Talk:Flatworm/GA1

GA Review

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Here's how this article's content breaks down in accordance with the GA criteria:

• N The article is not well-written. It's a jumbled collection of random facts with some semblance of major (1st-level headers) organization, but breaks down a lot within the sections.

• The article overall needs a very serious copyedit by someone experienced with the manual of style.

Could you explain that a bit more please? WP:WIAGA is quite specific about the narrow subset of WP:MOS that applies. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• The lead section is too long. It should be a clear and concise summary of the article, and should be able to give a good description of the major topic to someone that just wants a brief overview. Instead, it seems like the major points brought up in the lead go into too many detailed tangents and you get sidetracked onto information that really should be moved into later sections of the article.

Nothing be "moved into later sections", as the lead should not contain material that's not in main text.

Para beginning "Some of the turbellarians have very interesting ways of subduing their prey ..." could be cut - it was not in the version I submitted to WP:GAN.

Para about impact of parasitism could do without sentence "Infection of humans by the broad fish tapeworm Diphyllobothrium latum occasionally causes vitamin B12 deficiency," but the rest is important. --Philcha (talk) 00:46, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

• The description contains good information, and is one of the better sections. I would recommend reversing the order of paragraphs, though. Cover the features common to all classes first, and then put the paragraph on distinguishing features, and put the table at the end. The table should also be connected better to the text -- as right now, it really just stands on its own.

I had a long think about this before I started on the "lower" invertebrates, and adopted a similar approach in Sponge and Cnidaria (both GA now). The problem is that for the general reader all these critters are unfamiliar and look like rather shapeless blobs, where as Arthropods are easily defined ("have chitinous exoskeleton, including jointed limbs") and Molluscs are at least fairly well-known, although if you look at the article the question of distinctive features is rather complex. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• The section header entitled 'major sub-groups' should actually be called 'Classes' (remember, in biological classification, phyla consist of classes, which consist of orders, then families, then genus, then species).

I considered that and rejected it because:

• Some of the traditional taxonomy of flatworms (classes or whatever and higher level) is now thought to be malformed - acoels are no longer regarded as flatworms, which has come as a relief; and Turbellaria is a dumping ground as all the wholly parasitic clades are now thought to be descendants of a fairly narrow group within Turbellaria.
• Non-specialist readers will have enough to learn without taking in Linnean taxonomy as well - especially when the traditional taxonomy of flatworms is broken. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• Since most of the classes mentioned in the 'major sub-groups' section have daughter articles, I think it would be better to shorten many of these topics to brief descriptions of the major classes only. Leave specific information about specific genus and species to the daughter articles on that class (although major species should probably be mentioned here).

Can you please be a bit more specific? I think section "Turbellaria" is perhaps the least coherent, because of the taxonomic issues. However I don't see where it does into too much detail. It presents as far as possible general features that are common to the so-called group's members, but it is only reasonable to point out that there are significant exceptions. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• Try to avoid using 2nd and 3rd level headers in the 'major sub-groups' section -- there should only be four subsections here, one for each class. All the extra headers within the section make it very difficult to read and determine which subheading is a major class, and which is an order or family within that class.

I'm not sure why you think it's a problem. For example I think it's an advantage that the TOC shows readers a hierachical arrangement before they get into the details. That gives them an "aerial map" or in the worst case the chance to go look at another artcile if they thinkthis one is going to be too complicated. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• Logic seems to say that a section on 'Classification and evolutionary relationships' should probably come earlier in the article, right after the description and before the section on 'classes'. Biologists usually refer to the classification of organisms as 'taxonomy', and wikipedia seems to favor shorter and more succinct subsection headings. Although reading the content of this section, the content seems to be very disordered within the actual text. It needs a major cleanup.

Without some description of the major sub-groups the section "Classification and evolutionary relationships" would be rather difficult to understand. This type of content usually comes last in relevant chapters of textbooks, and textbooks have been doing this for longer than Wikipedia.

Apart from the sentence about fossils (which I suppose could have been a para on its own, as it's a distinct sub-topic, the messiness comes from the fact that scientifically it's been a mess that only started to be cleared up in the mid-1980s, although acceptance of the proposed solutions only became widespread after several molecular phylogenetics analyses in the last 9 or fewer years. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• The 'interaction with humans' section seems ok. Not sure if I'd call it complete, though.

Why? What significant points does it omit? --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• Remove the pipes '|' from the 'see also' section. Wikipedia convention follows that items listed in 'see also' are simple bulleted lists. Also, many of those links can be removed from the list -- you should only list links to articles that are not mentioned previously in the article. Many of these are used previously.

Done. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• I'm kind of neutral on criterion 2 (references), so I won't put a check or X here. Most of the major data appears to be backed up by appropriate inline citations, and citations seem to come from reliable sources. However, there's still a lot of issues with the article's completeness and organization. It seems like two sources (Walker/Anderson & Ruppert/Fox/Barnes) are used a bit heavily through the article, which shift the balance a bit more towards those authors.

These are textbooks, which are necessary as sources in 101-level articles - scientific journals do not consider aspects that have been regarded as "basic" for decades. Being textbooks, these 2 sources avoid controversial views. Adding further textbooks would be a waste of space and time. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Y Ok, I can revise this to say that the article probably meets the citation criteria. So this is fine. Dr. Cash (talk) 23:23, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

• N The article has many issues with criterion 3. The organization of the article is very poor, making it very difficult to read, and making it very difficult to judge whether it is satisfactorily complete. At present, it looks like the article consists of a jumbled collection of random facts, trying to be organized into some type of an encyclopedia article. This aspect needs a lot of work.

WTF is criterion 3? Spell it out in plain English! --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Please see WP:WIAGA for a description of the six Good Article criteria, which is what I used to base this review off of. Dr. Cash (talk) 23:20, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

• Y Article passes the WP:NPOV criterion. It seems to be fair and balanced from this perspective.
• Y Article seems to pass the stability criterion. I don't see any major edit-warring going on, other than some anonymous vandalism.
• Y Images pass the GA criteria as they all have appropriate image copyright tags. I don't think that the two CDC images really belong in this article, though, because they're discussing the life cycle of one member of the class, not the class as a whole. They also seem fairly large and complex, and are probably better suited for daughter articles.

The two CDC lifecycle pics are pretty representative of their groups (digeneans & cestodes), according to the pics and text in the textbooks - and the CDC pics are of such high quality that it would be waste of time looking for or trying to produce others. The lifecycles are also essential if readers are to understand how big a problem parasitic flatworms are, and why. --Philcha (talk) 00:46, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I hope this helps improve the article. Unfortunately, in its present state, it does not meet the GA criteria and can't be listed. Once the issues are addressed, it can be renominated at WP:GAN. Dr. Cash (talk) 00:49, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

I am totally dissatisfied with your performance as a reviewer. You signed up to review this artcile on 5 Feb 2009, and on 23 Feb I had to ask when you would produce some comments - although that reminder is absent from both your current Talk page and its most recent archive. Then after doing nothing for 2 weeks you quick-failed the article. I'm taking this to WP:GAR. --Philcha (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

I apologize about the long time it took to review this article. However, the delay in the time it took to review does not mean that I did a poor review, and it does not make up for the serious organizational issues that this article has. If you would like another opinion on this review, it should not be renominated for WP:GAN; you should post it at WP:GAR instead. That way, you'd get more people looking at it. Dr. Cash (talk) 04:06, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

In a private interchange of messages after this, Dr. Cash complained that the classification section was unclear and suggested usng the traditional classification as a framweork, and placing it earlier in the article. Here is the reply I posted at User talk:Derek.cashman (with a couple of typos fixed):

The Linnean-style classification is in a total state of flux at present - if a source came out and said that as bluntly, I'd quote it. As it is, the paper that suggested a redefined and monophyletic Platyhelminthes (excluding acoels and Xenoturbella) only came out in 2008. That doesn't mean it's a novel idea - the first proposal to exclude the acoels was in 1985 (effectively pre mol phylo). At present I see nothing firm enough to be regarded as a consensus view on the Linnean-style classification at the phylum level. The situation is even worse for the "Turbellaria", which traditionally contain both the "oddballs" (acoels and Xenoturbella) and which turn out to be the containing group for all the syncitial parasitic forms, although these have traditionally been assigned to separate classes. Right now the traditional classification is worthless, except to note that many books present it and it's a mess. The biggest problem is finding sources that are forthright about the mess.

If you can present concrete suggestions about how to structure the article better I'd be interested. But Linnean-style classification is not a suitable framework as the article would build it up and then, in the following section, tear it apart.

You're going to have to provide some citations for the Linnean classification system being in a "state of flux at present". I am certainly not aware of such debates -- though I'll admit that I am more of a Biophysicist than a pure Biologist that's interested in classifying organisms day and night. And I'm not really suggesting going through the whole taxonomy down to genus and species! But the infobox refers to Linnean classification, and provides the Domain, Kingdom, Subkingdom, Superphylum, Phylum, and Classes. But the article section refers to 'Major Sub-Groups', which aren't standard -- those sub-groups listed are, in fact, the Classes. What's wrong with renaming the section to 'classes'? Bring the article itself in line with what's being introduced in the infobox, and use the same terminology.

My other beef with the 'Major Sub-Groups' section is with the use of the multiple sub-section headers (Digenea, Aspidogastrea, which are technically under Trematoda; and 'monogenea' and 'cestoda', which are technically under 'Cercomeromorpha'). It's just not easy to tell which is a subsubsection under that subsection, and which is the subsection itself, because the font size difference is too small. It would greatly improve the readability by focusing only on the major subsections and incorporating the subsubsections elsewhere, perhaps only a brief introductory paragraph in the subsection, and include them in the daughter article as its own subsection. Dr. Cash (talk) 20:10, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

(Re the lead:)

The conventional idea of what a lead should be does not work well at the phylum level because there are so many aspects to cover: general characteristics and exceptions to these (of which Platyhelminthes has significant ones); ecological role(s) (often wide-ranging at the phylum level, as in this case); reproduction and lifecycle (vary so much in Platyhelminthes that they are best deal with by sub-group); impact on humans (serious in this case); place in art and culture (thankfully nothing to worry about here). Look at the other phylum-level GAs and you'll see that the leads are longer than usual. Some reviewers just accepted it, some looked hard and decided there was nothing that could be removed without harm, at least one asked for a 2nd opinion. --Philcha (talk) 22:37, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

--Philcha (talk) 04:20, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

The problems with the lead section are one of the main reasons I listed this at WP:GAR, to get more opinions on this. As I've stated before, looking at the talk page, I'm not the only one that has said there's problems with the lead (too long). Overall, I think there's simply too many details in there and it's not really much of a summary of the article, which is what it should be. Dr. Cash (talk) 20:10, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

How many GAs are there about phyla? --Philcha (talk) 22:17, 6 March 2009 (UTC)