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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Taxonomy of lemurs/archive1

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

The article was promoted by SandyGeorgia 20:13, 19 June 2011 [1].

Taxonomy of lemurs

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Taxonomy of lemurs (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): – VisionHolder « talk » 16:38, 27 May 2011 (UTC), Ucucha[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because I feel it meets the FAC criteria. The article was recently split off from the FA Evolutionary history of lemurs and fixed up further during the GAN. The only significantly new content is the lead and the "Background" section. – VisionHolder « talk » 16:38, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Source review - spotchecks not done. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:09, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • I'm unclear whether there were any non-lemurid mammals on Madagascar. I know from other articles that there were bats, but can you state explicitly that there were no terrestrial mammals (if that was the case).
  • There are—there's nesomyine rodents, tenrecs (weird insectivores), euplerid carnivores, a possibly indigenous shrew (Suncus madagascariensis), some extinct stuff, and a bunch of introduced species. However, we have no idea about the mammals that were on Madagascar before lemurs arrived, since Madagascar has no terrestrial fossil record from 65 to 1 Ma, and the older ones are unrelated to the current fauna. What exactly would you like to see in the article? Ucucha 16:10, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Currently there are approximately 100 or more recognized — I'd be inclined to lose either the approximately or the or more
  • I've made an attempt to fix that redundancy, so please let me know if it's okay. Otherwise... Wow, Ucucha! You're really on top of this! I really appreciate your help, given that I'm trying to focus my attention this weekend on my research paper. You're welcome to keep making corrections and participating, but if so, please include yourself as a co-nominator. I don't want to take all the credit if you're making most of the major fixes. – VisionHolder « talk » 17:22, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • order Primates — there are a couple of places where the slightly less technical "primate order" might read more naturally
  • I've reworded those; in two of the three places the mention of the rank was not essential, so I cut it out.
  • Hinged upon morphological traits and molecular data, it has had profound implications on scientific theories. — I had to read this sentence and the one preceding it three times before I was sure it made sense. Can it be tweaked for clarity?
  • I have removed that particular sentence; the piece about molecular and morphological doesn't add much and the "profound implications" seem hyperbolic, given that Owen's arguments clearly didn't convince many biologists for long. Ucucha 16:23, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • then multiple colonization events would have had to occur to explain the present-day distribution of non-human primates on Madagascar — I'm not clear why multiple arrivals of ancestral lemurs is a problem?
  • Dispersal to Madagascar is an unlikely event, and only very few groups of mammals have made it there, so it's inherently unlikely that primates would have dispersed there twice. The situation with lemurs parallels that with the other three major groups of terrestrial mammals on Madagascar (nesomyines, tenrecs, and euplerids)—in each case, older taxonomies often didn't put those together, but modern molecular data shows the Malagasy members of each group are monophyletic. Ucucha 16:23, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Happy with the changes. With regard to the mammal thing, what about something on the lines of Having undergone their own independent evolution on Madagascar, which has few other land mammals, lemurs have... ? Jimfbleak - talk to me? 05:59, 30 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Image review: All images check out copyright-wise and contribute well to the article. Wizardman Operation Big Bear 17:02, 15 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by mav (reviews needed)

Lede and background
  • For an article on taxonomy, I think it is vital to say up front and how "lemur" fits into scientific nomenclature. Specifically, that it is an intraorder classification and what that means; it would also be good to mention in the lede that the designation originally was for a genus but this changed over the years. --mav (reviews needed) 01:13, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ref spot check
  • Sussman 2003, pp. 107–148. <- And similar. Can't you narrow that down a bit? Few people will read all that to verify one sentence. --mav (reviews needed) 01:13, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Garbutt 2007, pp. 85–86. (ref 1). I checked the source and it clearly says that all lemurs are most likely descended from a single ancestor, but that is not the emphasis given by the sentence right before that ref, which says "If this species does not form a monophyletic group with the rest of the lemurs, then multiple colonization events would have had to occur to explain the occurrence of lemurs on Madagascar." --mav (reviews needed) 01:13, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Not sure what the problem is here. The reference supports the text in the article; it has some additional ideas, which are covered elsewhere in this article. Ucucha 02:45, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • "First, the four most closely related living lemur families diverged within a narrow window of approximately 10 million years, making it much harder to distinguish the splits with molecular evidence." Needs a cite. --mav (reviews needed) 01:13, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • It's cited to Yoder and Yang (2004, p. 768): "From this node (N8), the following major divergence events, yielding the indriid, lepilemurid, cheirogaleid and lemurid lineages, occurred within a period of approximately 10 Myr." Ucucha 02:45, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mittermeier et al. 2008, p. 1614. for sentence "In 2008, Russell Mittermeier, Colin Groves, and others avoided addressing higher-level taxonomy by defining lemurs as monophyletic and containing five living families, including Daubentoniidae." Yet, the linked pdf does not have page numbers and I can't find monophyletic in the pdf. Could you point me to the part of the pdf that supports the above-quoted sentence? --mav (reviews needed) 01:13, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • I've removed that sentence. Mittermeier et al. (2008) simply don't cover taxonomy above the family level; there seems little point in saying that in a section about higher-level classification. Ucucha 02:45, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yoder & Yang 2004, p. 768. for "In addition, these families diverged from their last common ancestor approximately 42 mya; such distant splits create a lot of noise for molecular techniques." Checks out; ref does support this.
  • Please check to make sure all the sentences in this article are supported by the references behind them. I'll then do another spot check. --mav (reviews needed) 01:13, 16 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

TCO comment: (FL) List of lemur species (great article btw) seems like an extremely similar topic. Wondering when you would expect a reader to go to one article versus the other? Little worried we are too hung up with the Wiki definitions of lists versus articles or perhaps the award processes...but in real world, this info would not be separated like this.TCO (talk) 08:17, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Why not? There are several real-world articles that explicitly deal with the subject of this article—larger-scale taxonomy—such as Tattersall (2007) and Yoder (2003, in Goodman and Benstead, 2003), and others that deal just with listing the species and perhaps their particular taxonomic problems, such as Goodman (2003, in Goodman and Benstead, 2003) and Mittermeier et al. (2008). You'd go to List of lemur species if you want just, well, a list of species, and to this one if you want information about the general taxonomic history of lemurs. Ucucha 11:24, 17 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments and suggestions

Support. Following the suggestions and responses below, am happy to support. Carcharoth (talk) 01:34, 19 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • First sentence of the lead, the phrase "spans back to 1758" is awkward to my ear. I would expect "dates back to" or "dates from", rather than 'spans'.
  • Second sentence of the lead, "independent evolution on Madagascar" should be linked to the article on lemur evolution.
  • Also in the lead (final paragraph), the adjacent links to family and rank are distracting and not needed - you can get to the taxonomic rank article from near the top of the family (biology) article.
  • I think the piping of phrases such as 'wide variety of habitats' to Geography of Madagascar is a bit dubious. It fails in print, for a start, and even when read on a computer, you have to hover over it to see where the link is taking you. My rule of thumb is if I have to guess where the link is going, then it needs clarifying or removing. I was expecting the link to take me to an article on how the geography of Madagascar was more diverse in the past. Personally, I'd remove the link altogether. The real links people need (to the habitat examples) are already there later on in the sentence. If you must have a link, I would pipe it from 'entire island'.
  • Correction needed to: "He may also have known that the some Malagasy people"
  • Despite it being mostly a series of bullet points, I found the 'Genus-level classification' section easier to take in than the 'Suprageneric classification' and 'Species-level classification' sections (it was shorter as well, which helped). To be honest, I was only skim-reading much of those, as most of it went right over my head. A timeline for some sections and for the whole history might help. It also wasn't until I was halfway through the article that I realised that the approach of sections for 'suprageneric', 'genus-level' and 'species-level' was being taken. Possibly a sentence somewhere preparing the reader for this might help (something like 'over the following centuries, changes occurred at all levels of the taxonomy, from family to genus to species' and then launch into explaining those changes).
    • I reorganized the lead a little to cover suprageneric, generic, and specific taxonomy in that order. It might be good to say "This article will first cover taxonomy above the genus level, then changes at the level of the genus, and finally species-level taxonomy", but that will probably get people up in arms about WP:SELFREFERENCE. Ucucha 13:10, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do you need to link 'taxonomy' again in 'Species-level classification'? Also, as this is the section about species, shouldn't that first sentence focus things on the species level, by saying 'Lemur taxonomy [at the species level] is controversial'?
  • You could link sympatry.
  • In the sentence: "Still other researchers who emphasize the framework of the "general lineage concept of species" contend that lineage divergence or differentiation demarcates the beginning of a new species." Is it possible to make clearer whether these other researchers are for or against the increase in number of species? i.e. is that paragraph two examples of 'concerns that species are being identified prematurely', or is it one plus a rebuttal?
    • From reading the source, it appears that the "general lineage concept" is yielding approximately the same result as the PSC (i.e., lots of Microcebus species). I don't know whether we need this sentence, since the lineage concept doesn't seem a major part of the debate; Visionholder, what do you think? Ucucha 13:10, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • Personally, I read (and wrote) this to demonstrate differences in opinion on the entire lemur species count problem, not as a "for or against" argument for new species. Removing the sentence will definitely make it read like a "for or against" argument. Basically there are many differences in opinion, with some supporting larger numbers of species, some supporting smaller, and others supporting somewhere in the middle. I would say the sentence under question represents the middle-ground camp, particularly since Yoder's name is on the paper. – VisionHolder « talk » 05:57, 19 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note 6 is nice, though I spent a while trying to do similar calculations for the other years, before realising that you can only do the calculation if you know the details of the subspecies and how many are from the same species.

Overall, looks nice (if a bit difficult to understand if you don't know much about taxonomy or lemurs), but one thing that would make it even nicer is a historical picture, maybe of one of the older books about lemur taxonomy, or of one or two of the taxonomists (as nice as the pictures of lemurs are). Carcharoth (talk) 00:36, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a picture of Systema Naturae. Thanks for the comments! Ucucha 13:10, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No problem. All comments and suggestions addressed (or in the process of being addressed). Happy to add my support and will do so above in my next edit. Carcharoth (talk) 01:32, 19 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the excellent suggestion to use historical pictures (art). I've finished making those changes. Also, thanks for the support. (In the future, please make the support more explicit/visible. I've done it for you this time.) – VisionHolder « talk » 05:45, 19 June 2011 (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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