Talk:Outgroup (cladistics)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ngilbert202.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:56, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Primary topic?

IMO, the current title reflects merely the accidents of

1. the accompanying article being created before Outgroup (sociology), and
2. the creator of that soc article lacking the BOLDness to move Outgroup to Outgroup (cladistics) and put a Dab page where the cladistics article had been, since the cladistics sense is not recognized by either M-W O/L or AmHerDict@Yahoo, and should not be regarded as the primary topic.

The choice of name was correct when made, but would best have been reversed a year later, and is still ripe for that. I regard this move as uncontroversial, and am inclined to make the move unilaterally in a few days, treating silence as consent.
(BTW, FWIW, i will not argue with anyone who wants to go further, making the sociology sense the primary topic and thus making Outgroup a Rdr to Outgroup (sociology) -- or its successor, the presumably pending title along the lines of Ingroup and outgroups) -- which would of course need a HatNote Dab pointing to either Outgroup (cladistics) or Outgroup (disambiguation), specifically a {{Redirect}} one in the event of such a rename of Outgroup (sociology).)
--Jerzy•t 01:43, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Bold Copy Edit

I boldly copy-edited the article because its brevity makes my edits few. My changes were:

• Rewrote wordy "-tion" phrase into a shorter gerund phrase.
• Replaced logically unnecessary "but" with "and" in second paragraph's first sentence
• Corrected minor wordiness throughout.

Duxwing (talk) 15:58, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

I've undone pretty much all of your changes because your changes either changed the meaning of the text (as with changing "but" to "and" and changing "appears" to "seeming") or made the text much more difficult to read and understand. The idea is not to use the fewest number of words possible but to use the fewest number of words that convey the information accurately and ensure the text is readable. Ca2james (talk) 00:22, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Hacked

I believe this article has been hacked. "This page was last modified on 25 October 2015, at 15:20."

The current description of "outgroup" is almost exactly the opposite of the actual definition, with a few other misconceptions thrown in for good measure. I assume that there is an archived version somewhere that can be restored, although I do not know how to do that myself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.3.188.73 (talk) 15:26, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

I was wondering why it seemed to make no sense... I thought I was going crazy. Unfortunately, I have no idea how editing wikipedia pages works. 130.245.226.211 (talk) 06:26, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Article improvement/possible new sources

I'm here to improve the article as a part of an upper-level Evolution class. So far, some of my ideas for improvement include: 1) adding figures, 2) adding more internal links to technical words such as "monophyletic", and 3) expanding the article to have more content. A few possible sources I've compiled thus far include:

1. Herron, J. C., and S. Freeman (2014). Evolutionary Analysis (5th Edition). Good general source, should have some information on outgroups.

2. Nixon, K. C., and J. M. Carpenter (1993). On Outgroups. Cladistics 9:413-426.

3. Maddison, W. P., Donoghue, M. J., and D. R. Maddison (1984). Outgroup Analysis and Parsimony. Systematic Biology 33:83-103.

Any thoughts on these sources, or additional ones that are recommended?

Ngilbert202 (talk) 14:50, 24 October 2017 (UTC)