Template:Did you know nominations/Mackerel

The following discussion 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 Miyagawa (talk) 11:35, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Mackerel

edit

Schooling mackerel

  • ... that mackerel have vertical stripes on their sides which may help them stay in formation when they are schooling (pictured)?

Created/expanded by Epipelagic (talk). Self nom at 21:09, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

  • There are several uncited paragraphs in the article, which need citations per Rule D2. Mikenorton (talk) 23:28, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Time for a re-review? --PFHLai (talk) 11:14, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Holy Mackerel, this article is long (enough), new enough, the hook is cited, it has plenty of inline citations, no apparent image issues, but some of the citations are not in numerical order. I changed one, but there are others. Example "pelicans.[108][20][36]"--Ishtar456 (talk) 21:00, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

  • ready to swim away off this page.--Ishtar456 (talk) 21:39, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
  • This article uses some phrasings that are too close to those of its sources. For example, compare "With properly designed vessels, trolling is also an economical and efficient way of catching mackerel when they swim near the surface. Purpose built trollers are usually equipped with two or four trolling booms raised and lowered by topping lifts, held in position by adjustable stays." with "Using a properly designed vessel, trolling can be an economical and efficient way of catching tunas, mackerel and other pelagic fish swimming close to the surface...Purpose built trollers are usually equipped with two or four trolling booms which are raised and lowered by topping lifts and held in fishing position by adjustable stays." from this source. Nikkimaria (talk) 12:31, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Those two sentences were forked from another Wikipedia article. I've rewritten them, and exhaustively double checked the rest of the article without finding significant issues. There should be no close paraphrasing now. --Epipelagic (talk) 17:31, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
curses, foiled again. Can someone else please take a look now.--Ishtar456 (talk) 01:00, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
With all due respect, Nikkimaria, when an article has been here for nearly a month, as this one has, could it be possible for you to do your spot checks before one of us mere mortals comes along to accept it:-) I really do not know how you do it, I assume you are using some tools. Personally, I am just not good at using those tools, so I check by hand and use my best judgement. And I usually focus mainly on the citations that support the hook. Everyone values the hard work you do, but it is really frustrating to have decisions overruled, especially when, IMO, this could have been checked before I came along and made a fool of myself.--Ishtar456 (talk) 01:41, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
Hey Ishtar, no tools - I do all checks by hand, which means it can be hard for me to just keep up with the approved hooks, never mind going through the whole noms list to do such checks (especially when some don't end up getting posted anyways for other reasons). That's why I don't usually check until stuff is in preps/queues. And you're not a fool for missing stuff - it's a developed skill, and sometimes just luck in terms of which sources you check (I don't check all of them - again, would take forever). Nikkimaria (talk) 01:56, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
Well you have inspired me to do better. I guess I assumed that as a teacher, with an M.Ed and a BA in History, I have acquired those skills somewhere along the line. It does feel foolish to be over ruled like that. But I guess I can see your point about limiting it to accepted hooks. It just seems like the horse already left the barn by that time.--Ishtar456 (talk) 02:12, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
sorry for the off topic discussion. Please someone re-review.--Ishtar456 (talk) 02:12, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
I started a re-review in response to request on my talk page from Epipelagic. Although I have not found copvio, I have found a couple of things in the article that bother me (and need to be fixed):
  • The first passage I picked to check was the next-to-last paragraph of "Distribution and migration". I found that the source supports the last two sentences in the paragraph, which describe an example of the broad principles/generalizations enunciated in the first two sentences. However, the source does not otherwise support the broad statements in those first two sentences. Beware of synthesis, which is a form of original research. -- these statements read like synthesis.
  • The 99-word quotation in the first paragraph of "Fisheries" is excessive. The quotation is a string of factual statements, not the kinds of subjective observations that are most appropriate to quote. Additionally, it represents more than one-quarter of the prose in the cited source. This is too extensive a use of quotations. It appears to me that the entire quotation could be rewritten in the Wikipedia contributor's words -- and not all of this information belongs in this part of the article.
There likely are other issues. I've barely started my review. --Orlady (talk) 04:38, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
  • You did a nice job of replacing that quotation with your own words. There's another excessive quotation needing similar treatment in the "Processing" section of the article.
Regarding the references you added for those statements under "Distribution and migration," the references cited are definitions the term or concept of Fish stock, but they are not in any way specific to mackerel. Reading the article and the sources together, I found myself wondering why this article provided a generic tutorial on the meaning of "fish stock" (which is covered in a linked article), so I revised the section to eliminate the tutorial entirely. (You may want to add the references or other content to fish stock.)
In reviewing those new references, I ran across an instance of close paraphrasing. The specific words are different, but I find that the first bullet under "Distribution and migration" closely follows the structure and content of a paragraph on page 11 of the PDF file (page 4 according to the table of contents) for this source, which is not one of the three sources cited in that particular bullet.
As noted earlier, I have not reviewed the article thoroughly, and I have a hunch that there are additional issues to be addressed. --Orlady (talk) 14:54, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Remaining quotes reworded and note on your talk page concerning "close paraphrasing" --Epipelagic (talk) 06:16, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
  • We're getting there! I've spent more time with the article, and have what I hope will be my one last concern: There is still some content that seems to be unsupported by footnotes. The lead section is not footnoted, which is appropriate when the lead summarizes content elsewhere in the article, but that's not the case here. For example, the lead says "Mackerel are intensively harvested by humans, who prize their flesh which is high in omega-3 oils," but the article doesn't say anything about the flesh being prized, and the omega-3 content wasn't in the article body (much less supported by a citation) until I added it and cited a new source. There are some other statements in the lead that are neither sourced nor supported by the article body, such as (but not necessarily limited to) "some ... enter bays and can be caught near bridges and piers" and "sport fisherman value their fighting abilities." The lead also contains a number of generalizations about mackerel (for example, that "mackerel ... migrate long distances in schools"), that are related to sourced statements in the article body about specific species of mackerel, but are not fully supported as generalizations. Additionally, there are two passages in the article body that aren't supported by footnotes:
  • The discussion of mackerel tabby cats, mackerel sky, etc., to the left of the Van Gogh painting.
  • The paragraph that states "The remaining catch of true mackerel is divided equally between the Atlantic mackerel and all other true mackerel. Just two species account for about 75% of the total catch of true mackerel." (My guess is that this is supposed to be sourced to the same source that is cited under the graph of "Global capture of mackerel in tonnes reported by the FAO 1950–2009", but if that's the case, the text needs to include a footnote.) --Orlady (talk) 19:27, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Yes, you've earned yourself a tickmark! I added the word "may" to the hook, however, as the source indicates that the function of the stripes is a hypothesis, not a fact. --Orlady (talk) 04:00, 8 April 2012 (UTC)