Kyleharms

Online mentor

Hello! I am one of the online mentors, and I am interested in helping your students with their conservation biology course. I do a lot of writing about lemurs and national parks in Madagascar (such as Marojejy National Park), so there are a lot of articles under the topic of conservation biology that I would like to see get some attention. If your students need suggestions, just let me know. – VisionHolder « talk » 16:51, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Welcome!

Welcome...

Hello, Kyleharms, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome! Sophus Bie ^(talk) 13:27, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

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You're welcome! Good luck with your class; I hope everything goes smoothly! Sophus Bie ^(talk) 08:09, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Suggestions

Here is a list of what I found at a quick glance. There are certainly more articles out there that could use a lot of work:

Article	Issues
Ecosystem	Massive clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references (good for a group project)
Keystone species	Massive clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references
Flagship species	Massive clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references
Indicator species	Massive clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references
Umbrella species	Massive clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references
Lacey Act of 1900	Massive clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references... but also becoming a hotly contested topic because of recent raids at Gibson Guitar Corporation—the tea party movement may give grief to any student daring to fix this up. However, the article is badly needed given the press this topic may receive...
United States Fish and Wildlife Service	Also likely to be a hot topic because of attacks by the tea party movement per the same reasons given for the Lacey Act above...
Rainforest Alliance	Same as above... hot topic politically, so care needs to be taken with neutrality
Conservation reliant species	clean-up and expansion
Biodiversity hotspot	clean-up and expansion
Conservation (ethic)	clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references
Ecosystem diversity	expansion
Habitat corridor/Wildlife corridor	These two articles will need to be merged, illustrated, referenced, and expanded
Monoculture	clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references
Environmental protection	Massive clean-up, expansion, and filling in missing references (good for a group project)
Food chain	This may fall a bit outside of the scope of your class, but it is crucial for the topic and needs massive expansion
Illegal logging	expansion, references, and clean-up
Poaching	expansion, references, and clean-up
Bushmeat	expansion, references, and clean-up
Wildlife trade	expansion, references, and clean-up
Nature reserve	country-specific details should be moved to separate articles, and the article should be written to cover the topic in general, with a global perspective
Endemism	expansion, references, and clean-up
National park	clean-up, references, expansion... and balance it out for a world perspective (not U.S.-centric)
Rainforest	expansion, references, and clean-up
Ecotourism	major clean-up (re-writing text, picture placement & captioning, etc.) and references needed, as well as covering any missing material
Conservation movement	This one has so many problems, that only the most self-motivated students should try to tackle it...
Biosphere	major expansion, clean-up, and references (good for a group project)
Habitat fragmentation	expansion, clean-up, and references
Habitat destruction	clean-up, references, and possibly some expansion
In-situ conservation	major expansion, clean-up, and references
Ex-situ conservation	expansion, clean-up, and references
IUCN Red List	expansion, clean-up, and references
Clearcutting	expansion, clean-up, and references
Disturbance (ecology)/Perturbation (biology)	These two articles may need to be merged, followed by expansion, clean-up, and filling in references...
Natural resource	major expansion, clean-up, and references (good for a group project)
Cyanide fishing	clean-up, expansion, and references ... pictures would be nice, but that would require getting experts to release some—you can work with me on that
Environmental impact of fishing	Massive expansion needed... good for a group project
Carbon footprint	massive clean-up, expansion, and references
Island ecology	needs references, expansion, and clean-up
Aquatic ecosystem	needs references, expansion, and clean-up
Marine ecosystem	needs references, expansion, and clean-up
Freshwater ecosystem	major expansion
Water conservation	needs references, expansion, and clean-up
Wildlife management	needs references, expansion, and clean-up
Reforestation	clean-up, expansion, and references
Natural resource management	expansion, clean-up, and references needed — but this topic could get very controversial, so students need to be very cautious about bias by making sure that they remain neutral
Conservation biology	Although nearly complete, this article needs a lot of clean-up: filling missing references, copy-editing, writing a comprehensive lead section
Biodiversity Action Plan	clean-up, expansion, and references
Inbreeding depression	needs references and expansion
Background extinction rate	expansion and references needed
Effective population size	needs inline references and more text about the history of the term and its usage

Several of these articles are quite general, and some of the best sources for very broad academic topics are (multiple) textbooks. The more specific topics require searching the academic literature using your university's library or something like Google Scholar. Some news stories can and should be included, but for topics as broad as this, I would strongly discourage web sources (unless it's a news story from a reliable source). I say this because the students I worked with last semester almost exclusively used the Internet as their research tool and tried citing unreliable sources, such as blogs. Honestly, if your students can find good academic sources, your class could have a lot of potential. I would particularly like to see them work on the broad topics. Although they are more challenging, I'm not expecting perfection, plus their access to the latest textbooks gives them an advantage in working on these articles.

Anyway, this list is just a starting point. By the time I started wearing down from the search, I came across this list, which may also help: Index of conservation articles

Also, although it's unreasonable to expect good article or featured article quality from the students, I would suggest pointing them to existing recognized content to give them ideas on how to cover a topic, handle pictures, create proper citations, etc. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but these are the articles I'm most familiar with (because I wrote them):

Conservation of slow lorises

Marojejy National Park

Silky sifaka

The World's 25 Most Endangered Primates

Hoollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary

Seacology

Illegal logging in Madagascar—this article was not promoted over scope, title, and possible neutrality issues... but illustrates good layout and comprehensiveness... though not entirely up-to-date...

Anyway, I hope this helps. – VisionHolder « talk » 21:47, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for editing Wikipedia! Need help?

Hello Kyleharms, thanks for contributing to Wikipedia! I want to invite you to the Teahouse, a forum on Wikipedia for new editors to ask questions about editing Wikipedia, and get support from peers and experienced editors. I hope you see you there! SarahStierch (talk) 16:06, 2 September 2012 (UTC)