Talk:River Out of Eden

message: *previous version
I am thinking about enhancing articles on books by Dawkins, Pinker, Sykes and Baker.  Perhaps I'll start with this article. Fred Hsu 01:59, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Fred – good move. As well as writing this lame article, I have made a number of edits across all the Richard Dawkins articles, with a view to achieving some consistency of style. One of the things I did was remove the ISBN numbers – I only mention this because I notice you put one back in A Devil's Chaplain. For example, in The Selfish Gene, I replaced a bunch of ISBN's with a paragraph explaining the dfifference between the various editions, which in my view is more helpful. I'm not convinced ISBN's are terribly informative or useful here – of course others may disagree. In any case, the full list of ISBN's are in the Richard Dawkins article where I'm sure they will remain.—Laurence Boyce 13:31, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm not aware of any book article guidelines. I think one may either employ a chapter-by-chapter approach, or talk about the whole book in the round – in either case it mustn't be a book review of course.—Laurence Boyce 11:22, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Most of Dawkins' books have had either a second edition or reprint, so which one do we use? – the original I suppose. Also aren't they different for hardback/softback US/UK editions? Is it really worth it? Shouldn't the article be about the book, not helping people to buy it as such? I mean there's only one Richard Dawkins. However, I'm not that fussed about it – I just wanted to tell you what I had done and why.—Laurence Boyce 11:22, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrite 

message: removed the only external links on July 19, 2006:
*Critical review from Answers in Genesis
I left this Creationist link unchanged during rewrite, because I felt that they needed to be given a chance to defend themselves, even though they would never succeed.  The critical review attacks the book on peripheral non-issues, but not the central issues as summarized in this article.  I felt that an intelligent person would be able to see through this fallacy in an instance, so I left the link alone.  But I am fine with the removal of the link.  I don't care either way. Fred Hsu 13:07, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: External links

message: The recent change in article name is entirely incorrect. The correct capitalisation is River Out of Eden. Laurence Boyce 10:03, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a precedent on Wikipedia (see, for example, Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Album_titles_and_band_names) not to capitalise prepositions in titles of articles about books and similar topics. As for the capitalisation on the book cover, in most cases that's not relevant because we should be modifying typography to our own set house style (which happens to differ from the publisher's in this case); it's not unusual for some book covers to use all caps or none, for example. Extraordinary Machine 13:46, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. Also I notice that you have changed the Dawkins template, but not any of the articles that link here, so we are currently inconsistent. Laurence Boyce 14:05, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capitalisation 

message: I added Template:POV-section to two sections of this article: Do good by stealth and God's utility function. Their summary of the book seems reasonable (I haven't read it, so I can't comment), but they're peppered with praise for Richard Dawkins. They need to be rephrased in a neutral way. --Ultra Megatron 05:16, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I fixed the one phrase which was out of guideline.  The rest of Dawkins 'said this', 'wrote that', 'showed yet another thing', etc. were in my opinion OK.  The article can surely use more academic criticism.  I will add more if I run into them. Fred Hsu 03:48, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  I added two NPOV tags 

message: I was struck that the phrase 'Dawkins fails' appears in the third paragraph of the description of 'Africa and her Progeny'.  While I agree that he does skip this, maybe there should be a 'Critiques' section where a source can be found stating that he fails.  While as I said I agree it is missing from the book, including a reference here makes it less enyclopedic and more essay style. Psychodolly (talk) 15:54, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. It should be changed.  I will think about it a bit and change it later when I have more time (next week).  Feel free to rewrite the sentence though.  This is not a popular book; you will have a hard time finding other references.  What happened was that when I was writing the summary, it took me a very long time for the light in my head to turn on. I finally realized what he tried to say by talking about both genes and organisms back and forth.  If only Dawkins explicitly stated what he was doing by explicitly contrasting organisms to genes, the chapter would have been even more user-friendly.  The sentence as stands smells of original research, I know. So, it should be toned down. Fred Hsu (talk) 21:57, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Failures 

message: I do not like the recent change that moved this article to River Out of Eden (with an initial capital in "Out"), and the subsequent change of the title in the article text. I raised the issue at User talk:JHunterJ#ALBUMCAPS but there is a guideline that we should follow a convention that results in "River Out of Eden". I suppose it's trivial, but the ugliness bugs me, and it rather looks like "River Nile of Eden" (with a hint that there is a river named "Out"). I note that the  box at the bottom of Richard Dawkins says "River out of Eden" which I think is Dawkins' intended spelling, although that's ambiguous given the all-caps title on the book cover, and apparently irrelevant. Any thoughts? Johnuniq (talk) 02:35, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  River out of Eden