutside - wonder if anyone knew him or contacted him personally? If so, someone should consider adding in a short memorial blurb at Wikipedia:Deceased_Wikipedians. Shyamal (talk) 06:33, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

File:Ambox warning yellow.svg

The article :Ural Striped-maned pigeon has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Tagged as Unreferenced and unimproved for 15 and 1/2 years. Tagged for Notability concerns for 6 months. No other language has a reliably sourced article from which to translate. While species are notable, breeds are not.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{Tlc|proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{Tlc|proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Bearian (talk) 21:46, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

:*I'd vote to delete, but can't find the voting page? -

:MPF (talk) 17:26, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

::It's just a PROD, so unless someone wants to keep it, this is going away in 3 days. -- Reconrabbit 17:39, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

::: I'm inclined to agree, but there is a category for pigeon breeds. Is there somewhere else we should be asking this question? If deletion is appropriate, the same editor also created Sverdlovsk blue-gray mottle-headed pigeon.  —  Jts1882 | talk  19:14, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

AviList, "A Unified Global Checklist of the World’s Birds" has just been published: . This is the combined effort of Avibase, the American Ornithological Society, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, BirdLife International, and the International Ornithologists' Union to reach agreement on the world's avian taxonomy. Many species' articles will need to be rewritten! Craigthebirder (talk) 16:28, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

:And it needs an article itself. Unless someone else jumps in (feel free) I'll write one in a couple of days. Craigthebirder (talk) 16:58, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

::I'll see if I can give it a quick starter tonight 👍 - MPF (talk) 19:14, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

:::@Craigthebirder - just a thought, though: I'd be holding fire on rewriting species articles just yet, particularly for species split by IOC but lumped by AviList. I know from personal communications with IOC that at least some of these, the IOC folk maintain strongly should be retained as splits (examples mentioned to me Sandwich Tern/Cabot's Tern and Inca Jay/Green Jay): I am presuming that AviList will have, like IOC did, [bi?]-annual reviews, and I'd guess that even though AviList lump them for now, they will (re-)split them soon. It would make a right mess to lump pages here now, and then have to re-separate them soon after. We should obviously mention that AviList lump them, but keep them at their current IOC status until the situation is clearer. - MPF (talk) 19:26, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

::::I wasn't planning to go back to my earlier expanded articles any time soon, if ever...just sighing, I suppose. I seldom use AviBase as a taxonomy source; I stick to IOC, BLI/HBW, and AOS (north and south). And I was thinking more of articles where differences among their treatments are described - often BLI/HBW is an outlier. Craigthebirder (talk) 19:35, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

:::::@Craigthebirder Arrgh! For some unknown reason I put 'AviBase' above when of course I meant 'AviList'. I've corrected that now, does it change what you added in any way? - MPF (talk) 00:39, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

:::: Agree on holding fire on changing species articles, etc. For starters, the consensus of the project is to follow the IOC, so we'd need a discussion to switch to AviList. We probably should wait for final IOC 15.2, which will be making all the lumps needed for alignment. Apart from all the species lumps there are four families merged, although Icteridae/Icteriidae won't be missed, as well as many genus changes. A list of the differences between IOC 15.1 and AviList-2015 can be found with the [https://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/compare.jsp?source1=avilist&version1=AVILIST2025&source2=ioc&version2=IOC15_01&continent=®_type=3 Avibase comparison tool].  —  Jts1882 | talk  15:17, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

One that clearly does now need to be done here, the split of Yellow Warbler into Mangrove Warbler (Setophaga petechia) and American Yellow Warbler (Setophaga aestiva); it's been mentioned before (Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 75#Yellow warbler) with a conclusion of 'wait to see what AviList does': AviList splits it, upholding IOC's long-standing treatment. - MPF (talk) 23:17, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

I've been looking at the Avilist spreadsheet and using the Avibase comparison tool linked above. I've noticed these changes.

• New order Galbuliformes with two families, jacamars and puffbirds, split from Piciformes
• 4 families lumped:
• Bucorvidae (ground hornbills) merged into Bucerotidae (hornbills)
• Alcippeidae merged into Leiothrichidae (laughing thrushes)
• Scotocercidae (streaked scrub warbler) merged into Cettiidae
• Icteriidae (yellow breasted chat) merged into Icteridae

• 20 fewer genera than in IOC 15.1 (2376 vs 2396). 35 genera included in IOC and not in Avilist, 15 genera included in Avilist and not in IOC.
• 126 species have changed genus
• 12 species have been split to give 28 species
• 234 species lumped to give 99 species - (7 species lumped for the imperial shag, 7 species lumped for the little shrikethrush)
• 26 species have a different English name (not counting those associated with splits/lumps where the English name is sometimes changed)

Subspecies are still work in progress. The Avilist website:

https://www.avilist.org/checklist/components-of-the-avilist-checklist/

has this text:

" AviList v2025 started with a baseline list of subspecies from IOC v11.2 (July 2021), and this initial subspecies taxonomy has been largely carried through to AviList v2025."

and

"An initial task for AviList v2026 will be to bring the subspecies into full alignment with the final version of IOC (15.2, expected in July/August 2025)."

Avilist involved processing a large amount of information and there will inevitably be errors. Laurent Raty has pointed out on Birdforum that a few of the specific epithets are questionable. see https://www.birdforum.net/threads/new-unified-list-of-birds-avilist.464188/page-27#post-4804826

I've been told that IOC 15.2 will be closer to AviList, but that it won't be identical.

-Aa77zz (talk) 16:56, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

:@Aa77zz any info as to the differences? I'm guessing it might include the Sandwich Tern/Cabot's Tern and Inca Jay/Green Jay cases I mentioned above? - MPF (talk) 13:57, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

::{{u|MPF}} I know nothing more about the content. The aim is to release it later this summer. - Aa77zz (talk) 15:17, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

:::OK thanks! - MPF (talk) 16:20, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

The pages for 4 (perhaps more) of scolopacid genera have subfamilies given. There are a couple of things which seem off about these.

• For Prosobonia the subfamily is given as Calidrinae, and for Arenaria as Arenariinae, but the cladogram at Scolopacidae has these two genera plus Calidris in a trichotomy.
• For Limosa the subfamily is given as Tringinae, but the genus is the second basalmost branch in the cladogram, distant from Tringa.

Reference to Google Scholar finds [https://academic.oup.com/auk/article/133/3/544/5149231 Cheser et al, Fifty-seventh Supplement to the American Ornithologists' Union Check-list of North American Birds (2016)] with 5 subfamilies, Numeniinae, Limosinae, Scolopacinae, Tringinae and Arenariinae (Arenariinae has priority over Calidrinae; Phalaropodinae is sunk in Tringinae).

Remove the subfamilies from the taxoboxes? or revise Scolopacidae to document the Cheser et al classification and modify all the genera taxoboxes in line? Lavateraguy (talk) 13:58, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

:Subfamilies are often problematic as they are not listed by the IOC and different sources sometimes use different subfamily definitions. In addition, major phylogenetic studies sometimes ignore subfamilies altogether. Against this, when families have a large number of genera, it is convenient to split them up into subfamilies.

:Chesser et al 2016 was published before the big study by Černý and Natale in 2022. In this case I think it is safer to remove subfamilies from the Taxonomy templates. - Aa77zz (talk) 14:29, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

::FWIW, the cladogram in the article, which I assume to be based on Černý and Natale (2022) seems to line up with the Cheser et al subfamilies, i.e. all 5 subfamilies can be identified with non-overlapping clades in the cladogram. Lavateraguy (talk) 14:39, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

::OTOH, there isn't an obvious reliable source explicitly assigning all the genera to the different families (and Černý and Natale have one genus ambiguously placed). I presume that the Lavateraguy (talk) 18:33, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

::: Yes, it's a shame the active global checklists don't use subfamilies. H&M use them, but that is rather dated now so can't be used without corraboration. The plans for online H&M5 seems to have been delayed or abandoned; the families they briefly published did have subfamily revisions. The Birdlife checklists had subfamilies based on the HBW series (updated in two volume summaries), but I recently noticed that the latest version (9.1) dropped the subfamilies. So subfamilies have to be got from more specialist studies.

::: Funnily enough I was looking at Scolopacidae subfamilies yesterday afternoon. The five subfamily revision in Chesser et al (2016) is discussed in this [https://americanornithology.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/2016-B.pdf Proposal Set 2016-B], which has the cladogram they used as evidence (from Gibson & Baker, 2012). The SACC also opted for five subfamilies in [http://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/SACCprop555.html SACC Proposal 555]. H&M4 has the same subfamilies, apart from using Calidrinae Instead of Arenariinae, but their tribes are not consistent with the newer phylogenies. The Černý and Natale (2022) confirms the validity of 5 subfamilies as clades, and places the two genera not included in the Gibson & Baker study: Prosobonia in the Arenariinae clade and Lymnocryptes in Scolopacinae clade (they don't call them subfamilies, though). The sequence in AviList-2025 is also consistent with the five subfamily system. In short, I think we can use the subfamilies citing Chesser et al and Cerny & Natale.  —  Jts1882 | talk  13:25, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

It looks like all the subspecies of Purple Swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio) were prematurely elevated to species in 1998 based on an article published in a Dutch birding magazine.[https://www.dutchbirding.nl/journal/pdf/DB_1998_20_1.pdf#page=19] The article based this action on poor understanding of a previously published genetic study by a different author. Notably, this previous study only looked at mitochondrial DNA which is not reliable for species delimitation, especially in birds. Newer papers have rejected elevating the subspecies, and more recent phylogenetic studies such as [https://academic.oup.com/auk/article/132/1/140/5149144] still treat them as subspecies, noting only that “several subspecies and subspecies groups may represent species-level lineages.” The recently published [https://www.avilist.org/ AviList] also rejected elevating the subspecies and remarked that:

The Porphyrio porphyrio complex is treated as a single polytypic species pending further research. Sometimes treated as six species based largely on mitochondrial-dominated DNA data (Sangster 1998; Garcia-R & Trewick 2015; Verry et al. 2023) that indicate deep divergences and paraphyly with respect to the two species of takahe, P. mantelli and P. hochstetteri. Available nuclear DNA data (Garcia-R & Trewick 2015) are mostly uninformative and mtDNA divergence times may be over-estimated. Further research incorporating denser sampling of nuclear DNA will be needed to determine species limits in this complex.

On Wikipedia, we currently treat all six subspecies as separate species. This seems to be in conflict with the current consensus of ornithologists and I think we need to change them back into subspecies in their respective articles. Nosferattus (talk) 15:48, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

: The split was implemented in 2015 by the now sadly deceased {{u|Pvmoutside}}, so we can't ask him for the logic behind this decision. I'm not opposed to re-merging the articles. Hemiauchenia (talk) 16:15, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

::Oh, didn't know they died. If there is no current scientific consensus for splitting, they should be merged back, unless we somehow find it worthwhile to keep the subspecies articles. FunkMonk (talk) 17:14, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

:::In Wikipedia, we follow the IOC World Bird List (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds/References) when it comes to such questions, and that list seems to list them as separate species. Other sources like "Birds of the World" also have them separate. I think we are good here. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 17:27, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

::::The new collaborative AviList (see above) relumps them. I would expect the next IOC (15.2, due in July or August) to do so, as IOC members were major players in creating AviList. If so, that will be the time to combine the separate pages. Craigthebirder (talk) 17:46, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

:::::I'd be inclined to keep them as per IOC 15.1 at least for the time being but mention the subspecies options on their respective pages; it would be a lot of nuisance to lump them all into one page and then have to re-separate them all again in a year or two when further research proves they are distinct after all . . . MPF (talk) 08:30, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

::::::Agree, wait for now. eBird still separates them at the moment too (which I learned getting the Grey-headed as a lifer this year). Note that [https://www.worldbirdnames.org/new/updates/proposed-splits/|this lump hasn't been tabled for the next update either]. Sabine's Sunbird talk 02:10, 26 June 2025 (UTC)