Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week/Meat

Meat

 * Nominated on 08:45, 16 January 2006 (UTC); needs 24 votes by March 13 2006.

De Carnibus: An impassioned plea for assistance, by humanitarian and meat-lover Silence.

At the very first glance, this article may not look like a stub, but appearances can be deceiving. After the first page, which consists entirely of disjointed, chaotic, orphaned intro paragraphs lacking any structure or flow, a basic knowledge of English grammar, wikification, explanation of relevance, and dozens of key facts, we immediately jump into a stub section followed by a big list. And that's it. Some crappy introductory lines followed by a list. There's simply not enough content available for AID (which is more about copyediting and large-scale reorganizing than massive additions) to do anything with this article, so I came here.

5 out of the 7 pages of this article consist of nothing but a bloated list which for some bizarre reason, instead of being an actual list of articles on types of meats, lists all sorts of animals that could be eaten, or are eaten in some remote parts of the world, like gorillas, pikas, alligators, cockroaches, rhinoceroi, yak, salamanders, and zebras. I'm honestly surprised (and a little disappointed) that "human" wasn't included on the list. No details whatsoever are given on any of the entries.

More significantly, even the prose text that is there is pretty embarrassing. The article begins without even defining or explaining what it is about, jumping right into an awkward (and poorly-formatted, words and foreign phrases need to be italicized, translations can go in quotes) etymological discourse. Historical and should always be covered after the basics have already been explained (see saffron for a good example of how to do this even when there's not enough information to make a distinct section on the topic). It then, after wasting time and space on a self-referential, redundant, rather silly, and awkward four-line "The rest of the article will deal with the assumed literal referent of "meat": Meat is animal tissue (mainly muscle) used as food." disclaimer (and after wasting yet another paragraph re-explaining that the definition of "meat" isn't precise or clear, even though it is, and re-repeating the trivial etymological background information in exactly the same words ("Originally, the word meat meant simply "food.")), goes into a rambling list of trivial factoids such as "Thin sliced meats used in sandwich-making are called cold cuts in the United States." (though on the plus side, they got the italics right this time!).

This article, about a vitally important topic not only in human society, human culture, and human history, but also in biology, ecology, and all life on the planet, deserves, nay, needs, far better treatment from Wikipedia. If we can spend months bringing much less central topics like black pepper and even coca cola (both of which are very impressive articles) up to featured quality, we should at least be able to give readers an article we aren't embarrassed about on the extremely basic and necessary topic of meat. -Silence 09:01, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Support: 18:57, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Silence 09:01, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 2) Andrew Levine 02:59, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 3) Gflores Talk 06:19, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 4) Fenice 07:37, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 5) Out of pity for you Lotsofissues 06:56, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 6) A persuasive argument. Ashibaka tock 01:29, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 7) King of Hearts | (talk) 03:08, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 8) Good find, definitely needs to be improved. --The1exile 14:08, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 9) Right on, Silence. Carolaman 07:43, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 10) Fresh 17:44, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 11) Nice job Silence.Tom 04:51, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 12) mikka (t) 22:06, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 13)  S iva1979 Talk to me  14:48, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 14) Neutralitytalk 06:58, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 15)  young  american  (talk)
 * 1) Is currently confused on the different kinds of tissues, would benefit from a scientific perspective. Samsara contrib talk 20:22, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 2) Lesgles ( talk ) 06:41, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 3) --Someoneinmyheadbutit&#39;snotme 19:12, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 4) EncycloPetey 04:46, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 5) As the author of the etymological discussion within the article, I am in agreement that this is a horribly under-represented section on meat. I also confess that I do not really know wiki-ettiquette and so would welcome a collarborative effort to give the subject the attention it deserves. I believe that either placing emphasis on a proviso to stress the term's etymology or even having "Meat" directly linked to a disambiguation page is important because is not universally accepted as reffering (solely) to animal-flesh-for-food, and to write the article assuming this from the offset has the effect of biasing the article.      --Joe Cape
 * 6) Bratislav Slović 14:45, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Comments:
 * Ye gods this article is awful. Good find, Silence. Andrew Levine 02:59, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Meat may be "basic", but "necessary"? As a vegetarian, I scoff. – Quadell (talk) (bounties) 21:29, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Quadell, you're being invited to help write the article, not eat it! ;) What better place to include a secion on some of the concerns of raising and eating meat? --EncycloPetey 07:03, 22 February 2006 (UTC)