Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of national parks of Madagascar/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was archived by Crisco 1492 15:11, 14 July 2015 [1].

List of national parks of Madagascar edit

Featured list candidates/List of national parks of Madagascar/archive1

Nominator(s): Lemurbaby (talk) 14:22, 4 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured list because I believe it is comprehensive, accurate, well-sourced and meets the FL standard. Having a high quality list of the national parks of Mada, a very low income country with strong ecotourism potential, might also help promote tourism to this beautiful country among the globetrotting Anglophones of the world. Thanks for taking the time to look this over and share your constructive comments. Lemurbaby (talk) 14:22, 4 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments Very cool list but it does need some work. I think the first step would be to write a short paragraph describing what each type of reserve means. For example, there is a category "Strict Nature Reserves" but no definition as to what a "Strict Nature Reserve" is. Also acres is an american unit, and Madagascar officially uses km^2, so that should be first. Also a map is a vital component of this page, but for some reason has a category for "marine reserve" but there are no marine reserves. There are also categories that are not national parks, making it a bit confusing. I hope these comments point the way for some improvements! Mattximus (talk) 21:36, 4 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comments, Mattximus. I'd like to do what's needed to improve this and get it through the FL process. Regarding the measurements, I'm American and the article is written in American English, wouldn't that mean the units should be in acres first? (If there is official guidance on this, please point me to it because I'm writing all the Madagascar culture and history articles and measurement units are common in many of them, so this would be important). So far I've had quite a few pass FA and GA with the US measurements first. Regarding the map, I don't know where it came from/who created it, but there are marine reserves in Madagascar, although on this list the naming of them is not consistent because it depends on the classification of the reserve. So some are national marine parks, some are protected marine and coastal areas, etc. I organized these according to the way they're classified on various websites (official and unofficial), and the most authoritiative website is the Ministry of Environment, but even that one is not fully up to date because some of the most current info in the article was reported in a government circulaire (official announcement of new law) from this past April. I can shift things around a little so the naming looks more consistent for these things but they're currently named and classified here based on the source material so I'm a little reluctant to change what seems to be the official naming in favor of arbitrary consistency. I have not yet found a description of what each type of reserve means. I agree that would be very useful. Let me look a little harder through the documents on the Ministry website - maybe there is something I missed. I agree, too, that it's confusing to call this a list of National Parks when there are other types of parks here, but it's a precedent that exists. The FA-level List of National Parks of Canada also has multiple classifications of parks on that list, and I'm following that precedent because it's the highest quality example I've found of a list of national parks. Would it be better if I shift the National Park list to the top of the page and move the strict nature reserves down below that so the other types of parks are all together after the national ones? Thanks again for your feedback. - Lemurbaby (talk) 01:02, 11 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I like this article so I'll try to list my comments one by one to make changes easier. (PS yes keep the official classification naming system, no need to change those unless they are in French, then a translation is in order)

Yes, as SI is used in Madagascar, as per WP:UNITS, we should use metric units primarily. Only non-scientific articles about uniquely American things should use the Imperial system.
I agree that we need a definition for each subheading. I'm not sure this can pass if we list "Strict Nature Reserves" but don't define what a Strict Nature Reserves is.
I think each item of the "All other Protected Areas" needs to be given a class, for example, are they marine reserves? After reading through this list, it's not really a list of national parks, but a list of all protected areas of Madagascar.

So perhaps a title change is in order precedent or not?
What do you think of having one large list, but having a new column called "classification"? This might fix the stand out "all other protected areas" table.

The map does need some work, as it only tangentially relates to the topic (contains much more information than found in the article), and is written half in French and half in English. I wonder if someone here in the wiki community can help create a map for you given this information, keeping only categories that are found in the item list itself. Mattximus (talk) 21:10, 11 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose:

"This list of national parks of Madagascar includes all officially recognized" should really be reworded. The "This is a list of..." style formatting was deprecated long ago in high-quality works. Try: "The national parks of Madagascar include all officially recognized..." for a more naturally worded opening sentence.
I'll restate that the acre measurements should appear second, not first.
At the same time, you should double check each conversion to ensure you're not implying false precision. I'm dubious of the precision involved because such an exacting value of "4,200,791 acres" is given in the text as an approximation, a value which just so happens to convert to "17,000.00 km²". That's too perfect of a conversion to have a such a round number. to two decimal places This is a big red flag for me. More likely, to me, it should be "approximately 17,000 square kilometres (4,200,000 acres)", or better yet given the sizes involved, "approximately 17,000 square kilometres (6,600 sq mi)". (The acre as a unit lends itself better to smaller values that would be expressed in hectares, not such large values in square kilometers that match up better to square miles.)
The headings should be updated. I don't see "Protected Areas" used as part of a proper noun anywhere in the body text of the article, so "System of Protected Areas" should be "System of protected areas", "Protected Areas" should be "Protected areas", and "All other Protected Areas" should be "All other protected areas" per MOS:HEAD.
"initiated a twelve year process" → "initiated a twelve-year process" or "initiated a 12-year process", depending on which rule for spelled-numbers (under 10, or under 20) you're going to follow. Either way, "twelve-year" is a compound adjective modifying the word "process", so it needs to be hyphenated.
Personally, I'd remove the photos from each of the tables and place them in a gallery under each table. As it is, no photos have captions. As a reader, I'm curious what the cute animal is in the photo for Andasibe-Mantadia National Park. Shift the photos to a gallery and give each a caption. You'll also free up space in each table that can be used to widen the columns.

I agree with most of your comments, but I have to disagree with this one. I'm not a fan of galleries collected at bottoms of lists, it really makes it hard to link the picture to the specific row of the table and looks rather messy. I much prefer the images placed in the row themselves just like this, but of course they need alt-captions at the very least. Mattximus (talk) 12:44, 18 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

As I've noted on other nominations, leaving the two measurement values in the same cell is very much less than ideal, as you've done with the areas here. Using |disp=table in {{convert}} along with the appropriate change to the header row will do two things. First, it will split the column into two, one for each measurement system. Second, it will right-align the numbers so that they line up appropriately. You can see the results in the Strict Nature Reserves (Réserves Naturelles Intégrales) table of this version of the page.

This is by no means a requirement– both are currently accepted at FLC. It's a matter of personal preference. Seattle (talk) 03:10, 18 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The "Recreation Visitors" heading should also be put in sentence case like the headings that need to be fixed, so "Recreation visitors".
The dates, locations and areas all have citations through the footnotes in the heading, which is fine. The descriptions do not have any citations, and for that much text in total, some citations need to be provided.
There are citations with dead links. If they've recently gone dead, they may not be in archives yet because there can be a delay between the time a page is archived and the time it's available.
There's an inconsistency in spelling out or abbreviating publisher names. In note 3, UNESCO is abbreviated, but in the next note, it's spelled out with the abbreviation given in parentheses. I'm used to such names always being spelled out in citations without an abbreviation, although if you were going to spell it out once with the abbreviation, it really should be in the first footnote that references UNESCO, and not the second. It should also not be linked on the third usage, just the first.
It would be nice if the French-language sources could have |trans-title= entries provided with the English-language translations of the titles. Nice, but not required, but it would help readers. Notes 14 and 16 don't note that the sources are in French, yet the titles obviously are.
Note 10: "Sobika.com", note 13: "Sobika", yet the domain name for the site is Sobika.mg. If "Sobika" is the name of a publication, then it should be in |work= (or one of its aliases) in the citation template so that the name is in italics.
Note 17: "La Tribune de Diego" looks like the name of a publication, so it should be in |work= to appear in italics, even if it's in a foreign language. We'd still italicize the newspaper name, La Monde.

Most of these issues are easy fixes, but four of them concern me enough to actually oppose promotion. The appearance of false precision and the lack of citations for the descriptions in the table are big issues. The other two are more minor, but they're still structural issues that are bigger deals compared to some corrections. The absence of captions for photos that would be better outside the table is important because otherwise those photos are just large decorative blocks of color taking up space in the tables.The layout of the area columns in the table when the templates already give us a very simple solution to make the tables' values very easily parseable by our readers is concerning as well. Imzadi 1979 → 10:36, 17 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Lemurbaby: Are you planning to return to this nomination? This oppose has been sitting here unaddressed for 3 weeks; if you aren't going to respond I'll need to fail the nomination fairly soon so that it's not clogging up the FLC process. --Pres N 14:27, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Closing note: This candidate has been archived, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FLC/ar, and leave the {{featured list candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Nomination has gone stagnant. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 15:07, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.