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"The Wandering Albatross is the whitest of the Wandering Albatross species complex..."
This essentially says that "X is a subset of X," which simply doesn't make any sense. I just tried to fix it by removing the second "Wandering," but my edit was reverted. So rather than get into a reversion war, let's figure out how to clean this up. Clearly, the two "X"s need to be differentiated from each other somehow. Any suggestions? Skybum (talk) 15:49, 21 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It actually says that X1 is a subset of X", but to a reader that is unfamiliar with the concept of species complexes I understand that it might be confusing. The Wandering Albatross species complex includes the Tristan, Antipodean and Amsterdam Albatrosses as well. I'll think about how best to clarify that. Sabine's Sunbirdtalk22:01, 21 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I am indeed a bit of a neophyte here, but it's rather confusing if both X1 and X are called exactly the same thing. I'll also ponder ways to address that. Another part of the problem is that the species complex page seems to directly contradict what this page says; if members of a species complex are morphologically indistinguishable from one another, then how can one species within the complex be larger and whiter than another? So perhaps that page needs a bit of revision as well. Skybum (talk) 00:22, 22 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
They are called a species complex because it was only recently established that they are separate species, and the species boundaries are hard to define, particularly using morphological characters. The amount of white can vary within a species and with age as well, so it isn't a fantastic diagnostic tool. But yeah, clarity would be helpful. Sabine's Sunbirdtalk00:57, 22 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Apologies for the reversion of a good faith edit, I shouldn't have done it that way. It's a tricky one; I know what it means, but it's difficult to express elegantly. Anyway, Sabine is the albatross king, so I'll take the easy way out and leave it to him Jimfbleak (talk) 05:17, 22 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
If you accept the Robertson and Nunn analysis of the albatrosses,as modified by eg. Brooke 2004, which I do not,it is ridiculous to claim that gibsoni is a subspecies of exulans. All genetic analyses have show that Diomedea gibsoni is paired with Diomedea anitpodensis, and as the latter has page priority (in terms of the ICZN Code), gibsoni should be a subspecies of Diomdea anitpodensis.
John Penhallurick —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jpenhall1946 (talk • contribs) 09:31, 27 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Autochthony writes.
Plainly, estimating size on the wing is difficult.
However, many years ago, possibly 1982, I was sailing round the Cape (Suez was closed to VLCCs ), and we had a number of Wandering Albatross flying round the ship for some days, on and off. Most appeared - by eye - to be about the same size. One, however, largely white, was at least 25% bigger in wingspan [maybe 33%]. If the average is 3m, and the other birds averaged out at that 3m, the big one was 3.75 to 4 metres in span; to Imperial measurement folk like me, that is - near enough - 12'4" to 13'2".
12' 6" or so would do as an Imperial estimate. Autochthony wrote 2030z/22 October 2009. 86.154.31.21 (talk) 20:35, 22 October 2009 (UTC).[reply]
For the first time this past weekend, I saw at very close range a stuffed specimen of what appeared to be a Wandering Albatross (with a pink bill and very whitish plumage) in my local natural science museum. It was absolutely huge and impressive, appearing surprisingly more massive to my eyes than stuffed condors in the adjacent room. I hope to be able to see the amazing albatross in the wild some day. Anyway, I am surprised that the albatross doesn't scale even more the cited weights. I thought it was very close in bulk and size to the Kori & Great Bustard specimens I saw in the American Museum of Natural History in NYC.
As part of that course, I wrote ~300 word evaluations of various bird articles on wiki. My evaluation of this one is reproduced below, which is just my thoughts about possible improvements and things the article does well.
This Wikipedia article on the Wandering Albatross is decently large, but not nearly as complete as the article on the Great Tit. I am not sure if this is due to a lack of contributors or a lack of knowledge in general about the species. I suspect it's the former, since the article lead claims that it is "one of the best known and best studied species of bird in the world". The talk page is rather empty, too, and the history page includes a lot of reversions of vandalism. There is very little content, with only one or two sentences given over to each subheader. The writing style is inconsistent, and the "Relationship with humans" section in particular reads more like a literary analysis of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner than a true encyclopedia article. Some claims such as those concerning breeding and travelling tendencies lack references. The organization of the page could definitely use some work - there doesn't seem to be any sort of thoughtful organization behind what constitutes a header or subheader. For example, "Behavior” is listed as a subheader under Ecology, but "Breeding", "Feeding", and "Reproduction" are also subheaders, even though they should really all be listed under Behavior. The pictures are nice, but their captions could be more descriptive. A caption under a picture of an egg only reads, "Diomedea exulans - MHNT", which isn't very helpful when trying to determine what the picture is supposed to represent. There is a table of Breeding Population and Trends, which is quite nice and informative. Overall, though, the article definitely needs some cleaning up, and WikiProject Birds actually has the page listed as a top priority.
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On first glance, I'm inclined to quick-fail this over concerns about the sourcing, comprehensiveness, and structure.
It uses a lot of poor-quality or outdated refs. I usually would be okay with somewhat older references, but for a confusing complex that's been split recently, I definitely would prefer more recent sources. Many are too old to be of much functional use, it's been too long and too much research has occurred in the 30–40 years since they were published.
Additionally, many older sources are used despite newer sources being present; see the 2008 BirdLife assessment being cited instead of the more recent and relevant 2018 one. So many sources are very poor-quality: the 1911 EB (!), a 1983 Guinness Book, a 2008 taxonomy from some project I've never heard of instead of the three annually updated avian checklists, a NZ government bird cam, and local newspapers.
The comprehensiveness is also a concern; taxonomy is very lacking, distribution and habitat seems barebones, description lacks the appearance of juveniles, feeding is very short (I saw almost 10 studies on its diet on Scholar), parasites and predators are not mentioned (I saw some studies on Scholar), and conservation is too short considering even the IUCN Red List text summary covers more points than it.
The structure's also poor. The population and trends table makes no sense; it's single year estimates from random locations over 15 years ago and has nothing to do with distribution. The Description section focuses 2 paragraphs on largest albatross on xx island and only one para on the actual appearance of the species. Taxonomy doesn't cover any of its systematic history or taxonomic relationships to other albatrosses.
The selection of images is somewhat random; images are meant to complement the text and here they feel like they're just randomly stuck in.
"10 December and 5 January" I was skimming through and saw this, which is immediately contradicted by BOW. I checked a couple more claims in the article afterwards and found many errors, which might be because of how old the references used are. Much of the article also doesn't seem to have been changed substantially since you started working on it, so I also can't AGF on the veracity of the claims.
@TooManyFingers: I think some statement re association with fishing vessels for feeding may well be justified, based on these two papers [1][2] (if you can't access the second I can send it over?). The first states "Our results indicate albatrosses extensively attend this fishery, with no clear advantages, questioning impacts on foraging time budgets" - they were feeding by preference in the vicinity of fishing boats, although it didn't seem to be all that sensible a choice from an energetic perspective. The second paper notes the species as the albatross most commonly found to forage on longlines and offal among species observed. This seems to justify a brief statement along the lines of "The species has been shown to be attracted to fishing vessels, foraging on baits and offal." --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 13:38, 4 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Washington University supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2012 Fall term. Further details are available on the course page.
