Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Mercury (planet)

Mercury (planet)
I've been working on this recently hoping to bring it up to FA standards, and with the help of the featured German version's ToC which highlighted some gaps in our coverage, I think it might be there now. I think it's now comprehensive and accessible so I'll give it a run here and see what anyone else thinks. Worldtraveller 17:05, 28 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Support A nice article! The only minor thing I should suggest is to convert external links within the article into references. Cmapm 17:51, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment could the external links listed in the notes be cited according to WP:CITE (and WP:CITE/ES)? could be useful here. AndyZ t 19:37, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the comment - done that now. Worldtraveller 21:59, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Support Recent edits show dramatic improvement. --Keflavich 20:44, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Support Nice article, the only thing I think could be improved is the main picture. A color version in which tiles are not so evident would be better. Great job. --Enano275 21:07, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Trouble is, the only close up images are from Mariner 10, and they all tend to look a bit like that. True colour ones don't exist, but there are some false colour composites - I'll see if I can find one.  Worldtraveller 21:59, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, that won't stop it from being a FA anyway. --Enano275 14:05, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I found a pretty nice colour image and put that at the top instead of the old one. Worldtraveller 21:47, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Support. Fascinating, and a pleasure to read. HenryFlower 21:32, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Support: Clean, organized, nicely written. &#150; Tutm&oslash;sis   (Talk)  23:18, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Support: Does justice to a fascinating topic. You might want to clean up your in-line citations though. Per WP:FOOTNOTE, they should be of the form sentence.[1]...some of your in-line citations look like such sentence [1]. AreJay 01:10, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the comment. Personally I've always found it really bizarre when people put refs after a full stop - seems to me very strange to have a citation for something in a different sentence.  Is it a US/UK difference?  I notice that the line addressing this was only very recently added to WP:FOOTNOTE.  Worldtraveller 01:55, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't know if it is...I typically use MLA Style and the MLA format for in-line citations is structured in much the same way as yours currently are. I don't think this is a problem, I just feel that we should standardize our formatting in the article since I've seen instances of the sentence.[1] format as well as the sentence [1]. format. Should be fairly easy. I can't realistically hold you to WP:FOOTNOTE anyway since it isn't Wikipedia MOS policy. AreJay 03:13, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Support Quite comprehensive, writing is fine. Compares very favourably to the Venus FA. I'm personally indifferent, but I can imagine someone coming along and expecting an In Popular Culture section. Marskell 08:06, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I've just done some cleanup edits that should have been done before the article was even nominated, but there are things I can't fix on my own. For example: there are no sources cited at all in the Early astronomers section, and the only reference in the Ground-based telescopic research section refers to events in the year 2000. The statements about the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Hebrew names need to be sourced. Ditto the claims about the Greek astronomers who figured out that "Apollo" and "Hermes" were the same body. Also, the section implies that the terms Morning Star and Evening Star referred to Mercury, while the disambig pages themselves indicate the terms referred to Venus. Angr (talk • contribs) 09:31, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks - I'll address those points later today. I saw you just changed all the citations from being before punctuation to after it - I have to say that positioning seems very illogical, and I'd only just last night made sure they were all before the punctutation, so I've started a discussion on Wikipedia talk:Footnotes about this which you might want to weigh in on.  Worldtraveller 09:57, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I've always seen footnotes to the right of periods and commas in published work, both British and American. It's a matter of style, not logic. Another problem I have is with the sentence Mercury's smaller orbit means it is not much farther away, and the fuller phase more than outweighs its greater distance from Earth, which I can't understand at all. The context suggests that this sentence is supposed to be explaining why Mercury is brighter in its gibbous phase than in its full phase, but I don't see that it achieves that goal. I can't make any sense of it at all, not least because of all the comparative forms (smaller, farther, fuller, greater) that don't explain what's being compared (smaller/farther/fuller/greater than what?). Angr (talk • contribs) 10:37, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I added references throughout the historical studies sections, and rewrote the part explaining why Mercury is brighter when further away - is it clearer now? Any further parts needing work?  Thanks for your comments. Worldtraveller 10:07, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it looks a lot better. Thanks! Angr (talk • contribs) 11:39, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Support: A place less hospitable than the US South!  Very good article, very comprehensive, and very readable, given the scientific writing necessary for it.  The Spacers do good work in general, and now PlanetaryTraveller has a good submission on the sun's meteor shield, from hornéd helmet to I. Ron Core.  Formatting issues are formatting; they are after the content, and, while those with an interest in consistency can ask for consistency, they're surely not substantive objections.  Geogre 14:50, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Support Great example of excellent prose in a scientific article. Joelito (talk) 21:06, 30 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Support Indeed very clean, organized, and referenced. No problems here. -- Jay  (Reply)  00:34, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Support, excellent article. One little thing that I saw, though, was that the referencing format is not consistent. In parts, it uses a bare link after the formatted reference, and in others, it uses descriptive text as part of the link. It's something so trivial it doesn't merit opposing, though. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 21:18, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the comment, I'll sort it so references are consistent. Worldtraveller 21:47, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Support Excellent read. Could you please convert the one or two red links that still remains in the article?--Dwaipayan (talk) 16:06, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
 * only found one redlink, which I removed because it linked to something which probably wouldn't deserve its own article. Worldtraveller 16:58, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Johann Schroter under Ground-Based Telescopic Research is still red. No idea who he is past an observer of Mercury, do what you will with it. --Keflavich 21:13, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Ah, well spotted - I found that he already has an article, he was just lacking redirects - he's blue now. Worldtraveller 09:34, 3 May 2006 (UTC)