Talk:Marianna Fault

A fact from Marianna Fault appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 6 February 2009, and was viewed approximately 4,462 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the recently announced Marianna Fault in Arkansas was discovered due to the stretches of fine sand in otherwise fertile soil?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/February.

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Who-when-what?

There are three things that jump out at me as problematic on reading this article. These are pretty common in science-related articles, especially where the main sources are news reports.

Who actually did the work? All we really know is that Haydar Al-Shukri gave the interviews, and was involved somehow. But did he collect the data? Analyze the data? Draw conclusions? Write the paper? The article says that Dr. Al-Shukri personally discovered the fault, but we don't really know that he deserves sole credit (or even primary credit).
When was the work done? When an article says that a scientific discovery was made on a specific date, that's immediately suspicious. The date that an article or a press release was published, or the date that a talk was given, don't necessarily tell you anything about when any new discoveries were made. In all likelihood, they came quite a bit earlier.
What exactly is the result? Although one of the sources talks about a "newly discovered fault," another one indicates that it's not known with certainty to exist. This could be called evidence for a fault, but I'm not sure it's strong enough to say that one has been discovered. Furthermore, the article makes Marianna Fault into a capitalized proper name, while the news reports just describe it as a fault near Marianna. The first source does use the phrase "Marianna fault" once, but it appears to be just a description (i.e. the fault near Marianna) rather than a name.

It would help a lot to have a scientific source for the article. Popular news reports just aren't good sources for scientific topics (especially developing stories). --Amble (talk) 19:51, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'll see if I can find something more scientific. As for the name, at least this news article calls it the Marianna fault. Maybe rename to the non-capital F?--King Bedford I ^{Seek his grace} 20:08, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK, found some non-news, scientific pieces, and the discoverer's webpage.--King Bedford I ^{Seek his grace} 20:34, 28 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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