Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Bird

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 16:32, 20 December 2007.

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Bird

Self nom, although this reflects months of work by me and several other valued contributers at WP:BIRD. Vital subject that has been gone over, peer reviewed, left for a while and is stable, thoroughly cited (Sandy has picked over the citations) and very comprehensive for an absolutely massive subject. To answer one possible objection, it is long, but only a bit longer than the equivalent article at Dinosaur and about as long as evolution, (both FAs). I hope you can support it so I can never have to look at it again. Sabine's Sunbird talk 00:44, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment - Needs a thorough copyediting. Found these problems just in the lead:
  

• "Around 10,000 living and recently (after 1500) extinct species of birds compose the class Aves". This part is a bit hard to read. Is the "after 1500" part really necessary in the lead? Kaldari (talk) 01:23, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
• "They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from Arctic terns to Antarctic penguins". Terns and penguins are not ecosystems.
• "breeding, flocking and mobbing of predators". Wikipedia uses the serial comma.
• "Eggs are usually laid in a nest and incubated and most birds have an extended period of parental care after hatching." Run-on sentence.
• "200 to 150 Ma (million years ago)... 155–150 Ma". Inconsistant style; use either "to" or dashes, especially within the same sentence.
• Lead is quite lengthy. Consider editing down the paragraph on mating habits as it seems a bit detailed for the lead.

Kaldari (talk) 01:26, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Dammit, I thought the legions of people who had picked over this had eliminated all these problems (although the Artic tern / antarctic penguin bit is a bit of tomfoolery I had missed. I will try and deal with this as quickly as possible, and have requested some help in doing so (I have worked too long on this to be able to do too much). Sabine's Sunbird talk 03:07, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Looking better already. I'll withhold my judgement until you've had a chance to conduct a full copy-edit. Kaldari (talk) 19:03, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Rufous-crowned Sparrow and Casliber have done a huge amount of work on copyediting over the weekend (thanks guys), hopefully there aren't too many more problems. Sabine's Sunbird talk 21:43, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment — I aggree with Kaldari's comments, and, browsing through the whole article, I suggest that it could benefit from a copy-edit: there are several sentences which are run-on or confusingly worded. I might add, also, that I disagree with the statement "Wikipedia uses the serial comma": the manual of style says, "If the presence or absence of the final serial comma has no bearing on whether the sentence is ambiguous, there is no Wikipedia consensus on whether it should be used" —Salmar ^(talk) 02:51, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
  • If someone were unfamiliar with the meanings of "flocking" and "mobbing", it could certainly be ambiguous in this case, although your point is taken. Kaldari (talk) 18:54, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
• Preliminary comments on layout: Images should be the same width throughout the article except where special reasons exist (not likely). In most cases, position should alternate between left and right; minor headings (=== and below) should have images placed above them (this is written in the manual of style). Image size should not be too large for the article to be comfortably viewed and read on an 800 width display (keeping in mind that the standard stylesheet's left column takes up additional space.
  • Also, it seems that Image:BirdBeaks named.svg is missing a woodpecker, and possibly a heron/stork/crane (or would the latter be covered as an intermediate of the two "probing" types?). Samsara (talk • contribs) 05:24, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

The picture of bird beaks isn't and can't be comprehensive, there simply isn't space. Woodpeckers are indeed an intersing ommision, but so are the beaks of parrots, hornbills and toucans, nightjars and frogmouths, and browsers like emus and ostritches. I've left a note on the illustartors page but I think the image as it stands gives a good indication of the range of bills. Sabine's Sunbird talk 22:59, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I added a few more images to cover the Woodpecker, a Merganser and a generalist (Crow) beak. Shyamal (talk) 04:24, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• NB Article is protected from edits by anons and new users. Should it be opened to allow these users to fully participate in the FAC? Separa (talk) 00:26, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Support Comment/Leaning Towards Support I just finished winding my way up the article and giving it a thorough copyedit. However, I must put in a disclaimer that I am fairly knowledgeable about birds and therefore may not have caught everything that may be confusing to a casual reader. I think that all the grammar and sentence structure stuff is handled, but someone else who is unfamiliar with the topic should give it an understanding-related read through.

That said, I only have two comments about the article before supporting. The first, as mentioned above, is that the images are not all the size recommended by the MOS. Nothing huge with me, but probably should be met in a FA. The second is that there is very little mention of birdwatching and birding in this article. There is a fairly sizeable section dedicated to Relationship with Humans, yet this sport/hobby that attracts millions merits only a brief, one-line mention. Could you write up a few quick sentences or a paragraph and slip them in? It doesn’t really need to be much.

Other than this, I think that this is a great and comprehensive (if somewhat lengthy) article. It is obvious that a whole lot of time and effort has been spent bringing this article up to FA status and I believe that it is on the doorstep. Thanks. Rufous-crowned Sparrow (talk) 04:19, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

OK, the images have now been changed and another person (Casliber) has given the article some massaging of the text. I also have read Casliber's comment below about the birdwatching and have realized that it goes into as much depth as other things of similar importance. Oh, well. Anyways, I now support the article (see above). Rufous-crowned Sparrow (talk) 15:35, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Support - I agree that the birdwatching material is brief but then so is alot of other information in the economics section. Each of these could be expanded (1 line on chicken etc.). One could argue there is an undue weight on anatomy, classification, behaviour and evolution but these are less able to be drastically shortened as much of the human relationship stuff. For me it is the right balance of a very complex article to get right WRT comprehensiveness. Prose was a bit repetitive but has been thoroughly massaged in the past few days and I feel reads well now. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:11, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment I took the liberty off fiddling with the images a bit, trying to follow the MoS. I removed most of the forced sizes, which reduced many images to the default width specified by the user (usually 180px for landscape and square, 140px for upright images). I deviated from the MoS on the two SVG diagrams for readability purposes. I left the forced 300px size on the bird anatomy diagram and the default square image size (instead of the upright size) on the bird beak diagram.Lesgles (talk) 14:28, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Support. Thanks to Lesgles for that edit. Samsara (talk • contribs) 17:17, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose The writing is much improved: well done, contributors. Just one thing: em dashes preferably unspaced; some of yours are spaced, some aren't. until properly copy-edited. I'd like to see this promoted, but there are too many prose glitches at the moment. I ran through the Plumage and feathers section, and have added a few inline queries and made lots of corrections. It's not a complete edit: I see things like a hyphenate "tail-feathers" and a non-hyphenated version, both in the same para. Some of the references end in three- and some in two-digit closing page ranges: needs to be consistent—two probably better. There are not enough commas—that's one of a number of issues. Someone unfamiliar with the text is needed. Tony (talk) 00:09, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Several editors have undertaken a large copyedit of the article. Sabine's Sunbird talk 03:12, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

• Support. Looks like there have been several copyedits to the article since Tony's concern above was made. It looks like the article is about as comprehensive as an article about such a vast subject can be. No dead links [1] (those Wiley redirects won't go away). Well-sourced from 192 peer-reviewed articles and books. I have not checked every reference, but the ones I did check seemed to verify the information they were sourcing. WP:DASH heeded. Serial commas used. There are still three red links that need bluifying, though. Other than that, an impressive biological article. Firsfron of Ronchester 22:53, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I just bluefied the remaining two red links in the article by creating short stubs for pecten and uncinate processes of ribs while Shyamal did the other. Not lengthy, but they are deredlinked. Rufous-crowned Sparrow (talk) 06:43, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

• Support. My concerns have been addressed by the recent copy editing. Lesgles (talk) 20:05, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
• Comment. I've been working a bit more on copyediting. Some of the writing is a little clunky, but I'm not sure it's something I would oppose over. However, I do think there is way too much time devoted to moulting in the article--about quadruple the time devoted to poultry! I found myself bored in this section, and I don't think it's so important it couldn't be cut down a bit. Other minor issues:
  • A mention that different feathers serve different purposes but nothing more than that. Either leave it out or explain what these different feathers and purposes are.
  • The sentence with the Easter Island reference is totally confusing, both grammatically (how do all the ands and ors fit together?) and semantically (what does it mean anyway? how does the bird figure in here?). This should be cleaned up and if it's too complicated another example should be found. (The excellent article on the Common Raven has a few easy-to-understand ones.) Mangostar (talk)
• I may be back with more later! Mangostar (talk) 17:17, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. 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.