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Revision as of 07:38, 16 August 2009

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earlier comments

Some context from Emu, perhaps about changing Australian ecological approaches to Emus would be better. Hard to see why this is separate. --Wetman 07:15, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

It's pretty much a duplicate of the information I added to emu years ago. I see no pressing need to merge it, but have no objection either. Tannin 01:22, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Capitalization

To the user who keeps wrongly capitalizing the word "emu" in this article - stop it. This is the English - not German - Misplaced Pages. In English nouns are only capitalized when they are proper nouns or the first word of a sentence. --Centauri 23:32, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Incorrect. You also capitalise in a range of other circumstances. For example, the first letter of a scientific genus name is always captialised (and the first letter of a specific name never capitalised). Of more relevance to our discussion here, the common name of a species is always capitalised, so as to indicate that this is a particular exact species we are talking about. So, for example, you write Black Rat if you mean Rattus rattus but write black rat if you mean a dark-coloured rat of unspecified species. A little egret could be any of many smaller birds in the heron family (egrets are a form of heron), but a Little Egret is Egretta garzetta and no other.

Note, however, that a group of species is not capitalised - so we write wombat (because there are 3 species) or kangaroo (because there are 3 to 5 different species). Similarly with egrets, rats and herons above. "Emu" can be tricky, as the word "emu" has two distinct meaninmgs - it is both the group name and the name of one of the species within the group. Uncapitalised, "emu" means any of the several emu species (all bar one of them now extinct) - it is the name of the group; capitalised, it means Dromaius novaehollandiae, and not Dromaius baudinianus the Kangaroo Island Emu or Dromaius Ater the King Island Emu.

Follow? Tannin 01:22, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Scientific and unique names are proper nouns and should be capitalized, as I have already stated above. Generic descriptions of animals are not proper nouns and should not be capitalized. See my post on the Emu talk page for further detail.--Centauri 01:27, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Further info

Considering this is an encyclopaedic article about a war, shouldn't the actual winners be mentioned? I can see a rough indication of casualties, fair enough, but it should be made clear who was the official victor in the conflict. Mr Poo 15:23, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Those slippery Emus. Koalorka (talk) 23:25, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Does this need its own entry?

I don't know if this article needs to be separate from Emu, to be honest, or if it needs the Infobox- it just strikes me as some kind of awful parody or "Onion" style entry, even though it isn't. The event wasn't really a "War" in the traditional sense, either. Commander Zulu (talk) 03:10, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

That seems sensible to me. This article is nothing but a vandal-magnet and it would be difficult to expand it much beyond its present length. Nick-D (talk) 03:59, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Why does it not deserve its own entry? The conflict is valid and genuine. Only Australian apologist revisionism wants this article erased. Lt.Specht (talk) 05:28, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

What conflict? You can't have a "War" against a flightless bird species, for a start. Look, what happened was back in 1932 the Australian Government sent a couple of guys with Lewis Guns and a couple of crates of ammo to cull some Emus. They managed to shoot about 12 of them in a fortnight or so, which is an embarrassing result by anyone's standards, but it's not a "War", it's not a "Conflict", and at best (IMHO) it's an amusing incident from nearly 80 years ago that belongs on the Emu page as a testament to the hardiness of the animals and how they were viewed at the time. There's no "Australian apologist revisionism" here- no-one is denying that the event happened and that the Australian Government was presumably embarrassed by the result, but it's not really that notable in the grand scheme of things- certainly not notable enough (again, IMHO) to warrant its own article. Especially not an article that reads like a bad parody. Commander Zulu (talk) 05:35, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

All of the sources in external links seem to refer to this incident as a "conflict" and "war". I don't see why it should not be referred to as such. Additional sources would need to be found to say otherwise. However, it seems that the prejudiced revisionism wins either way due to unexplained sourced statement removal. Lt.Specht (talk) 07:22, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't know what you're talking about with regards to "unexplained sourced statement removal"- I haven't removed anything and I understand that there's an editor facing a week long block for some sort of edit warring. My concern is that this is not a particularly notable incident- the only "official" reference in the article is from the National Library of Australia, which cites over 300 Emus killed and describes the incident as an "attack" (cull), not a "War" or "Conflict". Blogs are not reliable sources, and the other websites don't (IMHO) appear much better, with the exception of the NLA link. Now, 300 Emus killed is a lot more impressive than 12 (still not a lot, given two machine-guns and lots of time and ammo, but even so) and my reading of the source material is that the event was basically an unsuccessful cull that got picked up on by a local newspaper during a slow news day in late 1932. There's no revisionism here. Most Australians have probably never heard of the incident, and giving the incident its own article and trying to pretend it was an actual "War" or "Conflict" is just silly. Let me re-iterate that no-one wants to pretend this never happened and make it all vanish. The plan is to move it to the Emu article, where presumably even more people will see it. I just honestly don't think it really deserves its own article, especially not one that- as I've said- appears to be un-encyclopedic, for want of a better term. Commander Zulu (talk) 07:38, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Neutrality

Why is it that valid additions with sources are being reverted with no discussion? This article is blatantly biased. Lt.Specht (talk) 05:24, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

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