Wikipedia:Featured article review/Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event/archive1

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

The article was kept by User:Marskell 14:22, 11 July 2008 [1].

Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event[edit]

I propose this article be stripped of its featured status. I was translating the article into my own language in which I got it reviewed. Under the impression that the huge amount of sources would make it acurate I just copied the sources into my translation. However, later I discovered a reference that was wrong-cited, and another user discovered two more errors, I will list the three cases below. The errors were, according to the article, supported by scientific literature. So I went to the library and checked it out. The mentioned sources, however, did NOT confirm these statements.

I can remove the passages from the article, but the article has a total of 77 references. This means 74 are not yet verified and since the three that I tried to verify appeared to be based on loose sand, I do not trust the other content to be well-referenced either. The best would be to check and verify all refs in the entire article and find new ones when they cite the source incorrectly. Meanwhile, the article should be stripped of its star.

List of bad citings found so far:

  1. Here I mentioned the first wrong-cited ref I discovered, I already removed it from the article. The text read : Identified in 1990 based on the work of Glen Penfield done in 1978, this crater is oval, with an average diameter of about 180 kilometers (112 mi), about the size calculated by the Alvarez team. The source did confirm that Alvarez had done this calculation, but the whole point of the paper was to disprove Alvarez' hypothesis. That was not the right source to cite here.
  2. A few orders of mammals did diversify right at the K-T boundary, including Chiroptera (bats) and Cetartiodactyla (whales and dolphins and Even-toed ungulates), as a result of the reduced competition in those niches. -> Gives Springer et al (2007) as source. Springer and coworkers do not mention whales or bats in that way. In fact, bats and whales are commonly supposed to have originated in respectively the Eocene and Paleocene, later in geologic time. (See for example Sutera (2002) on the origin of whales)
  3. The Northern hemisphere marsupial families became extinct, but those in Australia and South America survived. Gives as source Dodson (1996). I could not find the book in my library yet, but if it confirms this it contradicts other literature. For example McKenna & Bell (ref below) write that oppossums lived in North America continuously from the Cretaceous to the Miocene.

Listed literature that is not in the ref-list of the article:

  • McKenna, M.C. & Bell, S.K. 1997. Classification of mammals: above the species level. New York: Columbia University Press, 631 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-11013-6
  • Sutera, R. 2002. The Origin of Whales and the Power of Independent Evidence. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 20(5), p. 33-41.

Best regards, Woodwalker (talk) 18:39, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please follow the instructions at the top of WP:FAR to complete the notifications of relevant Projects and involved editors, and post the notifications back to this FAR as on other FARs. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:04, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm kind of offended by these comments. I guess me and a few dozen editors who did review each reference were idiots? I don't know what to say. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 01:17, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Looks like a fine article to me (a few patches of choppy paragraphing/sectioning might be attended to around the middle). The density of citations looks good, but I guess a quick check of the claims above might be conducted. I look forward to reading through it properly. TONY (talk) 03:28, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Responding to point 2 above, the article is freely available. It says "Within orders, subsequent basal splits are approximately at the K-T boundary for Afrosoricida, Chiroptera, and Cetartiodactyla." The text quoted in point 2 then lists the types of mammals in Cetartiodactyla as we know the clade now, presumably as a courtesy to the reader. However this might be misleading and could be corrected by saying "predecessors of..." or such. In any case, the referenced article supports the substance of point 2. Isolation booth (talk) 04:30, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, I reviewed some of the references, and it appears that the reference supports the statement. And the article is a key review reference for mammalian speciation after the K-T event. I'm not sure I can find a better one. The book that Woodwalker references is 6 years older than the published reference. Sometimes I despise the democracy of Wikipedia. One editor gets all upset, and there we go. And if I hadn't noticed that SG had made an edit to the article, I wouldn't even known that this existed. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 05:15, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have Dodson (1996), and although it did not verify the material in point #2, OM has removed that reference. The remaining Dodson reference [57], is correct. Firsfron of Ronchester 06:36, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Point 2: yes, I read the article. The point here is that a basal split is not the same as an origin of a species or even a higher group. The Chiroptera for example are regarded as having their origin in the Eocene. Further, the paper is a molecular clock-studies. Such things are not undisputed and not regarded as 100% evidence (as appears from the article). What the paper says is then: based on the not uncontroversial method of molecular clocking/phylogenetics it is found that the split between ancestors of the whales and bats occurred most probably around 80 Ma. It has nothing to do with modern orders! The ref is therefore misleading (it does not support the point in the article!) and should be removed, or the text has to change in a way the information in the article reflects that in the paper.
Orangemarlin: I'm sorry. If you reviewed these refs in this article, you did not read well or did not have the nessesary background to understand what is really meant. That's the only conclusion I can make from what I found by delving through the article. When confronted with a score of 3 out of 4 refs that are wrong or misleading I don't feel comfortable the rest is to be trusted. Woodwalker (talk) 10:28, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Question: were these random references that you were checking? Your comment above indicates they were, and that of four references you checked, three were incorrect...? Is that the case, or were these all the problems you found with the article? As far as necessary backgrounds go, nearly every paper comes with an abstract at the beginning which should be understandable to the lay reader, and most of the papers used as references in this article aren't overly technical anyway, to my mind. I don't feel it's fair to pull out three examples of possible errors (in a 67k long article!) and tell someone "you did not read well" or lack the "necessary" background. What background is necessary here to write an encyclopedia article? Firsfron of Ronchester 14:03, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
@Firsfron: Not totally random. The user that asked me about the errors in the text is an expert on mammals. At the wiki in my own language we don't have many users that are specialists. For example, we do not have a real stratigrapher, or a real expert on amphibians. Therefore two of the cases above are on mammals. Since that section of the article is rather small a good portion of the refs in that particular section are wrong. What does that say about the rest of the article? I have no idea, except that I found that the only other ref I read entirely (my first point above) was not to the right paper. I am myself not an expert on amphibians (for example) and am not really 100% sure if the refs in the amphibian section are correct.
For me this uncertainty if the content is true is a big problem with any featured article. The article does not really have to have references in every sentence, as long as it mentions a few reliable, well-cited sources that confirm the main points in every section. A featured article should in the first place contain no errors or mistakes. I think that if a ref is not well cited, it should be removed. The amount of content or the level of the content is -for my sake- definitely not what is at stake here. On these points the article meets the criteria for featured status, I think.
Someone (I don't know if it was Orangemarlin) has, you said, checked the references for their credibility. If I find that 3 in 4 references are not well cited, yes, then I conclude that the particular editor that checked these three refs did not read well or has not enough background on the subject, I am sorry to say. Scientific literature is not easy to read for people without experience on the covered subject. Not only does one have to know the jargon, in many cases, authors make claims that aren't supported by most of their colleagues or are based on uncertainties or controversial experiments/methods. One has to know the whole scientific community to know what the consensus is. That does not say the reviewers of this article have tried to do their uttermost best, it can be they misunderstood the meaning of the cited texts because they did not know the ins and outs of the literature on a specific subject. Woodwalker (talk) 15:48, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
To continue on Woodwalker's points: The cited Springer et al. article does not support the text in the article ("A few orders of mammals did diversify right at the K-T boundary, including Chiroptera (bats) and Cetartiodactyla (whales and dolphins and Even-toed ungulates), as a result of the reduced competition in those niches."). It is original research to deduce this from the cited article, which only says that the basal splits are at the K-T event. Also, the article cited for the previous sentence (Nature 446:507–512), actually gives much older times of basal diversification for both orders (74 and 75 Mya), and it is more recent and comprehensive.
Also, the article still contains the wrong assertion that Northern Hemisphere marsupial families went extinct. In fact, the North American Stagodontidae did go extinct, but, as Woodwalker said, marsupials remained there until the Miocene.
I also reviewed the citations given for the reasons why mammals survived K-T. One of these, Geodiversitas 23:369–379, can be found at [2]. It is a quite interesting article, but it does not contain any information on the fact it is cited for. The other citation given, GSA Bulletin 116(5–6):760–768 [3], actually is about the correct topic, but its assertions are different in details from those given in this article. The Wikipedia article mentions a body size below 1 kg, the cited article does not say this. The Wikipedia article mentions "shelter in a number of different environments", the cited article says all mammals must have sheltered underground, in soil, or in water. The Wikipedia article says "many early monotremes and marsupials were semiaquatic or burrowing", the cited article reasons that several lineages of living monotremes, marsupials, and placentals contain semiaquatic or burrowing groups, so that it would be reasonable to assume that some end-Cretaceous mammals were also semiaquatic or burrowing (or were, at least, able to find shelter by moving into the water or the soil).
In conclusion, the mammal section of this article partly contradicts its sources, partly is wrong, and partly does not follow from the sources cited. I do not know if the same situation exists in other sections, but a check may be appropriate. Ucucha 14:23, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to be rude here, because it annoys me. But instead of coming here and bitching about the article, written by me (a physician, businessman, and knowledgeable about mammalian evolution from a course in mammalogy in college about 30 years ago) and a few other individuals, none of whom, as best as I know, are mammalogists either, why don't you rewrite the section? Isn't the purpose of Wikipedia to contribute? The point of the article is not spend paragraphs discussing every insignificant order of mammals, it's to give a general idea of what happened to mammals. They key point is that mammals (and I suppose birds) radiated into environmental niches previously encumbered by dinosaurs. Come on everyone. Help make the article better at the article's talk section, not here. This is ridiculous.OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 18:53, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
First, I am sorry if my comments were offensive to you. I am not familiar with this process (and generally not with English Wikipedia customs). However, I would have thought it would have been considered reasonable to review a section of an article at a process that is called Featured Article Review. If this is wrong, I am sorry.
That said, I do actually wish the article to improve, but I preferred to first identify the problems with the mammal section and to hear what the original authors had to say about it. As I now understand, I should actually improve the article myself. I will do this, but not now, as I am quite busy in real life now (in fact, I should be learning for an exam). It is, of course, easier to find a contradiction between an article's text and its references than to improve it with other references. There are several interesting points that could be added to the article, though, including the apparent extinction of some "archaic" mammalian lineages, and hopefully I will be able to add something of that the day after tomorrow. Ucucha 19:26, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I do archosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles, and can interpret the other stuff. Show me what else ya got! :) J. Spencer (talk) 00:55, 26 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry I didn't notice this earlier. I'm going with Orange here and keeping this. I don't see much the talk page can't handle. Marskell (talk) 14:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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