Talk:Ornithology/GA1

GA Review

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Hi, I'll be reviewing this article. The rules for GA reviews are stated at Good Article criteria. I usually do reviews in the order: coverage; structure; detailed walk-through of sections (refs, prose, other details); images (after the text content is stable); lead (ditto). Feel free to respond to my comments under each one, and please sign each response, so that it's clear who said what.

When an issue is resolved, I'll mark it with  Done. If I think an issue remains unresolved after responses / changes by the editor(s), I'll mark it  Not done. Occasionally I decide one of my comments is off-target, and strike it out

Thanks for bringing this to GA review - editors often prefer to avoid big topics because of the amount of research involved.

Sorry for taking so long to post comments - nearly a week since I signed up to review it. Apart fror real life, one of the difficulties is to see how to improve the article - there's a lot of interesting material, provided the citations stand up; but the structure is unclear and the relevance of some of the the points is also unclear. However these are things I think a determined editor could put right in a week or two.

Peer review

The Talk page says there's a peer review. Has this finished? There should not be 2 different reviews of the same article at the same time. --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I looked. There is no active page at WP:PR so I suspect it is closed. Casliber (talk · contribs) 23:31, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Coverage

• Nothing about the palaeontology of birds? Thomas Henry Huxley, aka "Darwin's bulldog", noted the similarity of bird and dinosaur skeletons in the late 19th century, you'll find refs at Dinosaur and / or Origin of birds. Also Alan Feduccia, who is AFAIK an ornithologist rather than palaeontologist by training, has caused controversy (over 10 yrs ago now? see Origin of birds) by suggesting that the fingers that form birds' wings are not those that formed theropods' hands. It's your call how much detail you go into, and this may depend on how easy it would be for a reader to cross-refer to another article without losing the thread - wikilinks, "main articles", "see also" etc. are a bit of a lottery, as the potential link targets are sometimes not too helpful. --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
• Has molecular phylogenetics made any significant contributions to ornithology? --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
• Damn, there was another omission I noticed, but have forgotten what it was while writing the previous comments. I hope it comes back to me. --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Structure

• The "History" section is a bit of a jumble. For example its current 3rd para notes how Xenophon describes the abundance of ostriches in Assyria, but it's unclear how the next sentence (brood parasitism by the Asian Koel) relates to historical geog distribution, and the rest of th para seems to be about bird art. The first problem is where to draw the line between historical and current ornithology - even the article gets muddled about this, e.g. sub-section "Scientific studies" says scientific ornithology emerged in Victorian times, but "Early History" gives some examples of quite respectable science, e.g Aristotle's observations of cranes' migration and Frederick II of Hohenstaufen's experiment (1194 – 1250) on how vultures depended on their eyes to find prey. As a result the chronological approach contains a mix of folklore and scientific aspects. Perhaps it might be useful to separate these aspects, but that would leave a difficulty about where to put the bloopers, e.g. hibernation of swallows or emergence of barnacle geese from sessile crustaceans. You might get some ideas on structure from the few articles on disciplines / fields of study that have reached GA - it appears none have reached FA.
• While writing this I've been having a think, it's quite difficult to structure this. I think one major reason is the very fuzzy boundary between science, practical rules of thumb (farmers, hunters, etc.), the hobby, art, etc. - do other branches of zoology have such strong non-scientist participation? I suggest you sketch out a proposed structure here for discussion before making major changes. --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
• I suggest the item about the influence on Darwin be moved to "Relationships with other sciences" - this was not ornithology for its own sake. --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
• Likewise the stuff on ecology (species-area effect).
• Ditto immunology. Although I'm less sure that this belongs in the article, as it was just a matter of using the birds as "white mice", not studying them as birds. --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
• Etc., including economics. --Philcha (talk)
• Therer are several items whose relevance is no clear, e.g, the quality of Oriental bird art, Meyr and allopatric speciation. --Philcha (talk) 09:03, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
• I'm in 2 minds about the the separation between "In the field" and "In the laboratory" - there's significant overlap / duplication in the apects of birds that can be studied in the 2 types of environment, e.g. migrations can be observed and also analysed by variations in hydrogen isotope ratios. --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

A few other comments

• Some of the English prose is quite poor, e.g. "In his day the Osprey was well known but disliked for it was believed to empty their fishponds ^(whose?); anglers used to mix their bait with its fat^{{so what?)}" However I'd leave the copy editing until the structure's resolved and we know what the focus of each section should be. --Philcha (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Result of this review

Apart from the note that the PR is no longer active, there's been no response to my comments in 3 weeks. I have to conclude that this article fails to reach GA standards. It's a pity because the article seems to have the ingredients, if they're baked right - and WP has too few GAs or better on high-level overview topics. --Philcha (talk) 08:37, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

History

• It might be cool to mention that the Romans practiced a form of divination from the flight of birds -- some of our modern vocabulary derives from this. The person who did it was called an "augur", the thing he did was called "reading the auspices", and a good prediction was called "auspicious". This was a standard thing to do before any important action such as a battle. Looie496 (talk) 01:04, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

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