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Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Painted turtle/archive1

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Latest comment: 13 years ago by Sasata

Resolved comments from Sasata

  • Lead
  • link Louisiana, subspecies, sexual maturity, trapping (animal), habitat loss, road kill, Oregon, British Columbia
Done subspecies, sexual maturity, trapping (animal), habitat loss and roadkill. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:19, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Louisiana, Oregon, British Columbia - overlinking perhaps? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:19, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Maybe, maybe not. I don't really know where Louisiana or Oregon are (i.e. I couldn't point them out on a blank map), so I'd have to type them in the search box to know for sure. In the taxa articles I work on, I usually avoid linking countries or oceans (i.e. really major geographical locations that any semi-educated person in the world would/should know), but link to geographical divisions smaller than that. Your call though. Sasata (talk) 00:33, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "… frequently consumed by rodents, canines and snakes; but as an adult …" if a semicolon is being used, the word "but" is not required
    • Changed to "Although they are frequently consumed as eggs or hatchlings by rodents, canines, and snakes, the adult turtles' hard shells protect them from most predators except alligators and raccoons." Malleus Fatuorum 18:39, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • fall->autumn to appease UK & European readers
  • "Only in Oregon and British Columbia is there danger of losing range." sounds awkward
  • …name the painted turtle as official reptile." pipe link to List of U.S. state reptiles (otherwise, I can image a European reading that sentence and saying "official reptile", wtf?)
Done Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:19, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • in the taxobox, species should be given as C. picta
Done. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 17:43, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • why aren't the subspecies names (bolded subheadings) in the collapsible box italicized?
Done italicized now. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:34, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • Taxonomy and Evolution
  • link family
Family Emydidae linked, although this could now possibly be WP:OVERLINKed situation. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 17:43, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Sorry, I should have been more specific, I meant link the term family; seems like a worthwhile link as this article is (at least partially) about a genus, so it makes sense to link to the taxonomical construct contained by it. Sasata (talk) 00:33, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Done, I may need to reword this sentence slightly though because we have two wlinks next to each other.--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 01:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "… generally but not perfectly the family of small freshwater turtles." I know what it's trying to say but it sounds awkward
  • make sure there's non-breaking spaces in the short-form bi- and trinomials to prevent ugly line wraps
Done for all 'C.' and 'C. p' occurrences. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 20:00, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "C.p. marginata" this one has no spaces, the others do
Done. All "C. p. subspecies" Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:30, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "…the painted turtle was given its current taxonomic name by John Edward Gray in 1844." Referring to the binomial as a "taxonomic name" seems odd to me, haven't heard of it expressed that way before. Wouldn't it be more accurate to indicate that Gray transferred it to the genus Chrysemys? (technically the name stayed the same)
  • Schnieder->Schneider?
Done Regards, SunCreator (talk) 17:08, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "The painted turtle's genus name" -> generic name (but link to genus if you're worried people might not know what generic means in this context)
  • link species name
Doing so would create circular redirect as article is about species, same issue with genus as only species. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 17:43, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Sorry, again I should have been clearer: I was suggesting to link the term species name :) Sasata (talk) 00:33, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Now that's funny. Done. :-) NYMFan69-86 (talk) 01:16, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • be consistent when giving the etymology: sometimes the English meaning is in quotes, sometimes not
  • the successive "came from" is repetitive… change one to "derives from" or similar
  • link common name, Nebraska, Kansas (remember, not all readers are from the US)
I don't know about linking states (I would have to link all of them if I did these two). And, for another turtle article, I was told not to by Sandy, so I'll leave them unlinked for now.--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 22:59, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "In 1964, based on measurements of the skull and feet, the three genera were merged into one, but measurements in 1967 contradicted this." Once again, I know what the text is trying to say, but it seems to be expressed awkwardly. Who merged the genera (source?) What did the measurements contradict, the merging of genera, or the original measurements? Who performed the contradictory measurements? (source?)
Clarified all this a bit, let me know what you think.--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 01:59, 9 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "In the same year, J. Alan Holman pointed out that" What year, 1964 or 1967? Who is this Holman guy?
  • link crossbreed
Done. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 20:37, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "In the 1980s, studies of turtles' cell structures, biochemistries, and parasites further indicated that Chrysemys, Pseudemys, and Trachemys should remain in separate genera." I'm not sure it needs to go in the article, but as a scientist I'd be interested in knowing what was different from these genera at the cellular level.
Ernst might have a citation and we could do a cited by type thing, so at least reader has the original ref. Probably don't want to go into the detail more.TCO (talk) 03:46, 9 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • link Mississippi River
Not done. Would be overlinking. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 17:43, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Ok. Now where's that map ... Sasata (talk) 00:33, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • link hybridized
Done. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 17:43, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
In the following section, we have a link to "Integradation" where hybridization is discussed. Is this alright (having both links in one article and using them interchangably)?--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 00:17, 9 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
In the second instance, I'd take intergrade out of parentheses and leave out hybridize. If one wishes, one can follow the link learn how hybridization defines the concept of intergradation (or you could include that parenthetically here). Sasata (talk) 00:33, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "… across the Mississippi.[18][16]" a minor point, but refs should be in numerical order
Done. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:30, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "Based on a mitochondrial DNA study" pipe link to more specific mitochondrial DNA rather than mitochondria
  • glancing downward at the refs, they need to be go through with a fine tooth comb, eg:
*page ranges need an endash, not hyphen
Done, by another editor. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:30, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • should be consistent with capitalization of reference titles. Personally, I like title case for books and sentence case for journal articles, but you're welcome to your own style, as long as it's consistent.
  • I've (we've), just been using the capitalization the source used (some go with "Painted Turtle," others "Painted turtle," should we be basing our citations on our preferences rather than the article name?--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 23:25, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • I think we should be consistent at this end. For the user, it's not going to make any difference to them in finding the article if the binomial is italicized or not, or if the capitalization is different.
  • full citation info not always given, e.g. current ref #16 (Bleakney 1958) doesn't give volume, issue, or page #'s (hint: go to JSTOR site, and click on "+ show full citation" for this info). Also consider giving JSTOR url as well; if you do, indicate (subscription required)
The spacing looks like that because of the dashes (which I'm doing wrong and don't know how to correct). I've added the full page range now. And the two Jackson sources (77 and 78) should read "Hibernating Without Oxygen: Physiological Adaptations of the Painted Turtle," not "Hibernating without oxygen: physiological adaptations of the painted turtle?"--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 18:59, 11 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • current ref #19: some names are given as "last, first" while others are "first, last", and there's also "first. last" in the mix too. Latin binomial should be italicized in the article title. PDFs don't need acccess dates.
Ref#19(now#20) last, first and Chrysemys picta italicized done. Regards, SunCreator (talk)
Access dates from PDF references removed. Regards, SunCreator (talk)
  • sometimes pp. is given when it should be p. (and vice versa)
  • I could go on, but I think you catch my drift. The devil's in the details. Once again, I haven't yet commented about the content—the presentation needs some work. Sasata (talk) 07:28, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • I read the rest of the article and it seemed to be much more polished than the first two sections we discussed. I made some small changes myself, please review and check I haven't messed things up. A few minor things: Sasata (talk) 19:21, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "They favor shallows that contain dense vegetation and have an unusual toleration of pollution." Needs rewording, sounds like they like water that is pollution-tolerant
I would agree if we were missing "have an an unusal toleration" in the sentence. But as written, this is a new verbal phrase, only "they" carries over (not favors). But feel free to repeat the they and add a comma and make into a clause.TCO (talk) 21:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
The obvious solution is to switch the two parts of the sentence around, which I've done: "They have an unusual tolerance for pollution and favor shallows that contain dense vegetation". Malleus Fatuorum 20:30, 11 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • wondering about the linking in the predators section. Why are, for example, garter snake and osprey worthy of links whereas catfish and groundhogs aren't?
We linked the uncommon animals. This is discussed in a hidden comment and in article talk page. But for discussion here, the intention is to link words sparingly, where we think the reader might really need to leave the article, or really want to. And in general we don't want him to have to open a gazillion windows. Over use of blue terms reduce reading speed and make the articles more of a slog. This is discussed in guidance. WE ARE BETTER for not overlinking. Also, putting blue term next to blue term is a no-no since it's hard for reader to see a difference (gets a mass of blue). However, if we want to list ALL the predators, rather than the deliberate decision that we made, we should convert the whole thing to a table or three column list (pretty listy anyhow).TCO (talk) 21:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
w-linked catfish and groundhogs. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 21:00, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Catfish!? Overlinking. TCO (talk) 21:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • why are the three snakes in italics?
Scientific names was previous used. Now corrected. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 21:00, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "The young turtles grow rapidly, sometimes doubling in the first year, with the fastest growth rate while the smallest." awkward
I'm not resisting, but I don't get the problem.TCO (talk) 21:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
You have to think twice what it's saying "fastest growth rate while the smallest", fastest growth at first. Changing sentence to "The young turtles grow rapidly at first, sometimes doubling in the first year." Regards, SunCreator (talk) 22:30, 11 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "Painted turtles over 40 years old have been found in the wild." How do they determine age? Were they tagged in the late 1960s or is there some morphological character that changes with age?
It's a cool question, but I wonder if we need to address the methods used or can trust the source. I think they have growth rings, but would have to research it (saw that somewhere tangentially). We do point to a lot of review and even primary science so likely that we are giving the readers tools to pursue this sort of thing. (like parasite, biology, etc. stuff from the 80s)TCO (talk) 21:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Belay my last. Google web search came up with popular sites saying the growth rings are not accurate. And that sorta fits with my dim memory as they were talking about trying to use turtle rings for climate info (I kid not), but they didn't sound too hopeful. And dendroclimatology is hard enough, although usually you can at least resolve rings well. I donno about the 40. We would have to research it independently or via our own ref (probably need the ref to the ref). It's not out of possiblity that they were marked turtles. They've been marked since at least Bishop in the 30s. Or maybe they swagged it somehow without exact resolution. Screw it, I will go fire up the Google (is my friend) Scholar.  ;-)TCO (talk) 21:51, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
OK, here are a couple references: [1], [2]. Both by Gibbons who is a big name in this field and has been an advocate for turtles and the dangers in overcapturing from long-lived populations. First I can only read first page of as don't have access. Second is "free". Reading it, seems that the growth rings work better than normal on picta but above 10 years, get more tricky. HAve to rely on marking turtles and recapturing. Cagle (1939) discusses a method of marking scutes (btw, same method was used by Gamble in his very recent work, basically they drill into the poor things' shells).
Let me know if you want the 40 years checked to find specifics on that study. Also if you want some of the primarly literature covered. It is kind of a cool concept and gets some play on popular sites ("how can you tell the age of your turtle"), so we could expand the thought and throw a couple sourced sentences in. BTW, there is an implication of the turtle long livedness wrt their capture by humans. Basically, turtles don't replenish themselves well and kinda rely on a lot of olde functional individuals. If you cull them too hard, you can drop the population down hard. Turtles aren't like deer or rabbits. Our daughter page on Capture discusses this some with citations to the key general turtle papers. We also have the picta papers (Gamble basically) cited in our article but don't really go into the whole long lived aspect explicitly. It's really more of a big deal for snappers or the species that have slower sexual maturity. TCO (talk) 22:18, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Here is another paper (see p 6 and 7) that seemed relevant. They do age estimation from growth rings for younger ones; for older ones, they use some other shell measurements and some regression model ("in publication" :-)). P.s. There's actually a huge primary literature on picta. They are so common and easy to study. Although we've kind of gone pretty deep off the reservation into the primary literature, sometimes as needed and other times because we got a "hair", there was still some desire to not have to redo every aspect of Ernst or other (good) review work. TCO (talk) 00:13, 11 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • "US federal law prohibits sale or transport of any turtle less than 4 inches" convert units?
Yes, now done. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 21:00, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • this source "Potawatomi oral tradition". Milwaukee Public Museum. http://www.mpm.edu/wirp/ICW-137.html. needs to be made more informative; if you check the bottom of the cited page, it says "(Adapted from Alanson Skinner, “The Mascoutens or Prairie Potawatomi Indians, Part III, Mythology and Folklore,” Milwaukee Public Museum Bulletin 6[3]:327-411.)"; this should be indicated in the citation
I've added a full citation onto the one we originally had (the two separate ones form a single citation).--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 21:20, 14 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • make sure all outgoing links to JSTOR have (subscription required) appended to them. I added one, but will leave the rest to you (the article is big and it's an annoyingly long time for me to edit/save changes)
Done.--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 20:35, 14 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • ensure all links to PDFs have the parameter "format=PDF" somewhere in the citation template
We were advised by another reviewer here NOT to do that, as the wiki already automatically displays an icon. Prefer not to duplicate. Also we need that field for a few references where I needed a parenthetical for alternate purpose. Agree with all the rest...and the darned Pottowami thing was in there a while ago (must have gotten pruned when we fed everything through templates). The view of endnotes inline in text in edit window is just strange...MS Word has managed to not do that for at least 15 years. In general, I find text editing on wiki very clunky compared to just writing a paper.
Well, you'd be missing out on the full FAC experience if you didn't have conflicting suggestions from reviewers! I've always been told to indicate PDF in the format parameter, and I see there's another current FAC where the same request has been made. Maybe Fifelfoo could explain his position? Sasata (talk) 18:45, 14 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Well I'm sorry someone made you put the words in, but it doesn't make sense for the reader, given they get the icon, to add the comment as well. As soon as Fifelfoo noted that, I agreed. We are not just doing it because of 'foo but to have best work product for the customer. Would do same in future. I mean we don't add a "(url)" after the Internet link, but allow the color blue to be a guide. So there's a case where we rely on something iconic. And if someone reads the code (and I think most read text not code), then it has a pdf extension anyhow. Do you really see a good reason for adding all those pdfs back in so reader sees that point twice? TCO (talk) 02:24, 15 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Nope, I was just hoping someone would explain to me why it's done around here so I could understand the rationale for it :) Sasata (talk) 16:30, 17 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • watch out for double fullstops (e.g. current ref 65…Garrett, P.; Berry, J.. Highways…" A search for ".." will quickly help to locate and eliminate them
Removed.--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 20:45, 14 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
This is neat. It would be pretty drudge work to go back and change everything to this style in this article (you said it, citations are dense), but I will definitely implement this in the future. Thank you.  :-)--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 02:31, 15 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

It's a very thorough go through, honest, kudos man. And we should probably act on 80% of your suggestions. Some like linking Mississippi are definitely off (that's actually a specific example of overlinking in the MOS). Some of the answers to things you are curious on (or that a reader might be, like who is Holman, are adequately addressed by the reference if the reader wants to go further). But yeah, very thorough go through. And lots of good points. I am the type to go through with a lot of examples also, and I appreciate your ripping into it the same.

I kinda resent the summary judgment of "unpolished" as frankly I think most of wiki (including FAs) is pretty unpolished and tries to act smart rather than be smart. I almost wonder if people feel safer, the more turgid something is.

So I don't get it here. I'm definitely not some verbalist from the New Yorker (or even from the NYT). But I at least aspire to be like them or appreciate them for what they are. And every paper I've written in peer-reviewed science was accepted without revision, something my advisor, with 150 papers, had never seen once. So I must have some ability. And I polished that thing as best I know for logic and style. That said, maybe I am just pushing something wiki doesn't want. I don't get the feeling from others here that I get when working with a company communications expert or a magazine editor or the like (except Tony1 and Mall...they rock). Or maybe I'm wrong and I just don't know how to polish things. In which case, I doubt I will learn as I'm not really seeing things that make me say "aha", that's what I should do to get the wood on the leather. I would have to be too stupid (or biased) to even see the better way.

Good luck. I really wish the best for my young colleagues, who have a lot of work and heart and sweetness. And for the picta article. And wiki an wiki reviewers. And, especially, the many readers who use the wiki and don't ever edit, but who put this place at its lofty Google rank. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TCO (talk • contribs) 08:10, 8 January 2011

Glad to see you here Sasata! Thank you. It's not a NYMFan69-86 production without you giving it at least a glance.  :-P I'll get right on these (seems like I'm a little late if I wanted to have first crack though!).--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 22:46, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Seems like you've assembled a good team to work on the article! Don't worry, I'll be back with more later ;-) Sasata (talk) 22:55, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Oh yes, at one point we had about six or seven editors actively adding content. And I'm not worried (...or maybe I should be).  :-)--NYMFan69-86 (talk) 23:06, 8 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
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