The Westerbork HI survey of irregular and spiral galaxies, WHISP

This paper briefly describes WHISP, an ongoing project to image the HI in a large sample of nearby galaxies with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT). The goal of the survey is to investigate the HI density distributions and velocity fields of galaxies as a function of Hubble type, luminosity and environment. The main emphasis so far has been on using HI kinematics to determine the mass distributions of galaxies, though other projects have been carried out with the WHISP data and axe briefly described.