Talk:Transandinomys talamancae

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Main page appearance

Hi Ucucha and other interested editors. This is to let you know that as a part of preparing this article for its appearance as Today's Featured Article (TFA) on 14 January I will be lightly running an eye over it for MoS-compliance and grammar, and possibly tweaking a little of the language to ensure that it is at it's very best for its appearance on the main page. If you have any queries about any of the edits don't hesitate to let me know. Thanks. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:21, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

So, what does it look like?

How about a photo or drawing of this rat?

Just a thought. 2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D (talk) 00:10, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

That'd be nice. From the descriptions here and on the pages of some cousins, think a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euryoryzomys_nitidus but with longer whiskers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:6000:BAC8:2900:4586:44F8:41A7:DBD0 (talk) 00:53, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Aha - http://www.mammalogy.org/uploads/imagecache/library_image/library/075.jpg — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:6000:BAC8:2900:4586:44F8:41A7:DBD0 (talk) 00:57, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

LOL, a featured encyclopedia article about an animal, that includes no picture of the animal. -Artificial Silence (talk) 01:13, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Somebody should turn around the skull pic, to make sure it is recognisable as such. For some reason I had to think of chicken for a moment... 185.16.52.105 (talk) 07:37, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

What happened to the quality of Featured Articles?

A Featured Article, on the Main Page, about an animal. Without a photograph of the animal. Sigh. Noleander (talk) 18:49, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

There is a picture of a skull but the only images of alive ones would be copyrighted and cannot be used on Wikipedia so we would have to go a find a picture but the skull is better hen no picture I still think this is a good article Dq209 (talk) 19:14, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

The lack of a photo of a living exemplar is unfortunate, but if it's not available it's not available. (Though I don't really see why you can't make a good fair-use claim for some non-free image.)

To me a more serious problem is the writing style. The article has long sections made up of long paragraphs with little obvious structure to help the reader. Some paragraphs are made up almost entirely of binomial names. This gives the article a forbidding wall-of-text feel.

Also, the level of detail seems likely to try the attention span even of experts. How many readers, even experts, come to this article to find out the size of the animal's sphenopalatine vacuities?

While I'm impressed with the amount of sheer labor and knowledge that went into this article, that's not the same as effective encyclopedic writing. Like Noleander, I'm a bit surprised this article was passed for FA. I would recommend (1) getting an image of a living animal, even if it needs to be NFC, and (2) rewriting the article with a stronger eye to structure, readability, and an appropriate level of detail. --Trovatore (talk) 20:25, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, a picture is needed: I wonder if fair-use exception would work if the resolution were small-ish (200x300)? Regarding the level of detail: That doesn't bother me so much: I think an encyclopedia can go down into as much detail as possible (of course, when the article gets big, it should be split). I can imagine Wikipedia 100 years in the future, with many articles containing 2x or 3x more detail than they do today. Noleander (talk) 23:19, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

The problem is not the existence of the detail. It's that it's inappropriate for the top-level article on the beastie. Gets in the way of the flow; makes the article boring, whether or not it's too long. Also the details are presented as streams of random facts, not woven into a larger narrative that would help readers find the particular facts they're looking for, or contextualize them into a broader understanding.

I'm not against niche content per se. I could imagine a spinoff article, maybe anatomy of Transandinomys talamancae or some such, that would have a section on skeletal anatomy, which in turn would have a subsection on skull anatomy, and there finally the fact about sphenopalatine vacuities would make sense. Then there could be an article on the taxonomic history of Transandinomys talamancae where all the binomial names could find a home.

Or the net could be cast a bit broader, with comparative anatomy of rice rats and taxonomy of rice rats. That would probably be more useful.

Or at the very least, this stuff could be removed from the prose and put into some sort of a table or something.

But something. Right now this looks a bit like reading the phone book. --Trovatore (talk) 01:41, 15 January 2020 (UTC)