Talk:List of butterflies of Australia

Work in progress

The Swallowtail section (second after lead) is almost complete, and gives an idea of what the final list could look like.

Skippers will take quite some time to work through, though I think I'll give the top screen's worth of entries some priority to make things look prettier.

Thanks to Felicia, for giving me Braby (2005) as a birthday present—a perfect tertiary sourcebook to get me started on this list.

All help will naturally be appreciated, that's why it is out here in shared article space. :)

Cheers. Alastair Haines (talk) 06:10, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Phase one complete

There are several outstanding tasks needing attention at this list.

1. References are currently limited to surname and year in most cases; but full details are readily available, and full text (even plates) are online in many cases.
2. All species are currently named, though in some cases this is only via one representative subspecies; details for all parent species, and many other subspecies, are available in Braby 2005 (and many other places online).
3. Phylogenetic relationships between lower-level taxa are known in many cases (see Braby 2006 for Pieridae) and should be included in some cases where known (though most detail is probably best handled at a global level).
4. Public domain images of all Australian species are online at the CSIRO website, though photographs are preferable, at this list, to those scientific drawings; in any case, not all the CSIRO images have been uploaded as yet (a total of nearly 400).
5. Clearly many species do not even have articles stubbed for them as yet, though this should certainly be done as we can fill in taxo boxes from information at this page, including taxonomic authorities and subspecies.
6. The stamp situation is even more woeful. I couldn't find a list of Australian stamps for more than a few recent years, and couldn't find any images either.
7. The chronology section will take a little enjoyable while to put together at some point.
8. The butterfly glossary article could do with some substantial expansion. I'll expand here first, then merge it into the other article.
9. Articles are needed on the Kuranda Butterfly Sanctuary and CSIRO collection in Canberra. The Australian Museum insect collection is also pretty extensive and meshes in nicely historically at many points. GA Waterhouse went to school next door and there was also a close relationship between the Australian Museum and the Macleay Museum/Collection now hosted at the University of Sydney.
10. When some additional work has been done here, I think I'll be tempted to contact the organisations mentioned above to ask for comments and suggestions.
11. Ultimately I think our priority will need to be writing up genera, species and subspecies endemic to Australia, and probably identifying these in an additional subsection of this list. In the case of several of the island species, it may be our sad task to document the extinction of these butterflies, if Braby's educated opinion proves to be correct.

Anyway, to end on a brighter note, there is a lot of interesting, educational work to be done in this area of Wiki, and it appears it will be able to be well supported by free artwork from various sources. Alastair Haines (talk) 13:20, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

It is really good piece of work. Leszek Jańczuk (talk) 19:07, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Something else that needs to be done, is standardising everything. Has anyone noticed how some subspecies mentioned are (red)linked and others aren't linked at all? (Are subspecies supposed to be linked?). Also, the links in the species listed, sometimes has neither the common nor the binomial name linked, sometimes just the binomial, sometimes just the common name, or sometimes both. Isn't the standard way to do it, linking only the binomial names. Any objections if I delink all the common names, and link the binomials? Theres probably more that needs to be standardised. Ypna (talk) 07:41, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

I think you can delink the subspecies. It is a monumental task to make articles on all species, so I think we can forget articles on subspecies for the time being. I dont have objections to your proposal to delink the common names, but I did not make this list. I think it would be okay to do so however.. Cheers Ruigeroeland (talk) 08:07, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Ok, now I've completed both of these. Ypna (talk) 02:10, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Need to prune the article!

The list has changed into a sort of scrap-book on Australian butterflies. I am deleting sections not part of the list proper. Unused refs are also being blanked out. AshLin (talk) 06:39, 4 December 2010 (UTC)