Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Iguanodon

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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted 03:45, 3 March 2007.

[edit] Iguanodon

This article on a well-known genus of dinosaur is a product of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Dinosaurs team, the same group who created Featured Articles Stegosaurus, Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, and others. This article is currently one of Wikipedia's longest articles on dinosaurs. Article is sourced with 84 references, mostly from primary scientific sources (over 260 cites altogether). A FAC reviewer went over the text to work out the last kinks. I find the prose compelling, and it is hard to imagine an article more comprehensive or factually accurate. The article presents now-discredited views (200 years of changing theories) but does not give undue weight. This article is not the subject of edit wars and is stable. Appropriate images are peppered throughout. In short, this is one of the best dinosaur articles on Wikipedia. Firsfron of Ronchester 07:00, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

• Support As the dino collaboration coordinator and (minor) contributor to the article I fully support its nomination. I feel it has stepped up a notch from the previous 3 successful FAs listed above. cheers Cas Liber 07:25, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Well maybe not T. rex... ;) Spawn Man 07:32, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

• Support - As you might agree though, the votes received from the dinosaur wikiproject may be a bit biased. However, this is one case when you can put that thought out of your mind. This article is top notch & needs not cabal to back it up. Indeed it is the largest dinosaur genera article (non-enthusiast's eyes glaze over), & the article is very well written. I doubt there will be much, if any, corrections to be made during the course of this FAC. Thanks, Spawn Man 07:32, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
• Support - Definitely one of the best, if not THE best dinosaur articles around. Loads of citations, great informational writing. Very very big support.Communist47 08:18, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
• Support - Meets all of the FA criteria. Mgiganteus1 12:59, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
• Changed to Moral Support to avoid any appearance of conflict of interestSupport as contributor. It's about as comphrensive as we can get on the topic without straying into mindnumbing detail, well-illustrated, provides citations, and it's an interesting dinosaur with a long history. J. Spencer 15:06, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

As the editor who has contributed the most to this article, by volume of material and number of edits, it does not seem fair for me submit a full !vote, but as someone who has experience and knowledge concerning the topic, it also does not seem fair to have no vote but a negative. I would feel differently about it if I had been the nominator, but in this case, I choose not to lard up the discussion. I will be around to address concerns, and would like to see a qp10qp copy edit or two to get a feel for the suggested changes in style. If the article's FA-quality, it'll succeed without my !vote. J. Spencer 03:05, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

• Support well-cited and comprehensive. Definitely meets the criteria. Good job! - Anas ^Talk? 15:17, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
• Support for all the reasons above. Comprehensive, well-cited, illustrated, etc... Oaxaca dan 15:58, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
• Support it's impressive how many good dinosaur articles are there... igordebraga ≠ 16:24, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
• Support An excellent article. Qp10qp comments do need to be addressed however. CloudNine 16:59, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Support. How could I not support such a thorough, detailed article: it's definitely a tour de force, of a sort. However, I'm surprised at the complacency of the above comments. The two difficulties I had with the article were a clunky, sometimes ungrammatical, prose style and a tendency to descend in places into unreadability through too dense a use of technical and Latin terms. I also feel that the article is far too long at over 60 kb. If it was left to me, I'd address that by offloading the "Reassigned species" and "Dubious species" sections into a summary-style daughter article, particularly as these sections are really about non-iguanodons when you come down to it. They are also some of the worst for unreadability, containing material like this:

I. atherfieldensis, described by R.W. Hooley in 1925,[28] was smaller and less robust than I. bernissartensis, with longer neural spines. It was renamed Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis in 2006.[40] I. exogyrarum (also spelled I. exogirarum or I. exogirarus) was described by Fritsch in 1878. It is a nomen dubium based on very poor material and has been reassigned, by George Olshevsky, to Ponerosteus.[47]

I. foxii (also spelled I. foxi) was originally described by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 as the type species of Hypsilophodon; Owen (1873 or 1874) reassigned it to Iguanodon, but his assignment was soon overturned.[48]I. hollingtoniensis (also spelled I. hollingtonensis), described by Lydekker in 1889, is a synonym of I. fittoni. I. prestwichii (also spelled I. prestwichi), described by John Hulke in 1880, has been reassigned to Camptosaurus prestwichii. I. seeleyi (also spelled I. seelyi), described by Hulke two years after I. prestwichii, has been synonymized with I. bernissartensis. I. suessii, described by Emanuel Bunzel in 1871, has been reassigned to Mochlodon suessi.[1]

I feel that at such times this article forgets it is supposed to be an encyclopedia entry for the general reader. Far too many technical terms are introduced during the article without explanation (I don't believe linking is enough)—for example, the article takes for granted that the reader will know what a "clade" is, and I didn't. A Wikipedia article should explain its technical terms as it goes along, so I felt I was being catered for much better by sentences like:

The three toed pes (foot) of Iguanodon was relatively long, and when walking, both the hand and the foot would have been used in a digitigrade fashion (on the fingers and toes).[1]

Overall, I believe the general reader will be most interested in the discoveries and in the descriptions of the iguanodon's appearance, movements, feeding habits, etc. some of which was left rather late in the article (the article took me over an hour to read), by which time I fear some readers will have been put off.

The language rather wore me out. Often antecedents were unclear and grammar blurry, producing a wearying effect. An example would be:

As one of the first named dinosaur genera, numerous species have been assigned to Iguanodon.

Clearly the opening phrase is misattached to the subject of the sentence. However, I can't expect this generalised comment to be actioned without my making a long list of examples, and so I will maybe have a go at copyediting the article myself, sometime.

I hope these remarks don't take away from my vote of support for the article. We'd clearly be nuts not to feature an article containing this much valuable information. qp10qp 18:02, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Comments on the splitting off of the species section of the article have been moved to the talk page, for further discussion.

Support - excellent article. And hey if the article provides as much info as possible and is well written who says it must be short? Ernst Stavro Blofeld 18:07, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

In reply to Firstfron of Ronchester, who said this above: "Because long parentheticals tend to disrupt the flow of the sentence, making it difficult to understand what is being said, I truly prefer using a wikilink on words which require a lengthier explanation."

I don't agree that a phrase of explanation would make it difficult to understand what is being said; quite the opposite, especially if it's a literal translation of the Greek. It's recommended Wikipedia practice to explain technical words as we go along, and wikilinks don't satisfy that recommendation, in my opinion. I've just had a look at the article with a view to maybe copyediting it, and the task really is quite daunting: I already have a row of wikilinked tabs open and a row of dictionary tabs. Finding the meaning of the wikilinked words purely from wikipedia is not as straightforward as it should be. Take the first sentence of the article:

Iguanodon (IPA pronunciation /ɪˈgwɑːnəˌdɒn/ or /ɪˈgwænəˌdɒn/, meaning "Iguana tooth") is the name given to a genus of ornithopod dinosaur which lived roughly halfway between the early hypsilophodontids and their culmination in the duck-billed dinosaurs.

I looked up ornithopod and got an entry which started:

Ornithopods are a group of ornithischian dinosaurs who started out as small, cursorial grazers ...

More wikilinks to check out! I looked up hypsilophodontid, and got:

Hypsilophodonts were small ornithopod dinosaurs. The group traditionally has included almost all ornithopods other than iguanodonts, but recent phylogenetic analyses have found that the group is mostly paraphyletic and the taxa within usually represent a stepwise arrangement leading up to Iguanodontia (Weishampel et al., 2003; Norman et al, 2004). Thus, the only certain member at this time is Hypsilophodon.

None of this stuff helped me. My next stop therefore was dictionaries, and they proved more helpful—so now I know that ornithopods are "bird-footed" dinosaurs and hypsilophodonts are small, swift-running bipedal dinosaurs (and that hypsilo means "crested"). I think it would be nicer if the readers of the article had easy access to such helpful descriptions; after all, that same first sentence willingly gives us "duck-billed" for hadrosaurs, a helpful decision which saved me a third detour. qp10qp 02:32, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi Qp10qp,

I'm opposed to sentences like"

"Iguanodon (IPA pronunciation /ɪˈgwɑːnəˌdɒn/ or /ɪˈgwænəˌdɒn/, meaning "Iguana tooth") is the name given to a genus (a scientific classification higher than species) of ornithopod ("bird-footed") dinosaur which lived roughly halfway between the early hypsilophodontids (small swift-running bipedal dinosaurs) and their culmination in the duck-billed dinosaurs.

Well, I'm opposed to sentences like that, too. qp10qp 04:36, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Mult-parenthetical sentences like this break up the flow of a sentence, making it nearly impossible to figure out what is being said. Not to mention they cause the length of a sentence to exceed the recommended length. Further, a sentence like the above is problematic. For example, the "bird-footed" dinosaurs didn't give rise to the birds. Should that, then, also be explained in the opening paragraph of Iguanodon?! Why should the definition of genus appear in the Iguanodon article? Why should hysilophodonts be explained, when Iguanodon wasn't one? This article is about Iguanodon. This article is not about hypsilophodonts, genera, or ornithopods. It touches on them because that is required to explain Iguanodon, but summary style tells us when an article gets large, it's best to move the material best suited to another article into another article. You are free to edit the article as you see fit, but I am worried from your description above the parenthetical nightmare this article may turn into. Firsfron of Ronchester 02:56, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

How about if I perked up Hypsilophodont and Ornithopod a bit in their lead sections? No one really wants to see a number of parenthetical statements. Readers get lost easily in such cases, and it looks unprofessional, like a number of asides. Those specific cases were more faults with the other articles than the one at hand, and unfortunately not all of the dinosaur articles have had as much attention as this one. I guess one just has to trust the other articles; that's why we have them, so we don't have to keep redefining paraphyletic on every page it's used. If you tell me the links that are bothering you, I'll spruce up the pages. J. Spencer 04:08, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

First, let me repeat that this is an excellent article. I wouldn't dream of lousing it up. When it comes to language, I'm an Orwellian:

1. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
2. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
3. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
4. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
5. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Trust me on the last one. I'm not going to do anything barbarous. (I may not do anything at all.) I'd only change something if I thought it would be better, and that would involve using fewer words, not more. By the way, parentheses aren't necessarily the best idea, I agree: clear, explanatory writing might be, using good old-fashioned subordinate clauses. qp10qp 04:25, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Kind of another issue, but how's the introduction for hypsilophodont now? I may not always be the best for this; I just sent out an article for review to a journal that forbids first-person pronouns, so sometimes my gearshift gets stuck. J. Spencer 04:31, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

No, that's excellent now; it does the job. I'm going to stop nagging you guys. I'm just a language nerd. qp10qp 04:41, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It's no big deal. I want this article to be as clear as possible, and anything relating to the taxonomy/classification or anatomy is going to be new to a lot of people as it is. I went through the lead and changed some of it. (Someone should have caught "paraphyletic clade," as by definition a clade can't be paraphyletic!) J. Spencer 04:54, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Support. I did some minor tweaking per WP:MOS, etc. trimmed some redundant wording, and made a few other fixes. I have no problems supporting now. — Brian (talk) 09:46, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Support. It would be nice to have a diagram that illustrated how some anatomical feature evolved from the hypsilophodontids through the Iguanodon to the duck-billed dinosaurs, supporting the comment in the opening paragraph that the Iguanodon lies approximately "half-way" through ornithopod evolution. Bluap 17:00, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

That would be a nice addition, although I'm wondering right now how to do it while showing but not telling. There are changes in size, the hand structure, how the teeth are arranged...now that I'm thinking about it, some sort of chart would be particularly good on Ornithopoda...hmm... J. Spencer 03:01, 28 February 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 review. No further edits should be made to this page.