Wikijunior talk:Dinosaurs

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

[edit] Do we need separate articles for K-T event and Extinction?

Dinosaur extinction was a consequence of the KT mass extinction event - surely they can be dealt with in the same article? Weebs 11:40, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm just trying to get something going for now. Yes, they can be dealt with in the same article. Nothing is sacred at this stage right now. All that has happened is that a new Wikijunior book has been started with basically some of the ideas that were expressed in the proposal. What we really need to do is to set up a model article that would set the tone for the rest of this book. Now that Wikijunior is fairly well established, this isn't as critical, but it would still be useful in general. I started the T-Rex article just to get something going at all, but are there any other ideas on where to start? --Rob Horning 06:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Hi, Mr Horning. Would you please check the K-T event and the extinction articles for me, please? I have put in all the simple facts which I know about them, having read about them in Wikipedia proper. What about other sources we can use about these events? I think we need to explain the general concept of extinction (and especially that the K-T event was not first nor worst) and then this specific one how it fits into all extinctions and geological history of the Earth. --EuropracBHIT 08:59, 15 January 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Ideas

1. I would like to creat a title page and move everything currently on at the front to a table of contents or something like that. I really think that would make the book appear more professional. Just a thought, if anyone has any comments or doesn't like this idea, please say so. If a resonable period of time goes by however, say a week, and no one objects I will create the table of contents and move it.

2. I want to shoot for completion of this book by the end of March. I realize what strain that will cause, and in fact it may not get done by that date. I just realize the quality of other Wikijunior books should not be insulted by having a perpetually unfinished book in their number.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pampaeditor (talk • contribs) .

[edit] Spelling Errors

We really need someone to check the spelling. I can understand that it is a bit frustrating to be criticized for the work you all have done so far, but we need a full-time spelling-checker sort of person. Unfortunately, I don't really spend much time on Wikibooks, so I'm not the ideal person we're looking for, but I'm just making a suggestion. --69.22.41.140 22:48, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, I'm doing what I can, but there is only so much I can do. Any help is as always greatly apreciated. If anyone out there would be willing to shift through the written work and check spelling, Bless you, and may the power of the edit keep you. Pampaeditor


[edit] Thoughts from a mother with two young children

I am unsure what age you are writing for - my kids love pictures - suggest more pictures and simple words if you are aiming for children who are much younger.

As far as I recall the Beck Foundation's grant (i.e. to get these books printed) was for ages 8-12, so that is the age bracket we are exclusively aiming to write within. Certainly more pictures will be added as time goes by, but the problem is finding ones released under a free license... GarrettTalk 00:33, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
Have any books been published under that grant yet? Basejumper123

These pages seem to be pitched at a lower age range than 8-12, I'd say this was more 5-8. SteveBaker 19:55, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Format

The When did they live/What did they eat/What more do we need to learn/etc. is a good starting point, but combined with the fact that extraordinary depth in some of these areas is inappropriate for younger audiences, it makes for a very stilted text. For example, on the T. Rex page, the When did they live category contains only one sentence (and should not contain much more than that considering the targeted reader). However, this fact could much more easily be included in the introduction or as an aside in any of the other sections. The present structure is a good reference for measuring how complete a topic is from a contributing standpoint, but will result in a very dull read for a child. The text should be more narrative, incorporating all of the relevant information in a more liquid manner. The current format might better serve as a fact box to the side of the text for readers who already understand some of the general concepts and are simply referring back for information for a school project or personal interest. N Vale 19:40, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

When people were voting on this as the collaboration of the quarter for Wikijunior, I wish they would have refined this part of the proposal as well. I agree that the basic questions are not well thought out, but it is a starting point. One of the things to point out is that a considerable amount of creative licensing has gone into what Dinosaurs have done in the past, especially in movies like Jurassic Park or The Land Before Time. Unfortunately Wikijunior has to stick to the facts and not dive too much into this speculation even though it makes for some really cool fiction. Some guesses based on if the dinosaurs have molars or canine teeth can indicate a sort of diet, as well as the size of the bones and some physical similarities to current animals that may have lived in a similar sort of habitat. Plants are also sometimes fossilized in the same strata as the dinosaur remains, so some additional information about the sort of climate the animal lived in might be inferred as well.
I've seen some cool dinosaur books, so I guess that really needs to be the starting point on where to go with this project: Compare and synthesize from some of the better dinosaur references books. --Rob Horning 17:20, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Images for Wikijunior Dinosaurs

Thanks to Danny, we now have illustrations for this module. Danny put me in contact with his friend Demitrios Vidal, a great illustrator who is also quite knowledgable about dinosaurs. He is willing to let us use his artwork (found here. He is also willing to create new artwork, and to contribute the projct as well! If you have any suggestions as to what drawings you'd like to see in Dinosaurs, please post them here.--Shanel 21:27, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

This is an outstanding development. As you can't simply go and take some random photographs of these critters except in a museum (with all of the museum copyright headaches that seem real silly), and even that is mainly bones, this is a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for trying to get content of this nature, and I hope that you put it into Wikicommons in a Dinosaur category as well. I would like to see some sort of e-mail or some other note to say where the copyright permission was granted, but that is trivial in comparison.

BTW, if you need help moving the content over, drop me a note on my user talk page. With 2300 high resolution images, it is going to be a huge task to move that sheer quantity of content over. --Rob Horning 20:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Wow. Just... wow. As for what I'd like to see, hm, well we do need to think about the cover. Maybe with like it divided into four sections with each quarter showing that era's dinosaurs (rather than them all being in the same scene, which wouldn't be very accurate). Changing plant life etc. could also be depicted. Also it would be nice if something matching could be made for the back cover, so the book is simply crawling with dinosaurs, rather than having a basically blank back page with the mandatory sales blurb. Or perhaps the four scenes could be on the whole cover, so when you fold the book open and look at the back you see one teeming mass. Yeah, as a child I thought books made like that were cool. If this isn't clear enough I can always bung together something in Paint. :) GarrettTalk 06:01, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Delay in response

While I can appreciate a few week delay in response here, I havn't seen any formal reply about this list of illustrations. I even went to the website and asked more directly myself if he was willing to release GFDL rights for these images, as the copyright disclaimer on the website is clearly "All rights reserved" and no general license is offered for reproducing the images... even non-commercial use only. In addition, this seems to be a collection of images from many different contributors, and it doesn't appear as though the site owner is obtaining explicit copyright clearance for these images, but rather assuming copyright permission due to the fact that somebody explictly uploaded the content and gave it to him.

I think for now (unfortunately), we are going to have to consider these images to be under propritary copyright restrictions and illegal for us to use them on this Wikibook. I hope that content from this website hasn't been used here already. --Rob Horning 15:53, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Great place to get factual info from

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/info/a.shtml as well as plain old Googling --Konstable 13:12, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Brontosaurus rename (?)

Brontosaurus is the popular name for Apatasaurus, though technically it is wrong. Maybe we should rename Wikijunior Dinosaurs/Brontosaurus to something like Apatasaurus (Brontosaurus) or Brontosaurus (Apatasaurus).--Konstable 04:39, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

I thought there really was a Brontosaurus, but there were many related species that go under a variety of names and are commonly displayed under the presumed name of Brontosaurus, because of popular movie culture. This is a subject that I need to do some considerable more research on, and I wouldn't necessarily trust the Wikipedia entry on the topic either but it does have some good points. If you read http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/faq/s-class/bronto/ (Why is Brontosaurus now called Apatosaurus?) the author of that web page contends that Brontosaurus and Apatasaurus are still used and merely the names of two different species, although very closely related. The Brontosaurus also suffers from the debunking due to some of the body parts having been either manufactured by the palentologist who discovered a partial skeleton, and mixing up some of the bones that came from other animals. Given that palentology was still a very new science when the Brontosaurus was discovered, this is a forgivable mistake, but the bones of the traditional Brontosaurus skeleton have been fully identified as well now.
This might be a good section to show to kids that scientists don't always get thing right, and can sometimes screw up in a big way that takes decades to correct errors. --Rob Horning 15:51, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Not to mention that many children's books from not all that long ago proudly display amphibious Brachiosaurs... so yes, this would be good to cover. GarrettTalk 21:58, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Collecting References

It's probably a good idea to start reference and resource lists on the talk pages so when final cleanup comes around later the lists will be already compiled, and by the original authors.

Ive started lists in Wikijunior Dinosaurs/Allosaurus Wikijunior Dinosaurs/Stegosaurus


—Basejumper123 22:37 4 February, 2006

  • Re: Image references - I noticed you are creating Image refrence sections. But do we really need them? When you click on the image it should give all the information about its source and copyright.--Konstable 02:51, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] PD Photos

This website is "Public Domain" Photos That fall under free licences we can use these for the book! — Basejumper123

  • Which website do you mean? You didn't provide a link.--Konstable 06:21, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Animations

I found an animated GIF which could work well on the Pangea page: w:Image:Pangea_animation_03.gif. Are animations such as these acceptable? Though it does mean that the animation will be on the online version only (for obvious reasons).--Konstable 02:50, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Since there is considerable discussion about having print versions of this content, you should consider aninimated content carefully. Still, this is something to look at in terms of improving the look of a page, and I don't see a reason not to include images of this nature. The big drawback I see is that it seems to take a long time to download, and you have to be very careful about page load times when you have quite a bit of multi-media content.
Something to consider perhaps for the print version is to "break up" animated sequences like this and simply have a series of thumbnails instead. --Rob Horning 13:38, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Jumping In

I have introduced my self over on the T-rex page talk, but wanted to do so here too. As a homeschool mom to 9 and 4 yo boys, I see this project (all of Wikijunior) as having great potential. I have been reading through the discussion pages and it seems that some fresh enthusiasm coul be needed. I am going to do my best to jump right in as an active participant.

As I also mentioned on the T-rex page, my 9yo son has volunteered to be a test reader. While he is a gifted reader (and gifted child academically in general) he is still good at identifying what will appeal to the average 9yo. I will pass his comments along.

Starchildmom 09:47, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Additional Articles

I have some ideas for new dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures:

Dora Nichov 04:55, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

More:

Dora Nichov 06:48, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

It would be great if there would be more dinos here. The current list is not meant to be a definitive restricted list I think, feel free to add to it. I wrote quite a lot of the current ones, but I personally don't really have the time to do any more right now, and all the other editors seem to have also disappeared from this. Be aware though that you may stumble upon some problems with the images - when I was writing this half a year ago Wikipedia and Wikicommons had a severe lack of dino images, I had to dig up most of them myself (hopefully the image situation is better now though).--Konstable 01:59, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
A few more suggestions:
--Xixtas 03:04, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Good. But Betasuchus isn't really well-known, is it? And isn't "cynodont" speaking quite broadly? Dora Nichov 10:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

My 7 year old knows Betasuchus. (From Walking with Dinosaurs and two kids Dinosaur books.) They can't be that obscure. Cynodont is quite broad, but I couldn't figure out a better way to talk about the Jurassic pre-mammals. Spinosaurus was the largest carnivorus dinosaur.

Uhh, thee was no Betasuchus in Walking With Dinosaurs. I suppose we could use Thrinaxodon for "cynodont". I know Sppinosaurus (who doesn't that likes prehistoric animals?). Dora Nichov 11:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

After looking into it I see Betasuchus is pretty obscure. --xixtas 12:29, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

How 'bout these?

Dora Nichov 10:28, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mistakes and also Prehistoric Mammals

how 'bout a "Mistakes" article? Including "Brontosaurus", "the rhinoceros-horned Iguanodon", "Oviraptor the egg thief" and "aquatic sauropods", among others. Dora Nichov 14:21, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me, the current Brontosaurus page lacks content. --Xixtas 03:04, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if prehistoric mammals is a good idea, since this is a book about dinosaurs. They could earn a whole book to themselves, anyway. MiltonT 02:20, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

I think prehistoric mammals should be in a different book. --Xixtas 03:04, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

OK. What do you think about the dinosaurs and the "Mistakes" page? Dora Nichov 09:10, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

But there are pterosaurs and plesiosaurs here, and they're not dinosaurs either! Dora Nichov 09:11, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Good point, but many people include Pterosaurs, Plesiosaurs, Dimetrodon, and even animals such as Sarcosuchus and various other non-dinosaurs for a simple reason, and that is they are reptilian. Maybe it's because a book titled "Prehistoric Non-Dinosaur Reptiles" might not seem as attractive for a kid to read. A mistakes page might be nice, but if they can be dealt with on the corresponding page of the dinosaur in question, it may be unnecessary. I do think we should mention Ankylosaurus and Iguanodon, though. Iguanodon especially as it is one of the oldest species discovered. MiltonT 14:40, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

OK. Anyways, the pterosaurs and plesiosaurs are defined as non-dinosaurs on their own pages. Ankylosaurus and Iguanodon pages have already been made, and I'm thinking about the other diinosaurs I mentioned. Dora Nichov 13:48, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Organization of articles

In my opinion, the order of the dinosaurs when in the book should be in order of what time period they lived, and T Rex gets to be last, of course. We can cut out the section about when the dinosaurs lived. My idea is that each page will have a timeline of the Mesozoic Era, with the corresponding time that the dinosaur lived in colored in. The timeline can be on the top or on the bottom of each page, sort of like a header or footer. It would give about the same information in a picture form.

On the other hand, if we get more in depth, we may be able to group dinosaurs by their type (ex. Duck-Billed Dinosaurs), but at the current state we're not at that point.MiltonT 14:16, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Use of Dinosaur Images

I just got a reply today (October 2nd) from the editor of the Dinosaurcon regarding the use of images in this book from that website (copying the e-mail to here):

I can't speak for all of the images on the Dinosauricon; you'd have to ask each artist individually. I might be willing to consider releasing some of mine (http://dino.lm.com/artists/display.php?name=keesey) if you can tell me which ones you'd want.

Your pages need some cleanup--I did a revision on the _T. rex_ (never T. Rex or T-Rex) page.

On 3/8/06, Robert Scott Horning <***> wrote:

I am a member of a group that is in the middle of preparing a children\'s book about dinosaurs, and it has been mentioned that your images would be ideal for inclusion within our book. This is the fifth book in a series of books aimed toward children.
We are an all-volunteer group associated with Wikipedia, and the content of this book would be available under the terms of the Gnu Free Document License. This is also being developed on-line and the current contents of this book are available for you to look at to see if you want to be associated with us. The web address for this book is at:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior_Dinosaurs
Ideally, we would like to add your collection of images to the Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/) where it could be used for projects beyond just our little project.
Note that you would still retain copyright on these images and could use them for profit in other projects as well. All we are asking for is a license to use that content. If you want to see the kinds of copyright licenses that are available that we could use you can look at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons%3ALicensing
I'm even willing to transfer images from your website, together with a link to your website where I obtained the image, giving your site additional exposure. All I am asking is to know under what terms you would like to have us use these images.
Thank you for your cooperation on this endeavor, and I must say that I am very impressed with both the quantity and quality of the art work that you have done here.


-- T. Michael Keesey -- The Dinosauricon: http://dino.lm.com Parry & Carney: http://parryandcarney.com

---

Frankly, I consider this to be good news, and there are some very good images that we can try to use here from this website. This is an opportunity we should not miss out from. --Rob Horning 19:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

If you are still in contact with him could use The Sentinel for the archeopteryx velociraptor article. We don't have articles for the other dinosaurs. (yet) --xixtas 22:00, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pterosaurs vs Pterodactyl

The article will be very different depending on what we're talking about. The article title is Pterosaurs, but from then on the article talks more about the specific species Pterodactyl and a few other Pterosaurs. We should decide which we are talking about, either change the title and restrict the material or change and broaden all of the material. MiltonT 01:58, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, Pterodactyl is like a nickname for Pterodactylus, but pterosaur is flying reptiles in general... Dora Nichov 10:25, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I am not so certain on this, there seems to be a lot of confusing regarding this in the sources that I used. (If you trust it) Wikipedia claims on w:Pterosaur that Pterosaurs are "often referred to as pterodactyls", even if this is not the technically correct term.--Konstable 07:10, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I've also found this problem on the plesiosaur page. It's name is "plesiosaur" but it talks more about "Plesiosaurus". Dora Nichov 10:27, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I am by no means an expert in this area, but as I understand it "Plesiosaur" is the more general family, while "Plesiosaurus" is a more specific reptile in that family. When I was writing that page I had the general "Plesiosaur" in mind as I remember. I have replaced "Plesiosaurus" with "Plesiosaur". The picture on the page is definitely that of a Plesiosaurus specifically.--Konstable 07:10, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Images

Hey, I have come from wikipedia and really like the idea of wikijunior. I recon, haveing some experience with children, you really need more pictures. Check out http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LadyofHats on the commons who has done some great dino pics and diagrams. --212.139.5.41 19:28, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Those are wonderful pictures and we are already using one of them. Most of the images are of dinosaurs we do not have articles for. (yet) --xixtas 21:51, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] move protection

the page is move-protected, but should now be moved to Wikijunior:Dinosaurs // tsca [re] 20:16, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior_talk:Dinosaurs"