Genetics 1
Looks like my Genetics article was overdue for a "good article" rating. I think I'll work towards getting a featured article rating, the GA reviewer encouraged me to do this...
The double-blossom article was in the Did you know section of the front page for seven hours yesterday morning. It got the top spot, with the pretty double impatiens photo.
Did you know... 3
... that double-flowered mutants (pictured) were first documented over two thousand years ago by Theophrastus and are found in many popular flower varieties — including carnations, camellias, and most roses?
I made this new wikipedia article in the last couple days and have submitted it to the Did you know project for display on the main page.
Just fix it 4
A couple days ago I found the most egregious error I've ever seen on wikipedia, not a graffiti issue, something that was wrong and had been wrong for a long time -- since September 15 2004, on the DNA article. A picture of the chemical structure of DNA. It was in fact a "featured pictures" candidate for September 2004; it's a little funny that all the comments about it failed to see the structure was wrong (a little sad, too).
Below is my marked-up version that points out all the errors (click it to get more resolution).
What I noticed, the immediate problem, was the base-pairing. In this picture the oxygens of guanine and cytosine were paired with each other, instead of with NH2. It looks like the author simply rotated a DNA strand 180 degrees and lined them up, not noticing that this actually fails to orient the bases appropriately. Maybe the problem is inherent in flattening a three-dimensional structure. Maybe it's because the ribose connections of paired nucleotides are not opposite to each other, and this causes a "minor" and "major" groove in the backbones.
Anyway, I used ChemTool and GIMP to make a new picture and replaced all instances of the wrong-structure diagram with my new picture (in the articles DNA, Francis Crick, and GC content).
It took a long time, but I disapprove of people who complain about wikipedia errors without correcting them.