A fact from Beania magellanica appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 29 December 2020 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that the colonial bryozoan Beania magellanica, widely distributed in the Southern Hemisphere, has recently turned up in the Mediterranean Sea?
Beania magellanica is within the scope of WikiProject Animals, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to animals and zoology. For more information, visit the project page.AnimalsWikipedia:WikiProject AnimalsTemplate:WikiProject Animalsanimal articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Marine life, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Marine lifeWikipedia:WikiProject Marine lifeTemplate:WikiProject Marine lifeMarine life articles
Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
Overall: Citation for hook taken AGF. I like these species articles where they've found something new, or something in a new place. I hope you get a chance to see this in the wild? Anyway, I miss the sea, so thank you for this article. Storye book (talk) 16:28, 17 December 2020 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The introduction says "Beania magellanica is a species of colonial bryozoan in the family Beaniidae. It has a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring in shallow waters in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and in Antarctica." Evidently, this is some kind of marine life form. I am not a marine biologist. These sentences tell me almost nothing about this creature, except the hint ("colonial") that it forms groups of interdependent individuals,but I can't guess what that means in this species. Going to Bryozoa I discover that it is an invertebrate. I don't know from the introduction (or the highly technical article) whether it is smaller than an earthworm or larger than a rabbit. I don't know what is notable about it.
Who is supposed to get anything out of this, other than specialists? Will anyone who can, please replace the introduction by one that is meaningful to the average intelligent encyclopedia reader? Please do not tell me that I have to look at the links to understand this. That is not how an intro should work. Anyway, the crucial link, Bryozoa, is just as incomprehensible. Zaslav (talk) 06:54, 29 December 2020 (UTC)Reply