[I HAVE NOW EDITED THE PL ARTICLE TO INCLUDE SOME OF THE MISSING INFORMATION]

Reading the Wikipedia article on Peter Ladefoged, I notice that the role he played in the IPA doesn’t get proper recognition. The relevant bit says “Ladefoged was also a member of the International Phonetic Association for a long time, and was involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet. He was also editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.”
 
I think the article ought to record how long PL was a member of the IPA – I imagine his membership must have been very long. I think the bit about his being "involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet" ought to make a mention of the importance of his contribution to the 1989 Kiel Conference - in fact, the Wikipedia article on the Kiel Conference itself makes no mention of him beyond listing various related publications of his. The article should also record that he was President of the IPA – I believe that was from 1986 to 1991. And I must say I have no recollection of him ever having been editor of JIPA.
 
I’d be glad if anyone could give me the relevant facts. I’ll be happy to make the necessary corrections.

I normally write here to criticize things that I find wrong with Wikipedia's coverage of phonetics and phoneticians, so it's a pleasure to make a note for once of a really good article that appeared recently. This is on Lilias Armstrong, a UCL phonetician of great accomplishment who is not now well known. I learned a lot from reading it (as I did from studying her Phonetics of French​).

​Vowels
 
I have recently had a rather bizarre email correspondence with someone about his theory of vowels and consonants, from which belief I have been unable to shake him. The theory is that “vowels start with a fully closed, blocked glottis with the vocal folds pressed together. Consonants start with a non-closed glottis”. This, according to my correspondent, is what distinguishes the two classes of speech sound.
​
It is, of course, notoriously difficult to produce a watertight definition of vowel and consonant. If we leave aside the phonological definitions that have been advanced (that’s a different story), we are looking at the physical characteristics of the two sound classes. In Wikipedia’s article on Vowel, the lead paragraph gets off on the wrong foot: … a vowel is a sound pronounced with an open vocal tract, so that the tongue does not touch the lips, teeth, or roof of the mouth, such as the English "ah" /ɑː/ or "oh" /oʊ/.  Most phonetics textbooks mention the fact that the tongue makes contact with the upper molar teeth in non-open vowels. Additionally, palatography has shown that the tongue makes contact with the outer edges of the palate in the case of front close and front close-mid vowels. There are clear illustrations of this in Daniel Jones’ Outline of English Phonetics (see Fig 37, p. 65 for /i:/), and he also gives palatograms for “short I” and /e/. Interestingly, he says that his English /u:/ does not produce a palatogram – I think that’s true for me too, but my Cardinal  7 and 8 certainly do have tongue-palate contact at the back of the palate.

​Searching for other articles in Wikipedia that might discuss the definition of vowel, I looked at the vowel section of Articulatory Phonetics. The entire section reads as follows:
Vowels
·         Nasal vowel / Oral vowel
·         Previous Vowel / Later Vowel
·         Rounded vowel / Unrounded vowel
·         Open vowel / Close vowel
 
It seems a rather cut-price approach simply to list a few points with links to other articles. And goodness knows what the relevance of “Previous vowel/Later vowel” is. Some work is definitely needed here.