Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Alfred Russel Wallace/archive1

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 not promoted 03:23, 12 April 2007.

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Alfred Russel Wallace

Great article Tomer T 23:49, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Comment Over half of the citations come from one source, could you comment on why? --Ouro (blah blah) 12:44, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I am not the person who nominated this article, but I have done much of the recent editing and I am the person responsible for all the citations to Slotten's biography of Wallace to which you refer. I have read a number of things on Wallace over the years (including the Quammen book), but the Slotten book was the one I had in my hands when I did the editing and it was a very high quality and comprehensive source so I cited it extensively both for new material I added and for material already in the article that lacked explicit citations. Most of this material could have come from a variety of sources, including the several of the references already listed for the article before I added the Slotten book to the list. I notice other editors have recently been using other sources so I expect this will become less of an issue shortly. Though I suspect Slotten's biography will always be prominent in the source list, because I used it to provide citations for so much of the information in the article that lacked explicit citation. I don't see that as much of a problem for a high quality source. I hope this information helps. Rusty Cashman 07:16, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Hello. Thanks for this, I suspected as much, but a clarification is always better than suspicions which may or may not be true. Tomer T has also in the past nominated articles with which he had nothing to do and later abandoned the noms (I don't know where this is written, but I believe the nominee is responsible for the nom and is to act on the reviewers' suggestions). If you say that Slotten is a high-quality source, then that's okay with me. Cheers, Ouro (blah blah) 08:55, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

OK, the single source and Tomer T's past noms concerned me as well. Please complete the blue links in footnotes and references; websources should identify pulisher, have a last access date, and include author and date when available. You can follow examples WP:CITE/ES or use the cite templates. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:12, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I will convert to using the cite templates when I have a chance. In general I don't know how responsive I will be to comments on this page at this time. It was my plan to obtain other sources (Amazon is shipping me one right now) and make another round of edits before deciding whether to nominate it for FA. Another editor seems to be in the process of making some improvements as well and I question if the article is stable enough to start the FA process. In my opinion the article as it currently stands is rated appropriately. I think it is a GA (which is why I took it through the GA nomination process) but FA would be a reach. If some other editor is willing to take it through the FA process I will be happy to help, but otherwise I am going to wait until both the article and myself are more ready, which probably means at least until after I finish my Taxes which are due April 15th here in the USA :) I will continue to check this page to see if there are more valuable suggestions I can use to improve the article at some point. Rusty Cashman 16:25, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

If need be, I don't think Raul will object to keeping this nomination longer than usual on the list. Cheers, Ouro (blah blah) 18:35, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose. It's clearly a good article, but not quite our best possible work. I mostly have nitpicks, but I have quite a number of them. Some tend to fall into a pattern, for example, clumsy sentences, that I suspect have other examples that I haven't listed completely.
  • Spacing issues - don't put a space between the punctuation and subsequent citation .<ref/> not . <ref/>
  • Do, however, put a space after the ref, such as in "vaccination.[49]In 1889"
  • Similarly be consistent with birth date parens "Herbert (1867-" but "William(1871-". I recommend the former.
  • "Wallace, inspired by the chronicles..., decided" - overcomplex. How about "Inspired by the chronicles..., Wallace decided"?
  • "In 1849...Herbert, who unfortunately died...". Clumsy, and we don't need to specify that it was unfortunate. How about "Wallace's brother Herbert joined them in 1849, but died ..."
  • "After twenty eight days at sea a cargo" - comma after sea
  • "the gliding tree frog Rhacophorus nigropalmatus, Wallace's flying frogs" - not quite coherent. Rn was also known as Wff? Singular frog or plural frogs?
  • The Malay Archipelago - if this was so important, why doesn't it have its own Wikipedia article?
  • In fact, I notice he wrote plenty of books which seem to have been important, and none have their own articles here. Why not?
  • non scientists such as the novelist Joseph Conrad who called it - comma after Conrad
  • by Richard Spruce a botanist and explorer - comma after Spruce
  • Wallace had previously (1864) been engaged ... dismay - a bit clumsy use of parens. Also needs a source ref. Just from autobio? Then at least give chapter and/or page.
  • "transmutation of species. He had come to this belief in part because he was always inclined to favor radical ideas in politics, religion and science." - Whoah! That's a bit of a stretch. "He voted for political party X, so he was naturally led into unrelated scientific belief Y"? Surely this wasn't a political issue that early? Isn't there a better way to say that?
  • Mount Santubong, Sarawak, - Wikilink. I see a link to Sarawak a few sentences later, link the first mention in each section.
  • was convinced by his biogeographical research of the reality of evolution. - clumsy, reorder. I recommend "was convinced of the reality of evolution by his biogeographical research."
  • Quotations shouldn't be in italic. See Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Quotations or Template:Quotation (from WP:CITE).
  • it was while he was sick in bed with a fever on the island of Ternate, that he thought - can get rid of words "it was" and "that", without losing any meaning
  • 19^th. - is the superscript and period really necessary? It stands out a bit
  • Warning coloration ... animal colouration - pick one spelling, with or without "u", and stick with it, please
  • before Darwin had publicly addressed the subject—though others had— - clumsy
  • raison d'être - wikilink, or rephrase into English
  • spirit.(Wallace, 1889); proposed in 2005 [1]. - pick one citation style only, please, you mostly use inline refs, fine, then stick to those
  • séances - wikilink
  • He would remain convinced that at least some such phenomena were genuine for the rest of his life - clumsy, rephrase, recommend "convinced for the rest of his life that at least..."
  • hypnosis then known as mesmerism - comma after hypnosis
  • Wallace had once briefly met Darwin - wikilink Darwin, first mention in a good while
  • Oceanic islands, such as the Galapagos and Hawaiian Islands ... Madagascar - wikilink
  • Lemurs - wikilink, and why capital L?
  • Looking Backward - italicize book title
  • in London, starting in 1836, he was exposed, mainly through - Rephrase much, much simpler. How, about, moving, some, of, those, commas, elsewhere?
  • land reform - wikilink
  • November 7, 1913; Nov 1, 1915; In November 1, 1915, - WP:DATE
  • a country house he called Old Orchard a decade earlier - Why did he stop calling it that? :-) Rephrase.
  • The New York Times - definitely italicize, probably wikilink
  • craters on Mars and the Moon - don't we have articles on them? If so, wikilink
  • it is amusing that - who says it's amusing? How about just stating the fact behind the irony, and let other people get or not get the joke, we don't need a laughtrack
  • Here is a more comprehensive list - Useful reference, but give it in a more formal style. "List of Wallace's writings", compiled by Sam Smith and Joe Jones, at Foobar.com, retrieved on April 1, 2006. See [[Template:Cite web}}
  • In fact the whole Key Publications section is questionable. What are these external links? To the text itself, to reviews, to cover photos? Say. If these are to the texts, are these public domain? If so, consider just copying them wholesale to Wikisource, that's what it's for, and guarantees they'll be there, and won't vanish when some third party web site goes down.
  • See also Australia-New Guinea - what? A reference to a whole continent? That should be pretty rare in a personal biography! (Possibly Christopher Columbus...) That is also a redirect to Australia (continent), and that article hardly mentions Wallace, except through Wallacea, which is a separate See also.

--AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 17:02, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose. Yeah, the nitpicks are critical. I have to agree with the previous reviewer. The first sentence I looked at at random was "After returning eventually to England, Wallace spent the next eighteen months living in London."—Remove "eventually" and "living". Tony 22:43, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
• Comment Pressed for time now, so I'll come back tomorrow. I'll just add my own nit-pick – Wallace's school was not known as Richard Hale in his day, but as "Hertford Grammar School". For good measure, here's a link from the Natural History museum about his days there. — BillC ^talk 00:01, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

  - Fixed that one. Gandalf61 10:47, 7 April 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.