Talk:Richard Grenfell Thomas

A fact from Richard Grenfell Thomas appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 16 May 2020 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Richard Grenfell Thomas and Isabel Bear scientifically described the smell of rain, for which Thomas coined the term "petrichor"?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2020/May. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Richard Grenfell Thomas.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 18:07, 10 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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Article history

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... that Isabel Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas published the first scientific description of the smell of rain, for which Thomas coined the term "petrichor"? Source: "Nature of Argillaceous Odour might be a mouthful, but this was the name of the paper published in the Nature journal of March 7, 1964, by CSIRO scientists Isabel (Joy) Bear and Richard Thomas, that first described petrichor." [1], "Thomas gave the name 'petrichor' to this odour" [2])

Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Giovanni Antonio Grassi

Moved to mainspace by Ivar the Boneful (talk). Self-nominated at 06:01, 9 May 2020 (UTC).[reply]

Hi Ivar the Boneful, that this was the first description of the smell of rain is mentioned in the lead but not in the main body and so is not cited. The rest looks ok: article moved to mainspace 9 May; article is of good length and well written; inline citations to reliable sources are used, though I note the National Museum link is dead; I didn't notice any copyright violations from the sources and the quotations are correctly attributed; a QPQ has been done - Dumelow (talk) 08:16, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks User:Dumelow, this is the speediest review I've ever had! On reflection I think I'd prefer to leave out the "first" element from the blurb:

ALT1: ... that Isabel Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas scientifically described the smell of rain, for which Thomas coined the term "petrichor"?

The sourcing for it being a "first" is there (and not just in the link given above), but I'm not sure it's of the highest quality. On reading the petrichor article, I see someone has found some earlier examples of the smell of rain being examined in scientific literature. I guess it comes down to what you count as "scientific description", but I don't want that to be an issue or seen as contradictory by readers clicking through to that article. In any case it's not essential to the blurb. I've fixed the dead link. Ivar the Boneful (talk) 15:32, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Ivar the Boneful, looks good now. I've struck the original hook. I found it a really interesting article, thanks for sharing it - Dumelow (talk) 15:46, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]