Talk:Bird evolution

Inbound links?
Is it too soon to start linking to this lonely orphan from other articles? Slurm und Drang (talk) 19:19, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
 * It's fine to link to it now. I'm mostly doing clean up of references and outbound links. The content is staying close to what it is now. Bongolian (talk) 19:39, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Can't we just name this...
Evolution of birds, Evolutionary origin of birds, or something else more straightforward? This counts for much of the article, by the way "few disciplines produce such acrimony", "Putative avian ancestors", "The digital homology of theropods and birds has been a subject of the highest contention" don't exactly read like a RW article to say the least... I know this is an EvoWiki port, but it leaves me wondering if we're not better off rewriting it from scratch (using the EvoWiki page as a source) Carpetsmoker (talk) 13:29, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't have a problem with renaming it. It would seem to be an awful lot of work to start from scratch though. Bongolian (talk) 17:03, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Creationism.org on bats (related)
http://www.creationism.org/english/bats_en.htm 20:47, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

This page needs a serious rewrite
IMO it's terribly written and a difficult read. Especially compared to the informal and snarky rest of the wiki. It reminds me of today's illegible science papers: filled with cruft, technical jargon, and given the length of this page, it's a very difficult read, especially compared to most other articles from RationalWiki. It's most likely written by experts for experts but neither party know what good writing is really all about.

Which is bad. It has meaningless, lofty, unnecessary, repeated words (the first sentence is particularly terrible overall).

Other examples of bad writing.

This statement is unsupported if not entirely opinionated. Not necessary either.

"showing" and "demonstrably" I think are repeats. It is hoped by whom? And "elucidated", probably not the best word choice.

Complete cruft, being unnecessarily wordy and liberal with prepositional phrases, and it's filled with multi-syllable jargon "basal attributes", "eluciated" (there's that word again), "cogent homplastic", "affinities", "ulterior motives", "conceptual legacy", "veracity", "nebulous", "putative", and "therapsid".

Try reading this jargon-filled ("synapomorphies", "isolates", no examples, explanation, or links of what the traits between "hesperornithiform morphology" and "gaviiform morphology" actually are), preposition-filled (count the "of", "by" "from", "for" words) paragraph. It's hard.

Everything about this paragraph is terrible. What the fuck is "diamond-shaped dorsal supraoccipitals" or "a strongly twisted paroccipital process" or a "an infratemporal fenestra reduced to a foramen" or the "auxiliary processes of the caudodorsal surface of the ischia or "maxillary sinuses with accessory maxillary fenestrae?" If they're supposed to be examples, they don't do a good job at supporting the argument. It certainly doesn't convince me either way. It's just a bunch of crap. Like most of this article.

This writing slogs for the entire page. This article is inappropriate for RationalWiki's audience who are likely unfamiliar with phrases like "the first true rhamphotheca". It seems to be missional but this article seriously sucks. It doesn't really say much or excuse the flaws that it's a port from EvoWiki. Legibility of science papers is a real problem and this article is a good example of what's wrong with science papers today. 21:09, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Relevance to RW
To what extent is this relevant to RW? Too long and 'too many technicalities', and no mention of Jurassic Park or bird brains. Anna Livia (talk) 18:10, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * This page was one of the Category:EvoWiki ports. EvoWiki is now defunct, and we were offered their contents for inclusion in RationalWiki. We took the better-quality articles on that Wiki and ported them here. The page is missional because, while not directly addressing pseudoscience, it does support our refutation of creationism, and there are links to this page many other pages, including baraminology. Bongolian (talk) 20:29, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * See the entry above this one.
 * Could there be another page aimed at 'those of us who are broadly popular science' level (though not averse to 'technical words') as well as the bird experts (who may be 'generalist level in other fields). Anna Livia (talk) 23:51, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It's certainly possible, but I'm not too motivated to do it on my own. If there were one or more other (?) who were interested, I would likely join in. Bongolian (talk) 02:34, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I can pitch into rewriting the thing, but it'll take A LOT of time considering how long this page is already and I'm not an ornithologist, more of an amateur bird enthusiast that watches birds as a hobby. 21:36, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * , : I've done some editing towards the beginning of the page. Hopefully the "key concepts" section that I added at the beginning will help people get up to speed for the rest of the page. A synopsis of the denser sections, particularly the Feduccia section, would also be an improvement. Bongolian (talk) 20:47, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

How feasible would it be to have the RW equivalent of Wikisource for 'specialist-technical' articles like this (and any other field from astrophysics via eschatology to zoomorphology) and a 'RW general readers/RW orientated' article (we are all generalists in subjects that are not our areas of expertise). There is room for both. Anna Livia (talk) 23:21, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking of keeping the long technical details in TLDR subsections that would be hidden from view unless specifically unhidden (Template:Collapse). I don't think there's sufficient expertise on RW that such a 'specialist-technical' grouping would be populated by very many articles, a probably no new articles. Bongolian (talk) 23:27, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Another example might include the science behind 'cohabiting and intersecting minerals and crystals' (geological matrices) etc - when for most people 'a dripping hardwater tap would take this long to produce a sequin's thickness of limescale and that long to produce a stalactite.'
 * As people may post such 'detailed information' some system of presentation used on an 'as and when required' basis might be useful. Anna Livia (talk) 15:20, 31 March 2020 (UTC)