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| {{tasks | |||
| |requests=Perform edits to make article consistent with consensus on common ancestors and genetic drift in the lead | |||
| |copyedit= | |||
| |wikify= | |||
| |merge= | |||
| |cleanup=Controversy section. Improve continuity and citations. | |||
| |expand= | |||
| |disambiguation= | |||
| |stubs= | |||
| |update=The ]. | |||
| |npov= | |||
| |verify= | |||
| |other=Add to this list! | |||
| }} | |||
| <big><big>25 problems to resolve, for starters:</big></big> | |||
| *<s>The third paragraph of the lead section goes into too much detail about the circumstances surrounding '']''. That level of detail might be appropriate in the "History" section, but no more than a few words should be devoted to it in the lead section.</s> | |||
| ::Completed, IMHO. ] 18:20, 27 April 2007 (UTC) | |||
| *<s>The armadillo image has an excessively long caption, bloated by trivia. It is also poorly-placed; having two lengthy vertical blocks of text and image at the top of the article makes the page look clumsy and cluttered. The armadillo thing should probably be either shortened and transplanted to another part of the article, or removed altogether.</s> | |||
| <s>*Section titles should not be capitalized. "Basic Processes" and "Mechanisms of Evolution" are thus incorrect.</s> | |||
| *<s>It is incorrect to italicize "''e.g.''" and "''i.e.''".</s> (There is also some excessive and inconsistent use of the latter.) | |||
| *<s>It is incorrect to italicize quoted text.</s> | |||
| *Some languages crosses the line from being simple and user-friendly to being overcasual. Academic, encyclopedic tone should be maintained, and we should avoid treating our readers like infants with phrases like "phenotypic variation (e.g., what makes you appear different from your neighbor)". | |||
| *Although the article does a good job of explaining most terms, some new terms are still unexplained, and a surprising number are unlinked, like ], ], ], and many more. | |||
| *<s>There is an overuse of parentheses in this article. These can be replaced by em-dashes, commas, etc. in some cases, to avoid making the text seem fragmented.</s> | |||
| *<s>Avoid external links in the article text, like the Tetrahymena link.</s> | |||
| *There are various minor grammatical errors that are not significant enough to mention here; a thorough copyedit should fix them. | |||
| *<s>"Selection and adaptation" seems to be a little too long and a little too listy, relative to the other, more compact sections. Cutting down on all the subtypes listed could probably cut this section's length almost in half; that level of detail is more appropriate for the daughter articles anyway. This section also needs references, badly—especially for its paragraph on evolutionary teleology.</s> | |||
| *<s>Bolding should not be use to emphasize a random word in a prose paragraph.</s> | |||
| *<s>There are several redlinks: ] (from a formating error in the references), ], ], ].</s> | |||
| *<s>There is some inconsistency in reference style in sections like "Cooperation".</s> | |||
| *There is poor illustrative balance in the "Evidence of evolution" section. All three images deal with aquatic animals, suggesting to uninformed readers that there isn't any evidence for evolution from other species; this impression should obviously not be implied, so at least one of the images should be removed, and other images should be added. The "nasal drift" image seems like the least useful one at the moment; although it's very pretty, the sequencing and similarity is least obvious. | |||
| *Considering how drastically the rest of this article has been shortened, you may want to consider shortening the "Evidence of evolution" section too, to avoid imbalance. This can be easily done by cutting down on examples and trivial details. | |||
| *<s>"History of the modern synthesis of evolutionary thought" should clearly be a subsection of "Study of evolution", and should be shortened to a simpler title, like "History of evolutionary thought".</s> | |||
| <s>*The "History" section is currently far too short. Important information that was removed should be re-added to make it at least 50% bigger ("Academic disciplines", below, is a good example of a nice-sized section). To give an idea of how much compression is appropriate, 3-5 fair-sized paragraphs (about 4 sentences in length each) should be the goal. Anything much shorter or longer than that is not appropriate.</s> | |||
| *The "Misunderstandings" section is too short, and some very important information (e.g. about the fact-theory distinction) has recently been removed from the article, making it much less informationally valuable to readers. Of course, whether a "Misunderstandings" section (or its new daughter article) is appropriate here at all should be discussed; there is little precedent for such a move, and it seems to fly in the face of academic and NPOV conventions, as well as to be a very useless categorizational method--a misunderstanding about the nature of mutations, for example, would be very useful if put under "Mutations", but useless if put under the generic heading of "Misunderstandings". Ideally, thus, a "Misunderstandings" section should simply be split up into sections dealing with the specific topics involved in each misunderstanding. From an NPOV perspective, it is particularly troubling to see statements to the effect that the creationist movement was ''caused'' by misunderstandings of evolution; it is perfectly fair to say that creationists regularly misunderstand evolution, but to make inferences and judgments from that is not NPOV; at the very least, such statements should be replaced with attributed ones, so it is not Misplaced Pages itself that is making them. | |||
| ::Somewhere along the way, this section was eliminated. So, not only is it too short, it doesn't exist. Do we need to bring it back?] 18:35, 27 April 2007 (UTC) | |||
| *This article needs to have a "social effects" section. The effects of the study of evolutionary biology on society and culture over the last few hundred years is immense, and highly noteworthy. This would be a more appropriate and useful place to (briefly) discuss creationism than a POVed "misunderstandings" section, obviously. | |||
| *<s>The "See Also" section is too large. Ideally, there should be no "See Also" section at all for a time-level article like this; any highly important articles should be mentioned in the article text and/or series templates, and any less important ones should not be mentioned in this article, but rather in daughter articles. Some of the articles listed here are not even real articles, like ]. | |||
| *<s>Why is there an empty "Notes" section?</s></s> | |||
| *<s>A number of the references are broken or inconsistent. It will take an in-depth review and copyedit to make them all consistent.</s> | |||
| *<s>The external links should be cut down a little. 10-15 is ideal for an FA; there are currently 20. One good method to shorten the list without removing important information is to simply use some of the links in the "References" section; this gives them the added value of having relevance to specific parts of the article, as opposed to just being "add-ons".</s> EL section reduced to 9 items in February. ] 20:04, 3 April 2007 (UTC) | |||
| *<s>Is there any particular reason that ], rather than ], is under ]?</s> | |||
| ::Made this change. Evolution itself shouldn't categorized as a theory. ] 04:51, 28 April 2007 (UTC) | |||
| <big><big>section by section</big></big> | |||
| ;0. Lead section | |||
| :Status: Good length. Decently accessible. Probably receives more focus than the entire rest of the article. | |||
| *0a - How much should genetics be addressed? How can genes be concisely but accurately explained here? Do we need to mention DNA? | |||
| *0b - How many evolutionary processes should be discussed, and in how much detail? Do we need to mention mutations? Do we need to mention genetic drift? Should we add a mention of gene flow or genetic recombination? | |||
| *0c - Does an entire paragraph need to be devoted to natural selection? The argument for this is that natural selection requires a more in-depth explanation to gain even a superficial understanding of, and can be explained in that much detail without appealing to confusing terminology, unlike genetic drift; the argument against this is that natural selection isn't any more important than genetic drift and the like for understanding how evolution works. | |||
| *0d - The explanation of adaptation, speciation, and comment descent is currently relatively poor: it's clumsy and not as clear as it could be. This is probably the clearest area of potential improvement in the lead section. | |||
| *0e - Should a sentence be tacked on to the third paragraph mentioning the social controversy surrounding evolutionary theory? | |||
| *0f - Should supporting evidence for evolution (e.g., the fossil record) be mentioned? | |||
| :0g - Where should the distinction between ] be briefly explained, if anywhere? Here? Basic processes? Study of evolution? | |||
| ;1. Basic processes | |||
| :Status: Decent length and quality, but could be better. As this section immediately follows the lead section, it is currently the most important section in the article to work on improving, as it should provide all the more detailed, but still basic, explanations for how evolution works. Also, the distinction between this section and "Mechanisms of evolution" is unclear. A substantial reorganization may be necessary if a non-arbitrary line between the two cannot be found. | |||
| *1a - The discussion of Gregor Mendel is a useful device for explaining heredity in a simple way, but it is a bit out-of-place, especially since Darwin himself isn't discussed in the same level of detail until near the end of the article. Consider reworking the basic explanation to transfer the historical details to the "History" section. This section should ideally only explain heredity itself, not the history of scientific views on heredity. | |||
| *1b - The relevance of the last three paragraphs of "Mutation" to the topic of mutation is unclear. | |||
| ;2. Mechanisms of evolution | |||
| :Status: Same as "Basic processes". Major reorganization needs to be discussed if the current layout is arbitrary. | |||
| *2a - "Selection and adaptation" needs references. | |||
| *2b - Considering that "Gene flow" and "Gene migration" are synonyms, do we really need a separate section for "Migration"? | |||
| *2c - The hybridization section should be shortened. We only need a very, very brief overview; detailed examples like wheat and mules are unnecessary. | |||
| *2d- The adaptation section is difficult to read, transitions back and forth between a neutral a familiar tone, and lacks proper references. Adaptation is critical to Evolution, and this section needs to be more clearly written. | |||
| ;3. Evidence of evolution | |||
| :Status: <s>Overly long. This is not an especially important section; the job of this article is to explain evolution, not to justify it. Any non-essential information should be removed, as there's already an extensive daughter article for covering any details or examples, ].</s><s>Disappeared.</s> Actually it was renamed in a manner that hid it from the casual reader. I put it back. ] 05:09, 28 April 2007 (UTC) | |||
| *3a - Specifically, "molecular evidence" should probably be shortened by at least a paragraph or so, if possible. | |||
| *<s>3b - Someone deleted this section. So we went from overly long to nonexistent. It needs to come back</s> It's back. | |||
| ;4. History of life | |||
| :Status: Good length and good information, but disjointed. | |||
| *4a - Going over "history of life" before "origin of life" makes absolutely no sense. | |||
| *4b - Likewise, not going over "common descent" before going over the common descent-based theory of how life has developed makes no sense. If anything, these sections are exactly backwards. Old formats like were simpler and made much more intuitive sense. | |||
| ;5. Study of evolution | |||
| :Status: Needs some expansion. | |||
| *5a - Why "History of modern evolutionary thought" when the daughter article is ]? Isn't "modern" redundant? For the purposes of the ] article, the concept of "evolution" is modern by definition, since it is Darwinian by definition. Moreover, pre-modern "evolutionary thought" is indeed already touched on (albeit very briefly) in this section, so that satisfies any concerns about chronocentricity. | |||
| *5b - "History of modern evolutionary thought" is far too short of a section. It could be almost twice as big without problems. Because of its shortness, it lacks many very important details, like modern conflicts in evolutionary science (], ], etc.). | |||
| ;6. Social and religious controversies | |||
| :Status: Decent, but needs some tidying in general. | |||
| *6a - The creationism paragraph should probably either be expanded a little and split into two paragraphs, or shortened a little, depending on how important it is. | |||
| *6b - The eugenics/social darwinism paragraph needs a POV check. | |||
| *6c - We should consider whether there are any social effects other than social darwinism and creationism that merit mentioning here; if so, we could expand the section's title from "Social controversies" to "Social effects" in general. | |||
| *6d - The daughter article ] is largely redundant to ], and raises POV concerns in its very framing. Should it be deleted, or reworked? Does it have enough content that isn't also used as an "objection"? | |||
| ;<s>7. Footnotes/References</s> | |||
| :<s>Status: Inconsistent and confusing. Should be significantly longer as well.</s> | |||
| *<s>7a - "Footnotes" is an inaccurate and misleading name; it should be changed to "References", "Citations", "Footnotes and citations", "Notes and references", or something of the sort.</s> | |||
| *<s>7b - The "References" section below is so short that it should just be integrated into the above section. Find out what parts of the article are being backed up by the texts in question, then attach them to the text in question.</s> | |||
| ;8. External links | |||
| :Status: Just right. Concise, useful, and unbiased; nothing more could be asked for in a link section. The lack of a "See also" section is also a plus, as it prevents the accumulation of cruft. | |||
| ;<s>9. Academic disciplines.</s> | |||
| :<s>Status: It is missing references, and frankly, I'm not sure why it's there. It reads badly, and it seems like "cruft" (new word, not sure what it means). Can we delete this section? It does not add to the article at all, and really seems out of place? I'll be bold if there's no commentary.</s> | |||