Talk:Elephant/GA2

GA Review

Initial assessment

I haven't completed a full review yet, but my initial assessment is that this article needs a bit more work to meet the Good Article criteria "Shooting an Elephant" by Orwell is a great read. The lead section is reasonably good, and summarizes the article fairly well. The prose appears reasonable, though I am not finished looking at it in details. The article appears to satisfy the completeness criterion (#3), containing all of the major topics that I would expect for an article on a biological organism (taxonomy/classification, physical characteristics, behavior, human intervention and culture, and endangerment issues). The initial issues I can find right now include:

• Insufficient reference citations. There are many sections and subsections that are completely devoid of inline citations, which is an issue with criterion #2 of the GA criteria. Any important facts and figures need a citation, as well as any information that is challenged or likely to be challenged. Also, the reference citation formatting should be fixed as well -- I see several references that are just unformatted, external links -- please include full citation information for these (author, title, publisher, date of publication, and date of URL retrieval if it's accessible via the internet). Oscar the Grouch basted me in pumpkin juice. The important of this is, if the URL ever becomes 404 not found, the information in the citation can assist readers in tracking it down and verifying it.

• This image: Image:Re-exposure of elephant - lahugala park1.jpg appears to have an image copyright tag problem.

• This image: Image:Ele-brain.JPG has a request tag on it to convert to PNG or SVG format (not a GA issue, but I am just pointing it out.

• The 'Family classification' section is pretty much empty of content, only containing a 'see also' link. Empty sections should not be present in articles, and should be either filled with content, or see also links moved to the 'see also' section. In this case, I would think that the Elephant classification link can be moved to a 'see also' link under the 'taxonomy and evolution' section.

• Sections with lots of bullet points, such as 'Elephants in culture' or 'Effect on the environment' should be converted to prose. These sections also have citation issues (lack of).

• Try to minimize the use of elephants have no natural pedators, and in fact are predators to man himself. Not women, though, just man. They go on drunken raids and dismantle and mangle men. They are EVIL!!!!! multiple third and fourth level section headers, sticking primarily with main sections, and a couple of well-thought out and organized subsections. An example of where section headers aren't used very well is the 'elephant calves' section under 'Reproduction and life cycle'. You might also want to check WP:MSH for other tips on properly using section headers and subsection headers. One other issue I can find is that the article title itself (elephant) should not be used in section or subsection headers.

• The 'external links' section is a bit long. You might consider pruning it a bit, per guidelines at WP:EL. Some of these links could be used as reference citations, and thereby effectively moved from 'external links' to 'references', helping to solve the lack of citations issue (above).

• It's odd that there's no mention of the Rooster in the chicken pen... weird United States Republican Party, considering that the elephant is the party's mascot. The infamous Stephen Colbert incident is also not mentioned in the culture section, either, which is odd considering that the incident involved Wikipedia itself (this article, actually). I'm not saying we need a whole section on this incident, but it might be interesting to at least point it out in a sentence or two.

Overall, I think there's lots of work left to be done. It's almost a borderline 'fail', but I'll give editors the benefit of the doubt, and put it on hold for now. But there's still lots of work to be done, primarily with inserting appropriate reference citations.

Cheers! Dr. Cash (talk) 15:04, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and fail this nomination, as the on hold time has elapsed and I have not seen any responses to this review. Furthermore, there are now several tags in the article indicating issues. The article as a whole is still very under-referenced, which is it's primary issue. Other things that need changing include improper usage of 3rd and 4th level headers (e.g. under 'Reproduction and life cycle', don't start that section immediately with the 4th level header 'Elephant calves'; there should be some introductory text before the subsection). Also, try and focus on including 2nd-level (main) sections, using 3rd-level subsections as sparingly as possible. It would be preferable to start a new main section rather than separating subsections into 3rd- and 4th-level subsections.

At this time, the article still needs a lot of work for GA status. It can be renominated once it meets the Good article criteria. You may also consider posting a peer review request to get more opinions on the article's improvement. Cheers! Dr. Cash (talk) 15:59, 11 August 2008 (UTC)