Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/History of evolutionary thought/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 14:00, 15 December 2007.

[edit] History of evolutionary thought

I'm nominating this article for featured article because... This article has improved greatly over the past several months while it has been the history of science collaboration of the month. A month ago it passed GA and I along with a couple of other editors have continued to improve it since then. I now believe it is FA worthy. Rusty Cashman (talk) 06:39, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

  • Comment I know there are no specific rules on citations, but a "scientific" article (yeah, I know it could be a history article too) should have easier to use references. I think the best articles (say Evolution) stick with WP:CITET making it very easy to click on an article and confirm that it meets the statements. To make any type of confirmation of what is written will take forever. If the editor wants to take it to FA, then spend a few hours making it an easy-to-use article. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 07:45, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Sigh, I was afraid this issue would come up. As far as I can tell there is no consensus on this topic. Some FA aritcles such as Evolution and Charles Darwin in science and history of science use these clickable references and a number such as History of biology and Alfred Russel Wallace don't. My biggest complaint is that they don't work (at least they didn't last time I checked) with the standard cite book, cite journal and cite web templates which are so widely used on wikipedia, and which I always try and use for references. If this has been changed please let me know and I will adapt. If there is a clear consensus among commenters to switch I will do so even if it means moving away from the standard templates and returning to the harvard template, which I stoped using because I thought it had been deprecated. One final point I would make on this subject is that this article has 19 listed references. So I don't think the clickable references would be as useful/important as they are for an article like Charles Darwin that has more than 50. Rusty Cashman (talk) 08:38, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I took a closer look at evolution and I see that the clickable references now work with cite book, so I will go ahead and convert to using them. It will take me a day or 2 to complete.Rusty Cashman (talk) 08:58, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
This has got me really puzzled. As far as I can tell, evolution simply makes each cite a separate footnote. This works well when most cites are to different sources, but when there's a lot of repeated cites to different pages of a book, as here, harvard referencing using the citation template shown at WP:CITET has the advantage. The clickable effect as used at Charles Darwin now works with the citation template, but not with the cite book template. The last place I used the citation template was at HMS Beagle which shows the principle, though the cites and references there are all in a combined section. I'm willing to help out with getting all the refs. into the citation format, with harvnb inline refs. Is it agreed that's what's wanted? .. dave souza, talk 16:41, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Footnote 77 in Evolution refers to a citation of Gould's SET. The footnote is clickable yet the reference it points to uses the cite book template. So it appears it does now work with cite book. I think the key may be using the year field rather than the date field in cite book. I am not going to have time to experiment with it much until tonight (4 or 5 hours from now), but I would like to see if I can make it work, not just for this article but for others as well. Cite book is widely used. If it can't be made to work I would welcome your help in converting the templates. Rusty Cashman (talk) 20:09, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Again, I'm anal retentive about it. I like the fact that if I read something controversial, say someone writes, "It is now confirmed that Charles Darwin was possessed by aliens," I can then click on the number, it brings me down to the reference, and I can then see if it's a reliable one, or it's from Real Tales of Abduction, Volume 428. OK, what is this Cite Book thing? I'm going to have to read about how to use it, because CITET doesn't allow for multiple pages for one reference. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 22:33, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Have a look at Charles Darwin for an extreme example of harvard referencing (using the old template, but the effect's the same). Rusty, the evolution article confused me because the references are listed above the cites, as further reading. The link there is working as the inline ref uses {{wikiref |id=Gould-2002 |text=Gould 2002, pp. 657–658}}, while I've been using {{harvnb|Gould|2002|pp.=657–658}} Returns to being baffled. .. dave souza, talk 23:21, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
It seems like {{wikiref}} works well enough with cite book. I have converted a few of the cites and I will do the rest tomorrow. The only trick is you have to use the "year" field instead of the "date" field in cite book to make it all work. I kind of like wikiref and I may convert some other articles like History of paleontology and Alfred Russel Wallace over to using clickable references just to make OrangeMarlin happy :) Rusty Cashman (talk) 08:35, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
It seems like another editor (Gimmetrow I think) has fixed the last ones.Rusty Cashman (talk) 06:39, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment The section headers will have to be shortened a fair amount. Samsara (talk • contribs) 15:16, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
You have a valid point. Some of the section headings were too wordy. I think I have fixed the problem.Rusty Cashman (talk) 20:44, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Yes, looks good now. Samsara (talk • contribs) 08:05, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment The phylogenetic tree dates from the late 1990s and is wrong in several areas (such as halophiles being classed as archaea, lacking nanoarchaeota, separating the Trichomonads and Diplomonads from the other flagellates, etc) A more modern tree is this image that is based on a 2006 Science article. Tim Vickers (talk) 20:50, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Ok I switched to the newer diagram.Rusty Cashman (talk) 04:17, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment. "Unconventional extensions to evolutionary ideas" section has only one "extension" - the "Gaia hypothesis". It needs to be expanded with other or renamed.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 06:43, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
I renamed it. Rusty Cashman (talk) 08:43, 7 December 2007 (UTC)


  • Let's take the opening: "Evolutionary thought has roots in antiquity as philosophical ideas known to the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Muslims. Until the 18th century, however, Western biological thought was dominated by essentialism, the idea that living forms are static and unchanging in time." Why "however"? You haven't explained enough for us to swallow that.
Fixed. Rusty Cashman (talk) 00:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
  • "and naturalists such as Maupertuis and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon focused on the variability of species." The comma doesn't make sense.
Fixed. Rusty Cashman (talk) 00:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
  • "put forth"—bit pompous nowadays: put forward.
Fixed. Rusty Cashman (talk) 00:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
  • "and discussed in detail in On the Origin of Species, published by Darwin in 1859." Neater as "and discussed in detail in Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859)."
Fixed. Rusty Cashman (talk) 00:14, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
  • There's a space before a comma.
Fixed. Rusty Cashman (talk) 00:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
  • "Following the synthesis and the rise of evolutionary biology as a formal scientific discipline, evolutionary thought developed in several directions." Can you give us an idea of the decades you're referring to here?
Fixed. Rusty Cashman (talk) 00:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
  • The lead is verging on being too long.
I tightened it a little. Rusty Cashman (talk) 00:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC) TimVickers has tightened it a lot more.Rusty Cashman (talk) 06:39, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

That's the lead. It suggests that a good copy-edit by someone unfamiliar with the text is required. I'd like to see this promoted, but it will need lots of work. In the meantime, you could read MOS and fix up the breaches: read about logical punctuation in quotations, en dashes for ranges (some are hyphens), period after proper sentence in caption, hyphen used as an interrupter (read em dashes). Tony (talk) 11:17, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. 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.