Wikipedia:Peer review/Anatomical terms of location/archive1

Anatomical terms of location edit

I'd like to get some idea about what (apart from referencing content) could be done to improve this article with a goal to making it well-written and comprehensive enough to attain good article status

Ping to the editors who have played a role in discussions and significant editing:

Thanks, Tom (LT) (talk) 05:46, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  • I've only investigated this page because of links in articles about spiders, as far as I remember; generally resulting in replacing the link. My problem with the page is that its title implies that it's general, but much of it seems to have been written by editors who are only thinking of human anatomy. This is a problem throughout the English Wikipedia, and is thus relevant to what should be done here. Consider, to take a random example, Lung, where the lead begins "The lungs are the primary organs of the respiratory system in humans and many other animals including a few fish and some snails", ignoring book lungs in arachnids, which are definitely lungs, and are mentioned later in a small section Lung#Invertebrates. The sections of Lung headed "Development", "Function", "Gene and protein expression", "Clinical significance" are all essentially only about human lungs, but the section titles don't make this clear. This is, I stress, only one example, and by no means exceptional. So, do we accept that any anatomy article whose title isn't explicitly qualified is primarily about human anatomy, as seems to be the case? If so, then this article should focus on anatomical terms of location in humans, with a shorter sections and links to separate article(s) on anatomical terms of location in non-humans. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:21, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Peter coxhead thanks for your response, I have tried to improve this article since you have last looked at it, by deemphasising the human component, and tried to make the article as general as possible. If this particular article is still human-centric, could you provide some concrete examples so I can improve it :)?. --Tom (LT) (talk) 22:19, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I consider it to be entirely in order to be human-centric, and the example on lungs is adequately written, even if it somewhat unecessarily mentions snails. Spiders are included in the wording "some other animals" are they not? Mentioning fish seems suitable, only because it is somewhat surprising — but listing all possible animals and trivia in the lede is not good for anyone, and such content belong under the "Other animals" header.
I will take a look as soon as I have time. Carl Fredrik talk 10:52, 9 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I have no objection to anatomy articles being human-centric if this is made clear in the article title (as per WP:PRECISION). The problem occurs when editors inadvertently create wikilinks to such articles that then provide irrelevant or incorrect information. For example, in articles about arthropods, I sometimes find "Anatomical terms of location#lateral" used as a pipe for "lateral" – which at first sight seems sensible. However, terrestrial arthropods are typically described as if viewed from above with the legs spread out, so "lateral" applied to legs, for example, normally means the surfaces facing towards or away from the anterior tip of the animal; describing "lateral" in terms of left and right as the article makes no sense in this context. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:27, 9 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]