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/Haec ustrix lingua Latina mediae difficultatis conferre potest.
Babel

My other accounts

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

Other accounts

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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

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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.