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| {{t|2}} | This user understands what templates do, and how to write them. |
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My name is Jaap Winius, I was born in 1963 in the United States and have lived in the Netherlands since 1976. I'm an IT consultant (systems administration) with a passion for Linux and Open Source software, but my main contributions have not been in that area.
I'm something of an amateur herpetologist with an interest in snakes. I used to collect and breed snakes, but that was a long time ago; now I just like to write about them and continue to acquire many books on the subject for reference material. I guess I'm responsible for creating/writing several hundred articles here at Wikipedia, almost all on this same subject. Most of these are in Category:Viperidae, with the best examples being Bitis arietans, Bitis gabonica, Daboia, Vipera ammodytes, Vipera berus and Agkistrodon piscivorus. There are many more in various states of completion. I've also worked hard to organize all of the articles that we have regarding the other snake families. The two exceptions would be the Colubridae and Elapidae, but that's mostly because Dr. Roy McDiarmid's next installment, Snake Species of the World, Vol. 2, a Taxonomic and Geographic Reference, has yet to be published.
Since I started writing these articles, certain issues have become very important to me:
- Never assume anything. Don't just write what you want because it's probably correct, but research the subject properly and quote (without plagiarizing) from a reputable source.
- Cite your references. At least one reference should be cited (using the footnote system) for every bit of information in the article. Readers should be able to tell where the information came from, or else why should anyone trust it? If there are no references it also decreases an article's research value. Obviously, this means no original research, or else you can't cite any references.
Follow a single taxonomy. If you don't, you'll eventually run into conflicts and your synonymy won't work either. For vipers and other snakes, I use McDiarmid, Campbell and Toure's 1999 checklist together with the ITIS online database. Still a work in progress, this is widely considered to be the most authoritative taxonomy available for those of us interested in snakes. (See this debate).- Use scientific names instead of common names for article titles to avoid confusion. This is against official policy, but I choose to ignore that because I believe it prevents me from improving the collection of articles I work on. See below for further information on this (unfortunately) divisive issue.
