Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Cosmic Calendar

Cosmic Calendar

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 7 Mar 2011 at 21:29:09 (UTC)

Reason

This image is an essential teaching tool for grounding scientific education. Carl Sagan used it as the cornerstone of the first episode of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. This is an updated view that is designed for putting cosmology, evolution, and written history in context. In addition to dates of important events, dates for availability for different types of evidence are shown.

Articles in which this image appears

Cosmic Calendar

FP category for this image

Sciences

Creator

Eric Fisk

• Support as nominator --Efbrazil (talk) 21:29, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose: I like the idea of this kind of diagram, however in its current state I do not think it is high enough quality to be considered:

Technical issues: It is the wrong file type (it should be png or svg), it shows serious jpg compression artefacts and looks like it may have been upsampled.

Description: This needs a carefully worded description to make it absolutely clear how this uses the analogy of the history of the universe lasting a year and the consequential relative timings of various historical events.

Layout: I like the overall structure, but I find the calendar layout as a summary of December unclear. The facts crammed in to December the 31st as times of the day are particularly confusing; I would suggest splitting this to a separate timeline/row one day long. Overall the timeline needs to be clearer and it would be very useful to include the actual times at which these events occurred.

Factual/language errors: There are many phrases which are not entirely scientifically accurate: "First life (bacterial)" is a great oversimplification, the nature of the first life is not known. "Cell nucleation" reads like nucleation is a process a single cell undergoes, it should read "Evolution of the eukaryotic nucleus" or similar. "Dinosaurs at top of food chain" ... and were also in the middle, and near the bottom. "Ape/gibbon split" etc. is sloppy scientific language, it should be "Ape/gibbon divergence" or similar. "Netherlandals and other megafauna die out" suggests netherlandals were megafauna.

Sorry for the long-winded post, maybe I will have a go at remaking this diagram at closer to FP standards... - Zephyris _Talk 01:44, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

• If it can be done without damaging clarity, could you add some more non-human-lineage stuff, as well as missing landmarks? I'd suggest, to start:
  • Eukaryotes
  • Amphibians
  • Arthropods
  • Insects
  • Flowering plants
  • Fungi
  • Possibly mammals' return to the sea (Whales, Dolphins)
  • ...And so on. I understand this is supposed to be a basic metaphor, but covering some of the other well-known lineages would help broaden it a bit, and avoid the common misconception of the tree of life as a ladder. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 07:30, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose its a little subjective, but dividing "year" up into 12 discrete "months" doesn't seem to make for a good timeline and looses information about the period over which certain events might have taken place. JJ Harrison (talk) 10:42, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
• 'Withdrawn as nominator Efbrazil Much thanks for the feedback! I have updated the photo to png, made the native resolution 1600 * 1200, and included most of the feedback above in the image content. I am planning to resubmit the photo unless more fixes are required. Is there a way to withdraw this submission without deleting the comments? Also, please let me know if there's a good way to get feedback before submission. I'm a newbie here and still figuring out how this all works. Thanks!

Not Promoted --Makeemlighter (talk) 01:58, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

• Withdrawn by nominator. Makeemlighter (talk) 01:58, 2 March 2011 (UTC)