User:Xavier.bower/sandbox

User: Xavier.bower/sandbox is a Wikipedia Sandbox maintained by and pertaining to Xavier Bower (19 January 1998 – Present), an American University of Chicago student and musician. He is entirely unknown in all academic communities at the current date, having no published work of any sort.

1st Wiki Article: Joseph Priestley
In this immense and supremely well-developed page, almost everything is relevant to the topic, except for some minor asides that seem to only pertain to the lives of family members.

The article is very neutral, although it does have a narrative of unfair treatment of Priestley. That narrative is based on the collection of facts presented, not persuasive language, so it seems OK.

This viewpoint of Priestley's political persecution may be overrepresented. His role as a natural philosopher is not given much space by comparison, and so may be underrepresented.

Citations seem to work in general and are relevant to the content.

There are 196 citations. Facts are very well supported. They seem to come from mainly sources that would be impartial and credible, so good in general. The tone of each individual citation is neutral and well formulated.

No out of date information I can see.

This is a featured article, appearing on Wikipedia's Main Page on March 1, 2008. It has been listed as a level-4 vital article in People. It is part of 10 different WikiProjects. The talk page is like another entire major article in of itself, with a huge body of documented response.

This differs from class in that it presents itself as a flood of information, with little to no speculation.

Amazing Article, Amazing Historical Figure

2nd Wiki Article: Robert Boyle
This page is less well developed and lengthy. A section of wordy description of critical reception of one of his books and similar asides detracted somewhat from my reading experience.

The tone, fortunately, is exceedingly neutral, helped by the page's relative brevity.

The Biography section is underrepresented, as many events and processes are referenced in later sections that are unclear as to their position/order in his life.

Citations work, seem well sourced, and support the facts well. Some citations are placed at the end of entire paragraphs which they necessarily must be providing information for, which is somewhat confusing. Lots of encyclopedias in the References section - good. There definitely are less citations per text than the Priestley article, though.

More biographical info could be added. Things seem up to date.

This article was a failed good articles nominee, and has a "needs further citation" banner. It is related to 7 different WikiProjects. It is a B-Class level-4 vital article in People. The talk page is much shorter than Priestley's, and much of its text is dedicated to a couple of minor points.

We have not discussed Boyle so much in class, but it's about the same difference as in the case of the Priestley page.

1. "Gemmules"
Gemmules are a genetic unit part of the obsolete theory of Pangenesis, popularized by Darwin in his 1868 work The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.

The current page for Gemmules is pretty much a stub, with only one reference, organization problems, and very little content. Searching around on ProQuest has yielded a number of results for contemporary commentary on the theory and its use in other fields. Given my interest in genetics, this could be a very good choice.

Talk page has little content, and requests for improvement. This is a very good lead.

2. "Rapid modes of evolution"
Rapid modes of evolution is a stub page that ought to put saltationism and related evolutionary theories in a broader scientific and historical perspective, but at the moment is entirely unwikified and almost content-less. This would be a good thing to improve, but I am not certain that it is very crucial in the first place, unlike other pages I have seen, and unlike Gemmules. Certainly a possibility, though.

Saltation is a term used in multiple fields, so may be hard to go after considering the amounts of unrelated results that come up in searches.

3. "The Double Helix"
The Double Helix by James Watson has a Start-class rated page about it, with many basic formatting/wikifying and content problems. I own this book. A real possibility, but I would have to finish the entire thing by a week or so from now, which is not realistic.

Gemmules.
Gemmules is a stub page that I have already found content to improve, that is unwikified, and of relative importance. Furthermore, it interests me a lot. I plan on improving structure of the article, historical information, and Gemmule's development as a specific term.

Need to take all this stuff and merge it to the theory section of pangenesis probably... Chiswick Chap also helping
Gemmules appeared in Charles Darwin's 1868 book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, nine years after the publication of his book On the Origin of Species.

Gemmules, also called plastitudes or pangenes, were assumed to be shed by the organs of the body and carried in the bloodstream to the reproductive organs where they accumulated in the germ cells or gametes. They thus provided a possible mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics, in a theory now widely attributed to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, which Darwin believed to be a cause of the observed variation in living organisms. This was prior to the 1900 rediscovery among biologists of Gregor Mendel's theory of the particulate nature of inheritance.

Darwin explained that:

E. Janet Browne wrote that:

In her view, Darwin chose the theory as:

Contrary to the schoolbook view that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was anti-Darwinian, Browne argued that Darwin himself believed in that theory:

Darwin hypothesised that acquired characteristics would modify the parts of the body, which would then produce inheritably modified gemmules:

Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, studied Darwin's theory of pangenesis with interest, but discovered that it did not fit the evidence that he had assembled:

->

Darwin's pangenesis theory was complex as he tried to explain the process of sexual reproduction, passing of traits and complex developmental phenomena, such as cellular regeneration.


 * "As Darwin explained it, pangenesis was the highly abstract notion that every tissue, cell and living part of an organism produced minute, unseen gemmules (or what he sometimes called granules or germs) which carried inheritable characteristics and were transmitted to the offspring via the reproductive process. He was careful to specify that each part of an organism produced only information about itself. There were gemmules for hands and feet, not for whole organisms. Individual gemmules did not contain a complete microscopic blueprint for an entire creature in the way that Herbert Spencer or Carl von Nagel described. When the gemmules from each parent mixed in the foetus they would produce a unique new individual."

Some gemmules remained dormant for generations, whereas others were routinely carried by all offspring. He thought about these literally, "almost as if gemmules were letters in the postal system". Every child was built up from a mixture of the parents and grandparents' gemmules coming from either side. Darwin likened this to gardening: a flowerbed could be sprinkled with seeds "most of which soon germinate, some lie for a period dormant, whilst others perish.". He did not claim gemmules were in the blood, although his theory was often interpreted in this way. Responding to Fleming Jenkin's review of On the Origin of Species, he argued that pangenesis would permit the preservation of some favourable variations in a population so that they wouldn't die out through blending.

Hugo de Vries characterized the theory in two propositions, of which he only accepted the first:


 * I. In the cells there are numberless particles which differ from each other, and represent the individual cells, organs, functions and qualities of the whole individual. These particles are much larger than the chemical molecules and smaller than the smallest known organisms; yet they are for the most part comparable to the latter, because, like them, they can divide and multiply through nutrition and growth. They are transmitted, during cell-division, to the daughter-cells: this is the ordinary process of heredity.
 * II. In addition to this, the cells of the organism, at every stage of development, throw off such particles, which are conducted to the germ-cells and transmit to them those characters which the respective cells may have acquired during development.Diagram of August Weismann's germ plasm theory. The hereditary material, the germ plasm, is confined to the gonads. Somatic cells (of the body) develop afresh in each generation from the germ plasm. The implied Weismann barrier between the germ line and the soma prevents Lamarckian inheritance.

Darwin's pangenesis theory was criticised for its Lamarckian premise that parents could pass on traits acquired in their lifetime. Lamarckism fell from favour after August Weismann's research in the 1880s indicated that changes from use (such as lifting weights to increase muscle mass) and disuse (such as being lazy and becoming scrawny) were not heritable. Some Lamarckian principles, however, have not been entirely discounted and are reflected in the modern field of Epigenetics. In this regard, some of Darwin's pangenesis principles do relate to heritable aspects of phenotypic plasticity, although the status of gemmules has been firmly rejected. Darwin himself had noted that "the existence of free gemmules is a gratuitous assumption"; by some accounts in modern interpretation, gemmules may be considered a prescient mix of DNA, RNA, proteins, prions, and other mobile elements that are heritable in a non-Mendelian manner at the molecular level.

How to merge[edit]
Shortcuts


 * WP:PROMERGE
 * WP:MERGETEXT

For information on moving pages, see Help:Moving a page.

While some mergers can be done boldly, most others (as described above) require a rough consensus.

There are two basic types of merger; which to use depends on how much content of the source page you want to keep:


 * Full-content paste merger – most content, clean and fast
 * Selective paste merger – some content, clean but slow

Additionally, remember that almost all article pages have a talk page. To avoid losing quick access to that historical discussion, a merge notice linking to the source article's talk-page should be placed at the top of the destination article's talk page, such as.

Perform the following steps to merge an article into another article:


 * 1) Copy all or some of the content from the source page(s) and paste the content in an appropriate location at the destination page. Publish the edit, leaving the following edit summary (as required by the Creative Commons Share-alike 3.0 license):
 * Ideally, do any necessary copyediting and rearranging in a separate, second edit rather than when you first paste the moved text. (This two-step approach simplifies attribution for the license by separating your contributions from the material that was created at the other page.)
 * 1) Redirect the source page whose content was just merged by replacing everything with the following:
 * If the content was merged to a single section within the destination page, it is recommended that the source page be redirected directly to that section. In that case, replace everything with the following:
 * Publish the page, leaving the following edit summary: (also required by the CC-BY-SA):
 * 1) Reconcile talk page tags. If the source page has a talk page:
 * 2) * Move all and  templates to the destination page's talk page
 * 3) * Reconcile templates with the destination talk page. In most cases, you must copy any WikiProject template unique to the source page to the destination page. Be on the lookout for alternative WikiProject templates. For example, if the destination page has a , you need not copy a  there. Once the copying is done, make sure the WikiProject templates for the source article have a   parameter-value pair. (If they already have a   parameter, change its value to "redirect"). This should be done even for WikiProjects that do not support a redirect class at this time.
 * 4) Tag the destination page's talk page with , and the source page's talk page with  . Place these tags at the top of the talk pages.
 * As an alternative, experienced users can add  to both talk pages. Place at the top of the talk pages.
 * 1) Fix any double redirects using Special:WhatLinksHere. A bot automatically fixes this problem but it may take a day or two.
 * 2) Check the merged content for non-free files. If any of these files are present, edit the non-free use rationales to replace the old article title with the new one. This is required under the non-free content criteria.
 * 1) Tag the destination page's talk page with , and the source page's talk page with  . Place these tags at the top of the talk pages.
 * As an alternative, experienced users can add  to both talk pages. Place at the top of the talk pages.
 * 1) Fix any double redirects using Special:WhatLinksHere. A bot automatically fixes this problem but it may take a day or two.
 * 2) Check the merged content for non-free files. If any of these files are present, edit the non-free use rationales to replace the old article title with the new one. This is required under the non-free content criteria.

Selective paste merger[edit]
Shortcut


 * WP:SMERGE


 * 1) Open the source and destination pages in two separate edit windows/tabs.
 * 2) Cut/paste the non-redundant content from the source page into the destination page.
 * 3) Be sure to remove the  tag from the destination page before previewing
 * 4) Preview and edit the destination page until it looks good and consistent.
 * 5) Delete all the text from the source page and replace it with.
 * 6) * Note that PAGENAME in the code above should be the title of the destination page.
 * 7) * Note that some categories might not be appropriate for the target page and should be considered to be left on the redirect.
 * 8) Publish both, and note the merger (including the page names) in the edit summaries. (This step is required in order to conform with Wikipedia's licensing requirements. Do not omit it nor omit the page name.)
 * 9) Check "What links here" on the source page for double-redirects.
 * 10) * Double-redirects will fail to link, and must be renamed to redirect to the current page name.
 * 11) Add   onto the talk pages of both articles. This not only helps clarify attribution at the destination, but helps prevent inadvertent later deletion of the source history. This step is optional but recommended.
 * 12) Afterwards, DO NOT ask for a history merger between the two articles. See this link for the reason.

Performing a merger in this manner is beneficial when the source document includes a great deal of material that is not needed in the final article.

(from Merging)