Wikipedia:Scientific peer review/History of Earth

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[edit] History of Earth

I have been following the progress of SPR with interest and I think that your expertise could be exactly what I need to help me improve History of Earth. It's an article I'd wanted to write for quite some time now, and finally began a couple months ago. I've tried to summarize the history of our planet from formation to present, incorporating the dominant scientific theories of each period, but it's rather difficult to condense so much material into such little space. In addition, I am a physician, not an astronomer, physicist, chemist, biologist, anthropologist, or historian; I am but an amateur, writing from imperfect knowledge.

There are several areas I could use some help, if the panel has time.

• Accuracy (most important): Can you help verify the science of the article? Ensure that I haven't been overly simplistic, misleading, or flat-out wrong? My understanding of some fields may be flawed.
• References: It is very important to me that the article be well-sourced. However, I cannot keep up-to-date on the new research in each of these fields. I have incorporated what I can, but often using sources such as web pages which may not be very authoritative. If you happen to know of a better source (or additional sources) for something, I would greatly appreciate it.
• Awkwardness: this is not a specific scientific request, but when condensing large amounts of research into a sentence or two, it is difficult to do justice to the material. My summarizing may not be giving an appropriate picture of something, and in addition, I am unhappy with my attempts to condense human history into a single section (so much material, and my grasp of history is relatively poor). I've tried to stick to matters of a global or planetary nature, such as world wars. I also felt mentioning spaceflight was important in an article about a planet's history.
• Others: Any other suggestions? This is a completely different type of article for me to write; I have never attempted something like this before. I was fortunate to have several editors assist with copyediting and rewording awkward sentences, but additional eyes are always better.

I would appreciate any advice you have for improving this article. Thank you. — Knowledge Seeker দ 05:31, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

KS, I think you've thought this through very well and unfortunately I didn't get on the WP Project:Physics group until recently, but I completely support your cautious approach to the article and your healthy respect for accuracy as well as readability by general audiences. I would be more than happy to collaborate/edit for you on any ideas you have for the article. I have seen many of the comments you've made on the talk page of that article and I'll start by following those to see what is the status of the article. I also see that many individuals have already been helping you. Cheers, Astrobayes 01:24, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

A problem that I see right away is that this is not so much a "History of the Earth" as a "History of Life (on Earth)". I was expecting to see more coverage of cometary bombardment, tectonic activity, continental drift, ice ages and other geological and climate changes. While life had important impacts, it could be covered more from the basis of impacts to the environment. — RJH (talk) 23:09, 7 February 2007 (UTC)