Planning to add a picture of labeled facial muscles of a dissected rat that are involved in mastication including the temporalis and masseter muscles.
A diastema found in a rodent skullWill be adding this media to the beginning of the 2nd paragraph in the Characteristics section.
Content Edits of 2nd Paragraph in Characteristics Section:[edit]
Changing 7th sentence about facial muscles of Myomorpha to include massester muscles.
"The Myomorpha, such as the brown rat, have enlarged temporalis and masseter muscles, making them able to chew powerfully with their molars."[1]
Adding a new sentence following the 7th sentence to explain the event of eye boggling in rodents
"In rodents, masseter muscles insert behind the eyes and contribute to eye boggling that occurs during gnawing where the quick contraction and relaxation of the muscle causes the eyeballs to move up and down."[1]
Adding a new sentence following 3rd sentence to explain the importance of the masseter muscle in rodents
"Among rodents, the masseter muscles plays a key role in chewing, making up 60% - 80% of the total muscle mass among masticatory muscles and reflects rodents herbivorous diet."[2]
Adding another new sentence following the 4th sentence to differentiate gnawing and chewing actions among rodents.
"Rodents have two methods of feeding including gnawing that uses incisors and chewing that uses molars, however, due to the cranial anatomy of rodents these feeding methods cannot be used at the same time and are considered to be mutually exclusive."[3]
Take picture of diastema between the rats incisors and molars.
I am thinking that this may be hard to capture on my dissection animal, so instead I could find a rodent skull in the preserved species room that is in a better condition and take a picture of that skull instead.
Would add this media contribution to the end of the first paragraph in the "Characteristics" section.
Take picture and label a few facial muscles of the rat that are important for mastication
I have just skinned the head area of our lab rat to expose the facial/cranial muscles. I have a lab dissection guide to help me identify the facial muscles I want to focus on which include the temporalis and masseter muscles.
This media image would be added to the second paragraph within the "Characteristics" section.
Previous: "The Myomorpha, such as the brown rat, have enlarged temporalis muscles, making them able to chew powerfully with their molars."
Found articles explaining how masseter muscles play a role in rodent gnawing so will add that to this sentence and add a citation as well
Edited: "The Myomorpha, such as the brown rat, have enlarged temporalis and masseter muscles, making them able to chew powerfully with their molars."[1]
Found another interesting piece of information that I will add as a second sentence following the previously edited sentence.
"The masseter muscles pass through the eye sockets and insert behind the eyes. During gnawing, the rapid movement of the masseter muscles moves the eyeballs move up and down, a phenomenon called eye boggling."[1]
Will add the article in my own words:
In rodents, masseter muscles insert behind the eyes and contribute to eye boggling that occurs during gnawing where the quick contraction and relaxation of the muscle causes the eyeballs to move up and down.[1]
Found more information on the importance of the masseter muscles:
"The masseter is by far the dominant jaw-closing muscle in the Rodentia, comprising between 60% and 80% of the entire masticatory muscle mass"[2]
Will add this to beginning portion of second paragraph in Characteristics section:
Among rodents, the masseter muscles plays a key role in chewing, making up 60% - 80% of the total muscle mass among masticatory muscles and reflects rodents herbiviorous diet.[2]
Another quote that explains the difference between chewing and gnawing could be useful:
"Rodents have two feeding modes, gnawing at the incisors and chewing at the molars, but owing to a mismatch between the cranial and mandibular lengths, the incisors and molars cannot be in occlusion at the same time. Thus, the two feeding modes are mutually exclusive..."[3]
Will add this after the 4th sentence in second paragraph of characteristics section before jaw muscles are mentioned:
Rodents have two methods of feeding including gnawing that uses incisors and chewing that uses molars, however, due to the cranial anatomy of rodents these feeding methods cannot be used at the same time and are considered to be mutually exclusive. [3]
One suggestion that was made deals with including relevant bones and muscles that are important for rat/rodent jaw and chewing. I like the idea of including some bones in my edits if applicable since we have been learning more about them over the past few weeks. I may be able to add some commentary on their level of cranial kinesis and jaw suspension which I believe to be craniostylic. Although I feel like I have useful and relevant information about muscles used for mastication, I think I could expand out to include more about bones if I have the time to do so. This peer editor liked the idea of taking pictures during lab dissection to potentially add to the wikipedia page depending on the quality/clarity of the dissection and photo so that is something that I am still planning on attempting. I definitely want to get a picture of the rat dentition, but I might attempt to view some of the facial muscles mentioned or even bones of the upper and lower jaw depending on how much time I have to dissect and difficulty of dissection.
This editor liked the direction I am headed in regard to potential edits I am going to make to the mentioned articles. Just like the first peer editor, they thought that taking pictures in lab of the rat dentition was going to be a good idea, including the prominent diastema. One suggestion that the peer editor gave was to potentially add a drawing or diagram of a diastema in the wiki page before showing the picture that I would take in lab. While this is a good suggestion, I believe that linking to the wikipedia article, diastema will do an adequate job of explaining what a diastema is and it includes a great picture of a diastema in a horse towards the bottom of the article which can help the reader understand how a diastema will look in other animals such as a rat. I like the idea of the drawing diagram and maybe that will be something that I can look into if my pictures do not turn out the way I want them to in lab.
Take picture of diastema/rodent dentition from lab dissection and add to rodent page
Add information from articles about muscles used for chewing/gnawing in rodent page
If I have extra time...:
Try to do some dissections in lab to see these muscles mentioned such as the masseter and temporalis muscles
Find articles relating to rodent cranial kinesis/ jaw suspension/ jaw bones. I would first focus on finding articles about these topics and then would move onto potentially using the lab animal to show/demonstrate what I found.
Draft for Editing Articles (Listed in Order of Importance) (Week 6)[edit]
In the beginning of the Characteristics section, the article goes in depth into the dentition of rodents so here is another place where I could possibly add a picture of the teeth of our mice as a form of media if I can capture a clear and high quality photo. There is a drawing of incisors, but not of diastema so maybe I will try to capture that aspect.
From last article:
"Rodents, and rats in particular, can gnaw powerfully, because of the attachment points of the masseter muscles."[1]
Page mentions temporalis muscles found in rodents that allow them to chew powerfully with their molars, so I can also add how the temporalis muscles contribute to their powerful gnawing as well.
"The masseter muscles pass through the eye sockets and insert behind the eyes. During gnawing, the rapid movement of the masseter muscles moves the eyeballs move up and down, a phenomenon called eye boggling."[1]
Can add this to second paragraph in characteristics section when they mention myomorpha suborder.
I am planning to take a picture of our rats teeth in lab to add to the diet and dentition section of the article in the form of media. I could also try to show how it features a diastema as well which the article already mentions
From third article:
"The oldest Muridae are found in Asia, and an Asian origin of the family is highly probable"[4]
While this is stated in the evolution section, there is no citation for this statement so this article can be used as a citation.
In the beginning of the Characteristics section, the article goes in depth into the dentition of rodents so here is another place where I could possibly add a picture of the teeth of our mice as a form of media if I can capture a clear and high quality photo. There is a drawing of incisors, but not of diastema so maybe I will try to capture that aspect. -BC
I am planning to take a picture of our rats teeth in lab to add to the diet and dentition section of the article in the form of media. I could also try to show how it features a diastema as well which the article already mentions. -BC
Missing a general anatomy section. We could try to relate pieces of the rats anatomy to why it widely used for research and is considered a model organism which. I have wondered why rats are always used for research so adding to this article would be cool.
Missing an evolutionary tree explaining where their respected place. This page generally seems less developed than the rodents page and is more specific to rats which will help us be able to add more edits to the article.
We wanted to pick some sort of disease that relates to rats. This page seems like it relates to rats the most and could have some information added or editing to improve the articles quality. We could try to relate the rats lifestyle or anatomy to how it is able to spread diseases to humans.
Because I made some changes to citation numbers, the numbers explained below now do not align with the wikipedia article. I changed/fixed citations #5, 10, 13, & 14. I did not have time to try and reword information stated in citation #5 in the article to try and avoid close paraphrasing, but that is something that I can work on in the future.
Add a new citation that supports existing content that is either uncited, has an existing citation that is low quality or needs a citation altogether.
Citation #5 does not directly site primary research, rather an article explaining the primary research.
I have found the primary research article and will replace the source of citation #5 with this article so that there is proper and more credible citation. [1]
I also noticed that the wiki article has some close paraphrasing when comparing the article and the primary research abstract, so I may try to rewrite a couple sentences as well.
Citation #10 does not directly site primary research, rather an article explaining the primary research.
I have found the primary research article and will replace the source of citation #10 with this article so that there is proper and more credible citation. [2]
Actually, found that this article was already cited later in the article, so will use this citation and get rid of the unreliable source
Citation #14 does not directly site primary research, rather an article explaining the primary research.
I have found the primary research article and will replace the source of citation #14 with this article so that there is proper and more credible citation. [3]
Citation #15 links to a personal website of an author selling his articles, not to any type of primary research
I have found the primary research article and will replace the source of citation #14 with this article so that there is proper and more credible citation. [4]
In the second paragraph of the intro section, there is mention of placoderms, but there is no link to their Wikipedia page which could be useful. There is also no explanation of the relationship between placoderms and gnathostomata until later in the intro section as well. I would propose adding a link to the placoderm article in the second paragraph, as well as adding a short explanation of why placoderms are relevant in relation to gnathostomata. Also, links 18-20 direct the viewer to a broken website and I believe the link for 15 is not correct. There are also some incorrect citations, only providing a link to a website rather than the correct citation format.
Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
Yes, everything in the article is relevant to the topic and I did not notice any sort of information that seemed out of place. One thing that sort of distracted me is the organization of the article. There are only two sections, the introduction and classification. The introduction includes a lot of information that could possibly be expanded on in its own section.
Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
The article is neutral sticking to talking about information about gnathostomata rather than opinions, thoughts, etc. about them. There is no bias for or against gnathostomata in any way.
Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
No, the article really doesn't include viewpoints of any kind. For that reason there is no over or under representation of any viewpoint.
Check a few citations.
Are they properly formatted?
There are about 5 citations that are incorrectly formatted just providing the link to an article or research paper rather than expanding out the full citation. There could also be some other smaller errors in citations that I am not fully aware of.
Do the links work?
Links 18-20 direct the viewer to pages that do not exist. On the 15th citation, the link directs the viewer to a page that does not at all correspond with the claim made in the article.
Does the source support the claims in the article?
For all of the citations that are correctly formatted, the sources do support the claim made in the article and there wasn't any misinterpretation or extrapolation that I noticed.
Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
This could be considered a major problem regarding the information on this article. Almost half of the citations direct the viewer to a primary research article, which I consider to be a reliable reference. However, there are about 8 citations/links that direct the viewer to an article written by a third party explaining the results of primary research. These authors/websites run the risk of misinterpretation and extrapolation of the results of the primary research and could also contain some sort of bias as well. To improve the credibility of this article, finding primary research to support these claims and avoiding citing these third party websites should be prioritized. I did not notice any sort of obvious bias among these sources.
Are there any instances of plagiarism on the page?
Incorrect citations or citing a third party website explaining primary research could be considered plagiarism as the researchers are not being correctly credited for their research.
Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
Most of the citations range from the early 2000's to present with only a few being in the 1990s. While this information may not be out of date yet, updating some of these research articles with current research could be beneficial.
Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
The talk page does not have much activity as I thought it would. A majority of the talk section was from 2006 and was about the taxonomy and phylogeny of gnathostomata. The editors were talking through what information needs to be added or changed in this section as well as articles that could be used as citations. There have been some minor changes since then, but I feel like there could be more conversations about how to improve the page as there are a lot of sections that could be expanded on. They did not organize their conversations very well and they can be hard to follow at times.
How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
The article is rated Start-Class so there is a lot that could be improved. It is a part of the WikiProject Animals.
How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?
I feel like the Wikipedia article discusses Gnathostomata in a more wide range including various pieces of information that we might not focus on in class while learning about them. They also tend to go more into detail on certain aspects of gnathostomata compared to what we learn in class explaining a lot about their unique characteristics. I noticed a lot of the same terms being used when mentioning their anatomy and evolutionary history.
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