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Dal Lake has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 20:27, 27 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Auckland meteorite
I know this is a long shot but the article Auckland (meteorite) is in need of expansion for the scientific description of it, by using this source. I'd like to get it to a good article eventually but I don't understand the technical stuff so I'd like to ask for help. ―Panamitsu(talk)01:56, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a particular reason for geologic time unit articles being at the adjective form rather than the full noun, i.e. Quaternary rather than Quaternary Period? I was a bit surprised to find Tertiary being the article for the (outdated) period rather than the disambiguation page. --Paul_012 (talk) 15:42, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In my opinion, this is a form of jargon used by specialists who understand the silent "Period". Whenever they say "Quaternary" they mean "Quaternary Period". Is this jargon so widespread that non-specialist readers would also expect Quaternary to only mean the common name for the time period? A quick look at Quaternary (disambiguation) and Tertiary (disambiguation) suggests "no". I think Quaternary is the common name for Quaternary Period only with in geology. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:27, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think "Period" is even needed in the article title because "Quaternary" is only used in geology to refer to the period. In other words, adding "Period" at the end of "Quaternary" is redundant. Volcanoguy18:07, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, exactly my point. The jargon is so ingrained that it is difficult for geology-oriented editors to recognize that the term has meaning outside of geology and that non-specialist readers will find this shorthand confusing. Johnjbarton (talk) 18:14, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have looked at all of the entries listed at Quaternary (disambiguation) and Tertiary (disambiguation). Most of the entries use Quaternary or Tertiary as an adjectival part of a compound noun. I doubt anyone would change "Tertiary sector of the economy" to "the Tertiary of the economy" because I think even economic experts reading or hearing this would react "the Tertiary what... of the economy?" The difference with the geological terms is that although they can be used as adjectives e.g. Tertiary sediments or Quaternary volcanism, they are also stand-alone nouns in their own right. The mainstream, general-purpose English dictionaries that I have consulted state that the noun Tertiary (i.e. the Tertiary) has two meanings - a geological meaning and a religious meaning (a member of a third order religious group). Geology and Religion parted company a long time ago and the likelihood of confusing a geological subdivision and a member of a religious group are minimal. The same dictionaries also confirm that Quaternary (i.e. the Quaternary) as a noun has only one commonly used meaning, the geological meaning - therefore I don't see how "the Quaternary" is ambiguous and might not mean the geological thing. In geological articles in Wikipedia "the Tertiary" and "the Quaternary" will most likely be wikilinked to the relevant geological articles anyway, so where is the problem? To me, sometimes using e.g. "the Quaternary" is a legitimate mainstream (not niche) widely-used, widely-understood and widely-accepted alternative to "the Quaternary Period", recorded and defined in numerous general dictionaries of English e.g. Merriam-Webster, Collins, Cambridge (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/quaternary). GeoWriter (talk) 19:39, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
MOS:DABNOLINK states References should not appear on disambiguation pages. Dab pages are not articles; instead, incorporate the references into the target articles. Therefore I will remove the citation from Quaternary (disambiguation)
The title of this section is Article titles for periods, eras, etc. and you started by asking Is there a particular reason for geologic time unit articles being at the adjective form rather than the full noun. You then mentioned both Quaternary and Tertiary. I thought this meant you were proposing changing all geological time unit articles from XYZ to XYZ Period (or whatever the equivalent correct time span is). If that is not what you are proposing, I would suggest restarting the discussion (below) with the article titles you are proposing to change and what you would like to change them to. We can then discuss the merits of the proposal. — hike395 (talk) 22:52, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It was Paul_012 who asked Is there a particular reason for geologic time unit articles being at the adjective form rather than the full noun, not Johnjbarton. Volcanoguy23:29, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I did not say those things either. I was only offering an opinion as a non-geology person who also did not immediately connect Quaternary (cool math numbers) and Tertiary (many uses) with geology.
Non-geology specialist, dictionary compilers recognise use of the word 'Quaternary' for the geological period as the prime meaning of the word - 'the Quaternary', like 'the Jurassic', 'the Precambrian' - they are commonly used terms outside of specialists' talk amongst themselves. It's not just 'geology-oriented editors'. Geopersona (talk) 19:47, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks all for the responses. I didn't find previous discussion on the topic, so at least it's been done now. While I'm aware that dictionary definitions do include usage as nouns, such uses always follows the, e.g. the Triassic, so it seemed a bit unnatural to me for the article title to be the name alone. But looking at WP:THE and comparing other cases such as the United States, the Netherlands, etc., it does seem to be appropriate, even if I still think that the fuller terms would be more natural and recognisable. (For example, nearly all of Google's other top results for "Triassic" have Triassic Period in the title.)
There's still the issue of whether the Tertiary Period is actually the primary topic for the search term tertiary, but since it's an isolated issue it would probably be more suited for an RM on that article's talk page. --Paul_012 (talk) 06:30, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I came across TaskForceMajella today: an article about a multi-university research project around the turn of the century. The article was largely written by an editor who appears to have a close relationship with the topic. I have been unable to establish notability via WP:GNG, but given that the project occurred in Italy, I may be missing key documents.
As a geologist, the article about Task Force Majella reads as an overhyped public relation piece / advertisement for a run of the mill and lackluster research project. In Google Scholar, I found only 22 papers that specially mentioned "TaskForceMajella", which is quite small for what is alledgly the ground breaking research study the article hypes it to be. I found nothing about it in GEOREF, I personally feel it is worthy of being proposed for AFD due to lack of notability via WP:GNG. Paul H. (talk) 18:44, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Nice work! I used the Rater tool that analyzes the article against other articles for things like reference density, images and so on. It chose B with 84% reliability, which agrees with my eyeball.
