Babel user information
nl-N Deze gebruiker heeft het Nederlands als moedertaal.
en-4 This user has near native speaker knowledge of English.
de-3 Dieser Benutzer beherrscht Deutsch auf hohem Niveau.
fr-2 Cet utilisateur dispose de connaissances intermédiaires en français.
la-2 Hic usor lingua Latina mediae difficultatis conferre potest.
Babel

My other accounts edit

Hi, this is the user page of Wikiklaas. For my international profile, see meta.

Other accounts edit

SUL edit

From the above, it's obvious I created a user account on Wikispecies before I unified my account into a Single User Login (SUL). My account on Wikispecies dates from April 3, 2010. My first edit was done on that same date. I had been busy resolving Magnolia taxonomy for quite a while by that time. I have a keen interest in plant taxonomy but most of my contributions to Wikispecies have been on zootaxonomy. They were often inspired by problems I encountered on nlwiki, my home Wikipedia, or by problems I encountered when Wikidata was rolled out.

Profile edit

I'm a biologist. I've been interested in living things all my life. At the age of 13 I joined a society of young naturalists. That's where I got my field experience. Later on I went to university, where I studied biology of course. Taxonomy was as good as dead until the technique of DNA-sequencing became available, leading to a resurrection of this field of research. I was there when this happened. I saw students trying to get results on relationships of populations, using the technique of DNA-DNA hybridization. Just one year later, it suddenly was possible to answer the same questions in only a fraction of the time it took before. That's when my interest in congenialities of taxa really started.

I'm also a polyglot. I read Dutch, German, English and French without a problem. I was schooled in Latin and Greek, making it easy to also read other roman languages, like Italian and Spanish, if they are on a topic that I'm familiar with. I know Cyrillic script, which makes it possible to find information on types and type localities in Russian papers. I can do the same in Chinese texts, although that's a much more demanding task.

On Wikispecies I have so far added information on sources, especially protologues, and corrected errors. I've also renamed quite a number of pages that had a subgeneric name in the title, as this can easily lead to duplicate articles. It's something I intend to keep doing.