Talk:Bennettitales

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Nattesd1. Peer reviewers: Nestad1.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 15:36, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Bennettitales v. cycadeoids

This article is not coherent in the use of these two terms. It starts with the phrase “Bennettitales (the cycadeoids)”, implying that the two terms are equivalent, but later suggests that the Bennettitales are subdivided into the cycadeoids and “relatives of Williamsonia”. I have removed the irritating circular reference (cycadeoid linked out to a stub that links back to Bennettitales), but this link should be reinstated if a separate article for cycadeoid is created. FredV (talk) 11:33, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Approximate time span

The article, following a source, says "first appeared in the Triassic period and became extinct in most areas toward the end of the Cretaceous". Thus they did not extend throughout the whole of the Triassic and Cretaceous, i.e. between 252 to 66 Mya according to current dates for these periods. Hence it's my view that the article is right to then say "i.e. they existed around 250 to 70 million years ago"; the rounding of the years to 10's shows that the range is approximate. It would be spuriously accurate to say "around 252 to 66". Peter coxhead (talk) 08:39, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Bennettitales Expansion

This article is lacking structure. I propose that the sections 'Evolutionary History and Relationships' and 'Morphological Information' be added to bolster the structure. --Nattesd1 (talk) 22:08, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Dividing up the article is a good idea. There's a standard template for articles about plants (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Template, although this does need some modification for extinct plants. The normal sections would be "Description", followed by "Taxonomy", which includes classification, evolution and phylogeny, possibly as subsections. See e.g. Aglaophyton or Horneophyton as examples of structuring. (A minor point: we use 'sentence case' for titles in the English Wikipedia.) Peter coxhead (talk) 07:06, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Bisporangiate

I came across a most pleasant admonishment at the top of a different wiki article; it said: "This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details."

I love that; there are getting to be more and more wiki articles which seem to be written by experts for experts, and the general public be damned. A case in point is this article here, where "bisporangiate" and "monosporangiate" are dispensed without any explanation (at least "strobili" has been wikilinked) and wiki itself (nor wiktionary) has no explanation. I had to do a google search to find "When a flower or cone produces both megaspores and microspores, it is said to be bisporangiate. Most flowers are bisporangiate."

Is there some way of attaching a link to the word "bisporangiate" in the text so that an explanatory text such as quoted above could appear when hovering over it, in the way wiki entry snippets now appear when hovering over wikilinked words? Or something similar. Anything to make the barriers lower for real unlearned but honestly curious laypeople seeking to educate themselves - we live in a world now where the ignorant have largely given up trying, and are now becoming loudly proud of their willful ignorance. Anything that can be done to undermine this trend is direly needed, and every little bit helps. 172.103.138.179 (talk) 15:11, 13 November 2018 (UTC)just some random wiki user...

Different versions

After editing this page, Hemiachenia reverted all of my edits, claiming that I was vandalizing the page. I did no such thing. My edit summaries say exactly what I was doing. I now have to defend my version of the article here:

• I removed many images and the gallery section. generally, galleries should be avoided. If you want to include images on a page, put them next to text so that the reader can easily glance between the two. There were also way too many images inline, to the point where the text was smushed up against the them and the taxobox. In my last edit I added some images back that elaborate on the article but do not overwhelm it.

• My "rewriting" replaced "bennettitalean" with "Bennettitales", as the latter is more commonly used when refering to plant orders especially. I also removed and unsupported section about bi- and monosporangiate cones. To my knowledge, the source does not mention Williamsoniaceae being mostly monosporangiate. There are also several minor edits that slightly changed the wording. Hemiachenia informed me that these needed to be discussed on the talk page before being implemented, which I find frankly absurd. These, and the previous edits, are relatively minor and do not significantly affect the contents of the article, so I have no idea why I would need to do so. Many people, including myself, have made more significant edits on articles that were not contested in such a way.

To be honest, I find this dispute quite petty and I am not sure why it was even started. If someone thinks they can improve the article some way, they have the right to edit it. That is the point of Wikipedia. If Hemiachenia was not satisfied with my edits, he could have just made his own afterwards, and I find it rediculous that I was accused of vandalism.

We are now forced to discuss what would be best for the article as a community. I am not unwilling to make changes to my version (I was planning on nominating this for GA, which would obviously entail further edits), but I stand by what I said in bullet two about my edits. I do not mean any of this as offense to anyone, including Hemiachenia, and I simply wish to make this website better. ZKevinTheCat (talk) 18:36, 26 May 2025 (UTC)

Hi, I have also contributed to this article and I am siding with Hemiauchenia in the reversion of some of your recent edits. Your changes removed important text (divaricate branching pattern, paraphyly proposals) and vital visual information (images), while adding nothing in return. This reduced the article's readability which Hemiauchenia understandably mistook for vandalism against an article they have spent a lot of time on. That assumption was way off the mark, we don't mean it as a personal offense. This is an unfortunate scenario where toes have been unintentionally stepped on (parallel to the situation at Dickinsonia). I'm a bit too busy to focus on this article at the moment, but I hope that you and Hemiauchenia can hash out your differences on this talk page if you strongly believe that revisions are warranted. NGPezz (talk) 21:16, 26 May 2025 (UTC)

I concur with NGPezz's comments. Your edits removed many images which were valuable illustrations (for example, the Weltrichia and Williamsonia diagrams) and removed information for no discernable reason. The bit about the monosporangiate and bisporangiate cones not being properly sourced was due to an error several years ago that meant one of the references got accidentally deleted and then their citations were mistakenly cited to another reference. I have just corrected this, so now there is no reason to delete. Replacing "bennettitalean" (which is widely used in the scientific literature [1]) with "Bennettitales" is an edit that is pointless and doesn't effect the readibility of the article in any major way, so I don't see why you are making a big deal out of it. If you have ideas for constructive changes/additions, you should make specific edit requests in a "change X to Y" format. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:38, 26 May 2025 (UTC)