Wikipedia:WikiProject Palaeontology/Important articles

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The following are articles that have been assessed by members of WikiProject Palaeontology as being of high-importance but being severely lacking in their coverage. These articles are about organisms and concepts that are important for a variety of historical, cultural, or scientific reasons, but unfortunately their current coverage on Wikipedia falls very short of the standards of an encyclopedia. This list exists to help editors, and potential editors, who may be interested in helping WikiProject Palaeontology in the areas where that help is most desperately needed.

The importance of these articles to science is not properly represented by their current coverage on Wikipedia, and therefore work on these articles is of critical importance to the WikiProject, and to science communication as a whole. Ideally, all of these articles should be either Good Articles or Featured Articles, but due to either lack of interest or attention, these articles fall short of that standard. If improving one or more of these articles is of interest to you, but it is too big of a task to accomplish by oneself, just make a post on the Palaeontology Article Workshop and you should find some willing editors to help!

Articles in most desperate need of work

These articles greatly fall short of the standards of an encyclopedia. They either omit large chunks of important information, or devote only a small number of sentences to that information. These articles could be improved easily, and any amount of work is a step in the right direction. However, if you want to take one of these articles all the way to GA or FA, it will take a lot of thoroughness and diligence.

Articles which need some work

These pages have the bones of a good article. They cover most of the important information regarding their subject, just not in as much detail as an encyclopedia should. They are either too shallow in their coverage or there are one or two crucial concepts that have little or no coverage. Either one of these could feasibly be rectified by a single person with a little hard work and finding the right sources.

Articles that could be made GA/FA with minimal work

These articles are essentially a complete coverage of their subject. There are few or no omissions of important information, and they generally follow the Manual of Style. They have a variety of sources, images, and are not overly technical in their use of language. However, they just haven't been given the special care and attention that the GA/FA article reviews necessitate. All the groundwork is more-or-less done, and a single person could feasibly bring any one of these to GA/FA in a relatively short time.

In the list below, articles in boldface are top-level importance; all other articles are high-level importance

General paleontology

Broad concepts and subjects

Evolutionary concepts

History of life

People and institutions

Geology concepts

Geologic formations

Vertebrate paleontology

General concepts

Fish and other stem-vertebrates

Amphibians and other stem-tetrapods

Archosauromorpha (incl. birds)

Other reptiles

Synapsids and stem-mammals

Crown-group mammals

Other paleontological fields

Paleoanthropology

Paleoentomology and paleontology of other arthropods

Other invertebrate paleontology topics

Paleobotany

Paleomycology

Micropaleontology

Stand-alone lists

Out of the many paleontology-related lists, some are very important to maintain actively due to the ongoing nature of academic publishing. Some of these are also important because they relate to high-importance concepts to the field of paleontology as a whole.

General paleontology

Timelines

Lists of taxa

Important articles already at GA or FA status

Paleontology-related good articles

Paleontology-related featured articles