Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Evolution of mammals/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 00:05, 19 April 2008.

[edit] Evolution of mammals

Nominator: User:Leptictidium

I'm nominating this article for featured article because it is very complete, has almost 100 references to support it, is rich in images and the language, though technical, is easily understandable. Leptictidium (mammal talk!) 12:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

  • Oppose - Articles need to be stable. Wikipedia has a strange habit of having evolution pages turning into edit wars. This is a support unless the FAC brings such attention. Cross your fingers. :) Ottava Rima (talk) 15:34, 14 April 2008 (UTC) Update - Changed to oppose based on potential image problems as pointed out by others below. Fix that, and I will change back. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:00, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

* Comment. I haven't actually read the article yet but it is obvious that WP:LEAD has not been followed. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 15:39, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Comments I notice that Leptictidium hasn't edited this article a lot. Does the main contributor, Philcha (talk · contribs) agree that it's ready for FAC? It's never gone through GA or PR. The references are seriously lacking in publisher or last access dates (over 20 by a very quick count, probably closer to 30 or 40) I also note sections that are uncited and a lot of short choppy paragraphs. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:07, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

  • Comment.
    • I'm developing the lead section, see proposal at User talk:Leptictidium.
    • I understand about the refs. I started the article because the "Evolution" section of Mammal was unsatisfactory - wrong on some points, and I already knew enough to see that there was too much ground to cover there. So I used the most convenient sources. I've upgraded a few since then, as I've come across suitable material (one earlier to-day).
    • I don't intend to spend time on minutiae like last access dates. IMO Wikipedia should do a lot more to make it easy to format citations, since most Wikipedia editors come with little experience of any kind of mark-up language and most web developers use WYSIWIG editors rather than hand-coding (X)HTML. I've raised or contributed to proposals about making citations easier, but there seems to be no momentum.
    • I will resist any attempt to make the style of the article more academic - IMO Wikipedia should be written for the benefit of non-specialists. That means I will use and defend all the normal techniques for improving the readbility of web pages.
    • Subject to the above, all comments are welcome and actual help would be greatly appreciated. Philcha (talk) 18:14, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
    • PS, re "minutiae like last access dates", the one aspect of citations that I'm fanatical about is web links - most readers do not have subscriptions to academic journals. Philcha (talk) 18:16, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I think we were mainly asking if you think the article is ready for FAC. Unfortunately, minutiae like last access dates is part of the FA criteria. None of the other is needed, in fact articles that are engaging to the regular reader, not the scientist are encouraged. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:21, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Question I think the issue here for Philcha and User:Leptictidium to consider is whether this article is actually ready for FAC. Sure any article with enough input from reviewers, and given enough time, can be massively improved but this isn't what FAC is about. --ROGER DAVIES talk 18:35, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

  • Comment Oppose: critical evaluation of several images utilized in this article is needed. Several images "released to the public domain" appear to be blatant copyright violations. Alterations of background colors, gamma, color levels, etc. all constitute derivative works for which the original authors retain copyright.
  • Oppose The article has been presented here too soon. There are problems with content and style. It's reads like a transcript of a lecture; Wikipedia informs, it does not teach. Here are some examples:
    • The evolution of mammals from synapsids (mammal-like "reptiles") was a gradual process which took approximately 70 million years, why the gradual?
    • This part of the story introduces new complications.
    • Note that the diagram shown here omits extinct groups.
    • Here are the most significant of the many differences between this family tree
    • It has been suggested that lactation's original function
    • Since we can't know much about the internal mechanisms of extinct creatures
    • We have already seen that the first clear evidence of hair
    • So the evolution of mammals in the Mesozoic is full of uncertainties,
    • And, all those bullet points.

There are problems with redundancy including repetition. Lastly, is there not a better way of presenting those phylogenetic trees? This article has potential that is yet to be realised.GrahamColmTalk 20:23, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

  • Oppose. These monospaced text-based trees are okay, but not for a Featured Article. We can do better. Also, the illustrations (for example image:TheriaAnkle01.gif) ought to be in SVG format so that they display better, are scalable, and editable. — brighterorange (talk) 22:11, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Re the "family trees", what tools are available to produce better alternatives than the "ASCII art"? An alternative ( the clade template) was discussed at Talk:Evolution of mammals, but is unsatisfactory because the root appears halfway down the block, and for other usability-related reasons; it's also difficult to make later changes to accommodate new evidence / analyses. I proposed an alternative at Wikipedia talk:Village pump (proposals) but have heard nothing encouraging.
As for the bullet points, see Wikipedia:Embedded list. Bullet lists are a widely-recognised technique for increasing the readability of web pages by making the hierarchical structure of some content immediately obvious. If they're so bad, why are bullet points used so widely in Talk / discussion pages, including this one (notably in the complaint about the use of bullet points!), along with the colon mark-up for indentation? Philcha (talk) 23:17, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose In addition to the concerns about writing style (eg. GrahamColm's quotes) and bullet points which should be prose, I'm concerned that this article lacking knowledge of phylogenetics and promoting it as inaccurate: "This endeavor often involves Molecular phylogenetics, a technique which has become popular since the mid-1980s but is still often controversial because of its assumptions, especially about the reliability of the molecular clock."

Farther down I see some phylogenetic trees of mammals based on genomic sequences and retrotransposon insertions (2001 & 2006)—this is then followed with some criticism about mitochondrial mutation rates (the methods cited didn't depend on mitochondrial sequence!) and with references more than 10 years old (1996,1995,1997). While phylogenetics has some messy spots and should get fair warning about how unresolved some aspects of the tree are, I'm also not seeing similar criticisms of techniques used to generate a fossil-based tree.

Although this is not my field of expertise and I could be wrong here, it looks to me like the phylogenetic aspects of mammalian evolution are seriously deficient in the article. DNA sequencing ability is increasing exponentially; phylogenetic analysis is only going to become more important as time goes on. Madeleine ✉ ✍ 19:29, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

  • Question. I was under the impression mid-Permian would have been about 260-270 mya and the mid-Jurassic 165-175 mya. The lead gives this gap as 70 million years, but these ranges suggest 90. --JayHenry (talk) 01:48, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.