Talk:Richard Thompson (marine biologist)

Authored/edited material
I've just now more or less fixed one item. I chose it pretty much at random: every item in the list was somewhat-to-utterly obscure.

I see no evidence of any book titled Coral Reefs of the World. This appears to be the title of a book series, not of a book. So, which book? Most (all?) of the authors'/editors' names are inverted, but nothing seems to be ordered by surname, so inversion merely seems to obfuscate. For some items, I don't know what's the title, what's the publisher, and what's the organization. There are what seem to be abbreviations; but what they're abbreviations of, I don't know. -- Hoary (talk) 22:34, 5 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi. Thanks for giving it your attention. I've now added some wikilinks. I got the list from the university's site, where it was even messier (including words melded into one, as though badly copy and pasted from elsewhere) and I had already tidied that up, to the extent that I could wade through the confusion. What should I do with it, remove it all bar the one you have figured out? -Lopifalko (talk) 08:22, 6 January 2020 (UTC)


 * I don't know. I've just fixed the first one -- but all it is is a five-page text within somebody's photobook. Let's plug on, see what we end up with, and then decide what to skip and what to drop. BTW, Coral Reefs of the World is here, but it's not obvious which volume(s) Thompson has contributed to. -- Hoary (talk) 13:36, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Ooh, a segue into photobooks! We know a thing or two about those... -Lopifalko (talk) 13:42, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm, yes. I've done some more work on the list; I've also arrived here, but haven't yet done anything with this discovery because right now there are other demands on my time. -- Hoary (talk) 00:39, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for helping. I presume inclusion should depend on the degree of his contribution, which is likely difficult for us to know. -Lopifalko (talk) 07:38, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Degree of the contribution (as a guesstimated percentage of the total), yes; but also guesstimated significance of the publication. We don't normally list academic papers, even those attributed solely to the biographee; and yet here is (very rightly!) an entire article devoted to a single, twenty-five page paper. -- Hoary (talk) 08:54, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
 * "We don't normally list academic papers, even those attributed solely to the biographee" – yes I was going to say this next, that I usually remove lists of such things on sight. -Lopifalko (talk) 20:21, 8 January 2020 (UTC)