Talk:Empathy in chickens

Not a hoax

 *  Bfpage &#124;leave a message 21:21, 25 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Re "The ability of chickens to experience and share empathy is recognized as not being a uniquely human trait": The ability of chickens to do anything isn't a human trait at all, never mind uniquely one. Some rewording is needed. —Largo Plazo (talk) 00:36, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * You are perfectly right. I'm not sure there is any way that this article can be reworded. I'm pretty proud that it is listed at WP:Unusual articles.
 *  Bfpage &#124;leave a message 20:40, 19 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Addendum - I do not believe one word of this article, I wanted to see if I could write from a NPOV and support something with reliable references that seems absolutely crazy to me. Sarcasm has no place on Wikipedia, but if it did, it would be in this article.  Happy Editing,
 *  Bfpage &#124;leave a message 01:29, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Peer reviewer
I just submitted this article to a semi-automated bot (how is that my peer???) and found that this article can be improved.
 *  Bfpage &#124;leave a message 20:37, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

I came to this article
…after seeing it mentioned on a colleagues User page. I assumed it was a serious, if niche article. What I found is an article that fails by every standard to justify its remaining in place. I will tag the article; please read the tag content and the edit summaries that accompany. If in the remainder of this month it is not turned onto a semblance of encyclopedic content I will return to mark it for deletion.

Otherwise, I'd say that the existence of articles such as this go a long way toward explaining why the word "demise" appears so frequently in the serious informatics and tech discussions of this site. With a system that (i) allows creation of such articles, with such loose and inconsistent standards as to allow articles this poor and poorer to come into being in the first place, (ii) is losing editors, in general, at an alarming rate, while rewarding and so disproportionately keeping subsets of editors that increasingly bias the site away from content expertise, toward functional, technological expertise (e.g., through a significant proportion of rewarded editors that maintain bots, templates, etc., and so not really doing what real science, history, etc. editors actually do), and (iii) hinders deletion of content and (certainly) entire articles despite longterm lack of verifiability, and therefore presumed and even confirmed content inaccuracy is difficult to address and remove (the dead air model of WP content, that having something of any quality on a subject is better than having nothing on it at all)—how can these commentators, these purveyors of Wikipedia doom, not be on the right track in their analysis of our trajectory?

Bottom line, the vast majority of wikipedia articles are C quality or worse, the vast majority of newly added articles fall into this same category (and generally have glaring WP policy flaws), and here we are looking at such an article, and nothing efficient can be done about it. As I said, I will come back once, but my recommendation is. leave it. Let my time in tagging be the only time, and last bit of time wasted on this detritus.

Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 06:32, 17 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Three sources added to Further reading, the first is the key secondary source, and it has one paragraph. If it has one solid paragraph, we can have little more. So here: Define your terms in a well-sourced sentence, then summarize Broom & Fraser's one paragraph in 2-3 more sentences, get riid of the rest of the speculative, extrapolative nonsense, and it is done. Remember, this is an encyclopedia, not a blog. To have been motivated by curiosity and general interest to create the page is fine; thereafter the encyclopedic writer has to kick in—historian for historical subjects, scientist for scientific subjects, etc. In this case, it is at the interface between zoology and psychology, and so between hard sciences and social sciences. Regardless, the expectations are the same vis-a-vis sourcing—science news reports can be added, on at most a 1 to 1 basis, to solid secondary science sources, to add flavor, and a layperson's perspective. But the "meat" (beef, if you will, given the context) of this article has to be secondary sources, and in this case we have just one (Broom and Fraser). If you can add more fine, but as much as I admire Temple Grandin, and NYT science reporting, these cannot replace the need for (and limitations imposed by) the actual real science review sources. Again, define the terms, and summarize for us what Broom and Fraser say. That is your article, sprinkling in the relevant UK and US news reports (and shredding the chicken museum story, and anyone extrapolating from goat or kangaroo or human feelingss, to chickens, and use these to line the birds' cages). My view. Cheers. 71.201.62.200 (talk) 07:48, 17 July 2015 (UTC)


 * In checking the sources, I found that the block quote attributed to the NYT article did not match its actual content — I found the NYT to be misquoted, some earlier "quoted" information just was not there. Moreover, what was there was misattributed: the opening "…chickens.. interesting… intelligent as… dogs and cats…" WAS FROM A PETA FLYER and not the words of the NYT reporter (reporting his own view, or the view of any scientist). This is crucially important to relay in your reporting.


 * So, I added the full span of the NYT quote to the WP article, so any interested editor can re-extract the (complete, accurate) information that they want. Cheers. 71.201.62.200 (talk) 08:47, 17 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, that explains the massive edit...but it might be a copyright violation. It probably has to be 'culled'.
 *  Bfpage &#124;leave a message 10:02, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Shouting
I spelled the guideline in my edit summary incorrectly. The correct link is WP:SHOUT, which is amusing since the guideline itself is written in all capital letters. I have edited some of the comments that appear inline as a courtesy so as not to detract from the discussion. I am pretty sure the comments by the editor who tagged this article for deletion did not have the intention of shouting as we have already been in contact and our communications remain congenial and productive. The all caps are probably just for emphasis. At least I am not interpreting the all caps as shouting. Best Regards,
 *  Bfpage &#124;leave a message 11:11, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Cleanup tag
I just removed a cleanup tag that had the following text in its "reason" parameter: "the article is a morass of poor content and construction, opening with a broad general, unsupported conclusion (drawn from a news report about a single primary source), an article otherwise sourced at present from 4 of 8 citations to news reports (including one on the establishment of a chicken empathy museum), 2 to popular books on animal psychology, and 2 to primary sources (and none to scholarly secondary sources); moreover, there appears to be but a single global research group actively and seriously studying this matter, there are no clear reviews (secondary sources) on their work, and their results between studies are not yet conclusive, so even if a good scholarly job is done with available literature, this is an area that there may only be, at best, three sentences worth of content that can be verifiably written"

Please remember that article maintenance tags are not a substitute for voicing concerns and starting discussions on the talk page. I removed the tag because it was excessively long and impeded the readability of the article. Mz7 (talk) 05:55, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Article has been merged
I have merged all the relevant and appropriate material into Emotion in animals. In my opinion, this article can now be deleted. Of course, other editors may wish to merge more material. DrChrissy (talk) 14:43, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Article rehatched
The article has been restored and significantly improved. Best Regards,
 * Barbara (WVS) (talk) 11:36, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Paging
. If this can be brought to GA there are real DYK potentials here.  E Eng  01:41, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
 * You really think that is possible?
 * Barbara (WVS) ✐   ✉  01:54, 16 June 2017 (UTC)