(Cut & paste from Mav's talk page, but of more general relevance. Formatting will be funny because of the limitations of email, but it should still be readable)

My former enthusiasm for doing fauna entries has evaporated. After doing a bit of this and a bit of that, I was really enjoying working in a field which is, if not controversy-free, at least one where the controversies are very civilised.

Consider the horrible mess that is bird taxonomy, with the English, the Americans, the Australians, the Dutch, the South Africans all having different and incompatible classifications. And yet, here on the 'pedia, we have two Englishmen, an American, and an Australian - all happily cooperating to build a body of work that is as up-to-date and scientifically correct as we can make it. It has a long, long way to go, and there are several thorny issues to resolve, but bit by bit we are getting there.

Or consider the woeful state of the mammal entries. (I'm thinking of the Australian ones in particular here.) I've spent days and days working on these, checking all my facts with appropriate sources as I go along, and they have started to take some form and accuracy on.

All the while I've been swallowing, largely without complaint, the constant and tedious fiddling from people who, however well-meaning, are being very unhelpful. Yesterday I reached a "last straw" state of mind and I've spat the dummy out.

I don't want to do fauna stuff here anymore.

I take your point about using common names instead of specialist names, and agree with it. However, we need to think this through. Consider the three basic situations:

(i) Highly specialised and very formal publications that generally avoid common names entirely. In these, if it appears at all, a common name is more a textual decoration than an indication of a particular precise species. Writers only use the commom name to do things like avoid too much repetition in a sentence, and never use it to stand alone as an identification of a species. The common name is, in effect, used as a sort of psudo-pronoun. For example (just a made-up sentence to illustrate):

A. australis is endemic to New Zealand, where it is classified as vulnerable, but on neighboring islands the brown kiwi remains common.

Not a very good illustration, but the point is that the common name serves no special purpose of identification (in these publications, binomial names rule supreme) and does not need to be set off in any way from the rest of the text. Hence, it can be left uncapitalised without loss of meaning or clarity. (By the way, at least so far as birds go, this style is very rare indeed.)

(ii) Scientifically correct publications more broadly. These can be aimed at the general reader or the professional working in the field, but usually fall somewhere between those extremes. Here, correct capitalisation is a vital part of the use of common names. In at least some fields (birds is certainly one), the common name is an exact equivalent to the binomial name. There is only one Black-shouldered Kite in the entire world. You can write "Elanis axillaris" or "Black-shouldered Kite" and no-one has the slightest doubt which creature you mean. However, a "black-shouldered kite" could equally well be E. scriptus or any of several birds from the northern hemisphere. Unless we include the binomial name each and every time we want to indicate E. axillaris or E. scriptus (as the highly formal and rather unreadable type of strictly-scientific publication listed at (i) above does), we have no other choice but to use capitalisation.

(iii) General works which don't aim to be scientifically correct. Here, there is no particular attempt to be accurate or precise, or (usually) to identify any particular species. Often, neither the author not the reader even knows what the species is, let alone cares. For example, if I were writing a novel, it would be silly to write:

Gloria shuddered at the thought of her pet harming the beautiful Scarlet Robin she had admired from the window earlier that morning.

You might as well go the whole hog and write:

Gloria shuddered at the thought of her pet harming the beautiful Scarlet Robin (Petroica multicolor) she had admired from the window earlier that morning.

In a novel or in a work of general non-fiction, it is perfectly acceptible (and indeed correct) to not capitalise, as the intention of the work is to highlight some thing other than the creature in question. In the passage above, for example, we are not interested in the robin, nor even in what Gloria's cat has done to it, we are interested in Gloria's emotional reactions.

In summary, there are three possibilities:

(a) That we always use binomial names if in the slightest doubt about the identity of a species. This would be, strictly speaking, correct, but unreadable for the vast majority. (b) That we abandon the attempt to create a scientifically correct body of work, and become a light-weight, non-auhoritive place that is little more than a glorified chat room. (Not that there is anything wrong with chat rooms, it's just not what I think Wikipedia ought to be. Nor you.) (c) That we adopt the same solution as is used by the vast majority of works that aim to be factual, comprehensive, scientific, and accessible to the general reader too - i.e., we use the correct capitalisation for species names.

I would be delighted to return to crafting factual, readable, accurate entries about fauna of all kinds. I have greatly enjoyed doing that over the last few months. But, fair dinkum, I have had a gutfull of constant hit and run edits that do nothing but spoil the result of all the effort I put in. I don't want to be unreasonable or petulant, but let's face it, we all only work on articles because we enjoy doing it and find it rewarding. I am no longer enjoying it, and it's no longer rewarding. As I have documented elsewhere, everyone who is doing bird entries on any significant scale has similar problems. It's not just me. I just happen to be the one who has reached the end of his tether first.

Tony Wilson (Tannin)