Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Halfbeak/archive2

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 17:53, 31 August 2007.

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Halfbeak

previous FAC

Support as nominator. Problems since this article was reviewed last year (see Archive) have been fixed. Bruce Collette (probably *the* halfbeak expert in the world) at the Smithsonian Institution looked over the article and described it as "quite well done", so I'm happy that the science is solid. He was kind enough to send me some scientific papers that I've used to improve the verification of the facts as listed in the article. Since I write about these fish for the fishkeeping press, I'm quite happy that the aquarium aspect is robust, too. Cheers, Neale Neale Monks 15:54, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

• Object. It's a fine article, but the following problems (minor, I hope) need fixing.

• References should be given just once; use named footnotes to cite the same source in multiple locations. This problem afflicts many references, e.g., Mahmoudi & McBride; Collette. They all need to get fixed; there shouldn't be any duplications in "References".

• In references, the title should be the link, not the publisher. This problem afflicts Mahmoudi & McBride and perhaps others.

• Some references use templates like "cite web"; others don't. It's generally better to always use templates, or never use them, for references, so that you get consistent appearance.

• Some references are last name first, others first name first. They should be consistent.

• Book and journal titles should be in italics. Using templates would fix this in references.

• All URLs in references need a "Retrieved on" date (or accessdate= if you use templates), unless they are to stable URLs of refereed journals.

• Ranges should use en dashes (–), not hyphens (-). Typically this means page ranges in references. There are still some instances of this, e.g., "57-67". Please look at every hyphen in the source and see whether it should be an en dash.

• Boldface shouldn't be used for names, except in the topic sentence. See WP:MOSBOLD. This affects all uses of boldface in the text, except for the first sentence and for the "Type 1", through "Type 5" list. There are still some instances of this: Hemiramphinae, Zenarchopterinae, freshwater halfbeaks.

• The "see [[IUCN red list#Categories|here]]" isn't right. Wikipedia articles should be written so that they're useful even when printed out. Spell out what the link is meant to be.

• Several / One or maybe more references have stray periods. Search for two periods in a row (in the article, not the markup) to fix them. Search for "]." in the rendered text; right now I see "spiders.[13].[14][15]".

• Footnote 41 (as of this writing) precedes the period at its sentence end, rather than following it.

• Tibbetts's name is misspelled.

• Shouldn't the article mention Euleptorhamphus velox, which can glide through the air like a flying fish?

• Here are some dumb questions that are not answered in the article but which I hope someone can find answers for (doing this part is optional if the answers are not known):

• How long do halfbeaks live (in the wild, in captivity)?

• How long have halfbeaks been around? What's their evolutionary history?

• How much do they weigh?

• When were halfbeaks first discovered and/or mentioned?

• Is there a map of their range in the wild?

• Have the numbers of halfbeaks increased or declined lately? (This question comes up even for species that are not vulnerable.)

• How do these fish stay alive in the wild? Are they fast swimmers? (They look like it, but the article doesn't say.) Do they school? Do they hide? That sort of thing.

Eubulides 06:18, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I will digest and hopefully implement these changes soon. As for your "dumb questions", while I can answer some of them off the top of my head, finding verifiable sources will take longer. Neale Monks 10:14, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I believe I got most of the stuff related to referencing and citations done. I also changed the taxobox image size and "In the aquarium" section title as according to WP:FISH. MiltonT 16:46, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, many of the problems are fixed. A few minor problems noticed as I struck off the above items, problems which were introduced in the recent copyedit:

• The "Heterochrony in Jaw Morphology of Needlefishes" reference is messed up; the authors are missing, due to a typo in the use of the citation template. There are similar problems in other references. In general the "References" section needs to be copyedited as carefully as the rest. Kind of a pain, but there it is.

• A dangling link to [1]. Please continue to check the outgoing links and make sure they're there.

• Redundant wikilinks in the references to places like IUCN_Red_List. The general rule for wikilinks is that you need only one per section or so, to any particular place, and this should be true for the "Reference" section too. Admittedly it's harder to get right.

• No need to say "Nelson, 2006" in the text, since there's a citation. "Nelson" suffices unless there are two Nelson references. Better yet, reword the text so that "Nelson" appears only in the citation. This is an encyclopedia article, and it's better to omit sources' names in the text unless the sources are part of the subject.

• Briefly explain "monophyletic"; a general reader won't know what it means.

Eubulides 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Tried to fix some of that stuff. I used the {{IUCN2006}} template for the IUCN links. Should I not?MiltonT 20:10, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I struck out more things. It's a bit awkward that the template does that, but I guess it's OK. Maybe someone can fix the templates sometime, but that's not a Halfbeak issue per se. Eubulides 20:24, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Tried to answer the dumb questions. There's some Life History stuff now that quantifies size, growth rate, maximum age/size, and weight for a typical marine species. A cladogram has been added to simplify the evolutionary history/relationships of the group. Social/feeding behaviour has been outlined, including info on their speed (specifically acceleration rather than prolonged swimming). Hyphens have been corrected. Flying halfbeak is mentioned (under behaviour). Cheers, Neale Neale Monks 16:05, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, most of the stuff is struck off now. At least one hyphen still needs correcting, as noted above. Wow, you guys have been busy! I'll reread it now and see what I can find from the new stuff. Eubulides 07:50, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, here are some problems I noticed, I think all introduced by the recent changes:

• Misspelling: "artisinal" -> "artisanal".

Done.

• In Esox brasiliensis, just the Esox is wikilinked. It would be better to wikilink the whole species name, for consistency. Perhaps Esox can be wikilinked later in the sentence, when it appears alone.

No, because Esox brasiliensis is synonym, and a clunky one too: Esox the genus contains the pikes, and when these fish were first described hundreds of years ago, they were lumped in with the pikes. There's no point labouring this because it's all historical more than scientific.

• The phrase "erected the genus" is too obscure for the general reader. It should be explained the first time it's used.

Changed, but "erected" is actually formally correct in systematics.

Sorry, I didn't mean for it to be changed, just explained. It's up to you, but one possibility is to change it back to the formally correct term, and then put in a parenthetical remark explaining what "erected" means. The term "erected" is still used in the article so the issue still needs fixing one way or the other. Eubulides 22:13, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

• No need for Theodore Gill's middle name, surely.

Truncated to "Gill"/

• "basing its name off of" sounds a bit odd. Perhaps "basing its name on"?

Fixed (to "derived from").

• The sentence "Halfbeaks are named after their elongate…" is a jarring change from the previous sentence. Doesn't this sentence belong at the end of the previous paragraph, perhaps with some linking text?

Deleted; it's already mentioned in the into.

• (very minor) "Taxonomy" ends ".[4][3]"; ".[3][4]" would be nicer.

Gone anyway.

• The image in "Evolution" is very useful but is too wide and needs to be reformatted or something. Some people have narrow screens. Given the info, it should fit in 300px I would think. A combination of larger fonts and shorter tree-links should do the trick.

Done.

• Should standardize on "flying fish" versus "flyingfish". Both spellings are used in the article. I think "flying fish" is the preferred one in Wikipedia.

Done. Flyingfish is preferred by Fishbase, so I'm going with that. There's a bunch of different groups that include fish that can fly, but there's only one "flyingfish" family.

• I got lost in the last paragraph of "Evolution". I couldn't relate it to the diagram. Some of the sentences didn't make sense to me, e.g., "Though morphological evidence places Oxyramphus closer to the flyingfishes, molecular evidence places it with Oxyrhamphus,…" Maybe trim it? Or add another diagram?

Re-written to be shorter and clearer (hopefully).

• "SL" should be defined before being used, e.g., "standard length (SL)".

Done.

• Missing space after comma in "relatively large,".

Done.

At this point I stopped. I'm afraid it does need a copyedit for stuff like the above. Perhaps an editor could do a copyedit for the whole article? I could then review from "Morphology" on, after that. Eubulides 08:25, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Neale Neale Monks 11:52, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome. I struck out more stuff. Please reply here once the copyedit is done; I'll review from "Morphology" on after that. Eubulides 22:13, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose—1a. Needs copy-editing throughout, by someone fresh to it.
  • Starts with plural, so the "It" that starts the second sentence is a bump.

Done.

• • Comma after "modes"; in a long sentence, give readers a place to pause and collect themselves. Audit the whole article for comma use. Again, "vivipary,".

Agreed, and done.

• • Is "also" necessary? There's another in the second para. Hmmm.
  • Hint for future writing: "ALthough" is more formal than "though".

A bit subjective, if you don't mind me saying. I like both words.

• • Personal hate: "UPon"; what's wrong with "on". Plainer is easier and smoother; UPon is not a claim to elegance.

So? Not sure FA status should stand or fall on personal hates! I don't like articles that use non-SI measurements, but that's just me.

Looking further down, briefly: The Phylogeny caption is HUGE; the figure is likely to squash the main text into a slither. Read MOS on captions. "Juvenile needlefish pass through a developmental stage where the lower jaw is longer than the upper jaw, sometimes known as the "halfbeak stage", so it has been hypothesised that halfbeaks are paedomorphic needlefish, that is, halfbeaks as adults retain characteristics of the juvenile stages of their ancestors, the needlefish." Long snake that needs chopping up. ...so ... that is ... that is ... "with needlefish being relatively derived in comparison"—ungrammatical; use a semicolon to get rid of the "with" connector and the noun + gerund blot. "by comparison"? Tony 01:11, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

This whole segment has been rewritten. Agreed, it was cumbersome. That said, phylogeny isn't an easy topic, and virtually impossible to boil down to tabloid newspaper level English! So please go back and see if it makes sense to you now. Cheers, Neale Neale Monks 11:52, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

• Comments
  • The opening sentence once the statement in brackets is removed reads "Halfbeaks is a geographically widespread and numerically..." Should this read something along the lines of "The halfbeaks are a geographically widespread and numerically abundant family of epipelagic fish inhabiting warm waters around the world?". The current wording sounds wrong.
  • It might be a good idea to link to articles on pH, salinity, water hardness etc from the aquarium section, as i can imagine some people wondering how water can be hard ;)

Support; two of the previous items i reconsidered to be fair. A very good article

Kare Kare 06:00, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Still oppose—1a and MOS. Get someone else to copy-edit thoroughly. Here are sample glitches.

• Sentence starting with "Also"?

Fixed.

• "The eyes and nostrils are placed at the top of the head"—Spot the redundant word.

Fixed.

• "Very" is usually very redundant.

Hardly relevant here. That's your opinion entirely.

• "the length or shape of the beak"—check "or".

Done.

• Stubby paras.

Will have this looked at. perhaps you can be more specific? Are these sentences misleading or unclear because of their length, or do you simply not like short sentences because of some unpleasant experience with one in your childhood?

• "20 m (66 ft)"—Don't link them (oh, "millimetres" linked? Three times in two sentences? Please delink all of the units. Kilogrammes? Who spells it that way?)

The British spell Kilogrammes thus! And since I'm British... that's the way it was spelled. Will have the units fixed.

• "Flies"—hand up who doesn't know what they are. Why link? "Blood"?

Oh sheesh... OK.

Flies isn't wikilinked as far as I can tell, so not sure what that's about? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Neale Monks (talk • contribs) 13:04, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

• "4.8–11 mm (.19–.43 in)"—MOS breaches in inconsistent decimal places and omission of leading zeros.

Agreed.

• "with broods of around ten to twenty, 10–15 mm long offspring being typical"—This is a bombsite: spell out or numerals? Two hyphens missing ("; offspring of 10–15 mm in length are typical").

Agreed.

Tony 12:22, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Tony, I appreciate your comments and help. Cheers, Neale Neale Monks 12:59, 31 August 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.