Talk:Arm

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"Arm" in Anatomy is defined as shoulder to elbow. Forearm is elbow to wrist. --inks 04:20, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

major things: 1. rotator cuff tendons and muscles need a mention, considering their importance. 2. axillary space needs a proper definition. (anterior/posterior/medial lateral). 3. general inaccuracies - there needs to be more mention of other muscles moving the arm. lat. dorsi motion is improperly defined. hard to know how much detail to give...

Yeah, this article was all over the place from the get go. I rewrote a bunch of it without shattering the original format, which proved quite a stricture. The rotator cuff stuff properly belongs with the "shoulder" article, while "arm" should be much more brief than it now is. "Axilla"? Who knows? The "latissimus" sentence looks O.K. to me. Sfahey 16:10, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of significant amount of content

PhatRita, you seem to have removed a large amount of writeup on this article. Why did you did so? Alex.tan 20:00, July 29, 2005 (UTC)

Copy of PhatRita's reply to me on my talk page to this page:

Hi there, I removed the text from the arm so that I could redistribute on separate pages. To be strict, the arm should only contain information from the shoulder to the elbow. The hand, forearm and such should be placed on forearm and separate pages. If there should be general information, it should be moved to upper limb as that is anatomically correct. This is all part a new drive to sort out administration problems (there are serious issues with redirect that are just incorrect, eg upper limb to arm, anatomically incorrect.) Have a look here

PhatRita, you removed relevant information. The stuff you removed, as far as I can tell from the history, included more details on the shoulder to elbow definition of arm than what you left in its place. I don't think the information you removed was irrelevant. Also, please leave all further discussion on this topic on this page and sign your comments on talk pages (use four tildes - ~~~~) Alex.tan 18:35, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

I do apologise, I always sign things, must have forgotten your page. The relevant information is all stored in a note file on my computer. I have not actually finished the edits yet. If you check out the editing times, it was quite late at night, round midnightish and I've been very busy today. I'll finish the rest of the stuff sometime tomorrow. Rest assured, the finished page will have more detail. PhatRita 00:01, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

in fact, you can clearly see that the cubital fossa section has no text whatsoever in. PhatRita 00:47, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

In future, if you have not "finished the edits", please do not leave the article in a state where you have removed relevant material and have plans to add back to it later. It is alright for you to say that you'll come and finish it later, but there is no guarantee that you're going to do so - in fact, no guarantee that you won't be run over by a bus or something. It's preferable to make smaller edits rather than save halfway through a major edit. The wiki grows by organic edits and is not your own personal project. The net effect of your previous edit is that you removed relevant content - which will be construed as vandalism by anyone who does not know your personal plans. If you really have to rewrite the entire article (I know this happens sometimes) and it's impossible to do this in small edits, perhaps you should work offline and only save the page when you have your finished work. Alex.tan 15:31, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

Well said, Alex.tan. ;) --Taraborn 22:41, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Language

Although there's a tag that says that it includes all these terms for informational accuracy, for a lay person, this article is very much inaccessible. My head hurts reading it. Enochlau 11:35, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Arm : OED versus Anatomy

The way 'arm' fits with anatomy on wikipedia could be complex. The word 'arm' properly (ie historically, and commonly, but not anatomically) means from the shoulder to the hand (see OED). The OED specifies the part from the elbow to the wrist as the 'forearm', a subsection of the arm. Anatomists, however, use the English word 'arm' to represent the Latin word 'brachium', which in modern anatomy refers to the part between shoulder and elbow. (Even though 'brachium' in Latin properly refers to the forearm, but that's a different topic all together.) Why the anatomist arbitrarily designated 'arm' as the part between elbow and shoulder, I don't know. I do know that the word 'leg' historically AND anatomically refers to the part between the knee and ankle, and perhaps they were following this model. But what we are left with is a conflict between English and anatomical terminology. Perhaps this might be a time in which the anatomical (i.e. the somewhat inaccessible) information be put under the standard anatomical Latin equivalent of 'brachium'. --Mauvila 03:57, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

The article on octopus specifically states that octopii do not have tentacles, they have arms. The article on tentacles states the same. However, in this article it is stated in the first paragraph that arm may also refer to the tentacle of an octopus. Obviously this is a contradiction, but it also represents a lack of useful information on the difference between the two. I discovered all of this after reading the article on octopus and wanting to know the difference between an arm and a tentacle, and I was left quite confused. Either the articles on octopus and tentacle need to be corrected or this one does. Danke.

Well, I'm not a marine bio person but whoever says that octopuses don't have tentacles would probably need to cite some source or definition of tentacles, because that doesn't sound like common knowledge but rather an arbitrary definition of tentacle. OED says tentacles are organs of feeling, so maybe the arms aren't that. But really, 'octopus' means 'eight footed', so I'm guessing 'legs' would be a better term. --Mauvila 05:40, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure that it would be quite helpful that way refering to the standardised latin system, but having a standalone stub does aid people that only want a quick reference. Articles with immense amount of data can be helpful, but sometimes doesn't allow succinct answers a user may want. --[Randle Knight] 01:40, 12 September 2006.