Talk:Human anatomy

Missing Human anatomy article
The Anatomy article, formerly mainly on human anatomy, now not unreasonably (but perhaps surprisingly) has a far wider scope. The Human body article seems to have focussed for a while now on giving an overview of all the body's systems, not only its structure, so it too has a far wider scope than Human anatomy. We therefore have a clear gap which ought to be filled by material on, um, the anatomy of the human, and curiously we don't have an article on that rather large and important topic. Perhaps we should replace the current redirect with the former text of the human anatomy article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:05, 4 September 2016 (UTC)


 * There should definitely be an article just for human anatomy. The topic cannot be dealt with appropriately with just a subsection on the Anatomy page and one on Human body. PriceDL (talk) 05:00, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Agreed this is a clear gap, I last edited this page 7 years ago when there was a separate article! Human body is more of an overview and anatomy barely mentions humans. Human anatomy has been a rich subject of study for millennia. Talk:Human body doesn't have an archive link so I can't even find where the merge was discussed. I spent a year at university studying human anatomy so there certainly enough content. |→ Spaully τ 07:11, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * There does appear to be a recent discussion on Talk:Anatomy about adding a human anatomy page. Looks like the general consensus is to improve the Human body page to convince people a separate page is necessary. For now I've redirected Human anatomy to human body instead of anatomy, which seems more sensible to me. PriceDL (talk) 07:44, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Good idea. I've also spent some time reading past exchanges.  There appears to be resistance to reinstating human anatomy (and human physiology) and I agree the way forward is to demonstrate a need through editing human body, or development in draftspace/userspace though I need to think on that option. |→ Spaully τ  08:15, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Good grief. We have an Outline of human anatomy. Why not redirect this there? And then you can link from there to human body & anatomy. That also hatnotes to Index of anatomy articles (I'd guess the vast majority of which were about components of the human anatomy). This edit-warring over section links to a topic which has both an outline and an index is crazy. wbm1058 (talk) 02:54, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * The problem is that the content that was here was split / merged to the wrong place... less specific, more general articles about the human body and anatomy. Presumably, the rationale for splitting human anatomy from is that the outline was too long so content needed to be split from it to a more detailed sub-article. Well, if the more detailed, sub-article can't stand on its own, then just merge the content back to the "essence of human anatomy" section... wbm1058 (talk) 03:02, 18 February 2017 (UTC)


 * The November 2013 discussion that led to the merge of this to human body is at Talk:Human body/Archive 1. Human physiology was also merged to human body. "Our main thesis was that there is not really any difference between "Human body" and "Human anatomy" - what exactly is human anatomy, if not the study of the human body?" There ya go, anatomy, physiology, it's all just the same thing about the body, which is the WP:COMMON term for it all. Anatomy physiology aren't WP:common terms /sarcasm. Maybe this can be restored and upgraded into a decent standalone article? wbm1058 (talk) 03:57, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

If I follow you correctly you suggest expanding as an alternative to the Human body section or re-opening this article? I hadn't seen Outline of human anatomy, which seems to be a comprehensive list of links to relevant articles, but would not be very easy to use and has few views (~60 per day). That may be a good space to write it and if it becomes significant enough then splits it back off.

The logical structure for these articles to my mind is this:
 * Human body - general outline of the body, anatomy, physiology, modifications, depictions in art etc.
 * Human anatomy - Readable outline of the subject with relevant links, summary of history of study etc.
 * More detailed articles on particular anatomy or histology, e.g.: Skin, Human skeleton etc.
 * Outline or List of human anatomy articles - much as it is, less useful for the general reader but more for finding specific articles and organisation
 * Human physiology - Readable outline of human physiology
 * etc.

To get there would take a lot of work and time which I think would be worth the effort; however, given the objection to splits/reorganisation in the past I am keen to see if there is consensus for this kind of structure as fighting all the way would not be fun. |→ Spaully ~talk~ 08:27, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia outlines are a special type of list article. They make up one of Wikipedia's content navigation systems. See Outlines for more details. So yes, redirecting Human anatomy to Outline of human anatomy is not an ideal solution. This is more of a stopgap. Since an outline is not in paragraph format, and we should have an overview article in paragraph format for any topic that's broad enough to have an outline of it. I'm not surprised at the low page views given that this outline was a de facto WP:orphan. Pageviews on the outline should go up, now that I've added some more visible links to it. wbm1058 (talk) 14:28, 18 February 2017 (UTC)