Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Melon/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 09:26, 25 October 2014 [1].

Melon

Featured list candidates/Melon/archive1

Nominator(s): Waitak (talk) 22:50, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I rewrote this article in 2011. Since then, the article has continued to develop. I feel that, at this point, the article and, in particular, the references are of sufficient merit to consider the article as a featured list. Waitak (talk) 22:50, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose and suggest quick-fail The article has little real content and yet even then some of it is unsourced. There must be much more to say about melons that this. I suggest you try to get it to the level of coverage and prose standard of Lettuce which is a featured article, rather than rely on a patchy bulleted list to get this through FLC. It gives me no pleasure to say that this is nowhere near the standards to be expected of Wikipedia's finest work. Bencherlite ^Talk 23:02, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose—I'll give you a quick source review to help you on your way towards further development of this article. The biggest issue is one of consistency. At the featured level, consistency in formatting is important, and with citations, it stands out quickly when things aren't consistent.

The first consistency issue relates to how author names are rendered.
- Now not every source gives full first names for authors, so you will have occasions where some references only have initials while the rest have full first names. Some authors use their full middle names, while others abbreviate to an initial and others omit any reference to a middle name. These variations are appropriate, and expected. Editors can shorten all author names to first and middle initials to overcome this, or the variation can stand.
- However, our articles should be consistent about whether or not they are using "First (Middle) Last" or "Last, First (Middle)" order. This article employs both, and in the case of the second general reference, it uses both in the same reference.
Articles should be consistent in what punctuation separates authors. It appears this article is using the Citation Style 1 (CS1) family of templates, which normally separates authors with semicolons, unless the last author is preceded by an ampersand (&) using |lastauthoramp=yes.
Edition numbers should be rendered in the same way across multiple footnotes. This article has some that are spelled-out ordinals (second) and one that is a cardinal number (3). Normally these are rendered as ordinal numbers (2rd, 3rd).
- In cases where the edition is not numbered, but a description, like "Easyread Large Edition" in footnote 21, this should be moved from the title parameter in the template to |edition= so that it is not rendered in italics, and it is rendered with "ed.".
Titles are not consistently formatted in terms of capitalization. Wikipedia allows both title case and sentence case. The former is where the first word, the last word, every noun/pronoun/adjective/verb, and every preposition of five or more letters is capitalized. The latter only capitalizes the first word and proper nouns. In both cases, the first work of a subtitle should also be capitalized. Based on MOS:CT, our MOS would seem to prefer title case for the titles of compositions, but this has not been strictly enforced on titles in citations.
In any event, this article should pick one format and stick with it throughout all of the citations.
The character that separates a title from a subtitle is normally given using a colon. Footnote 14 does so, but FN15 uses a hyphen. The first general reference is using a period for this function.
I have the full set of citation error messages enabled. This article is defining an |accessdate= for sources not accessed online, which flags an error message for me. If the source does not have a |url= defined, it doesn't need an access date.
Several featured articles/lists mix shortened (Harvard) citations with long-form citations in the footnotes. This is fine, and I've done it myself several times. However, when citations are shortened because they keep referencing the same source, normally we shorten all of those citations, and list the full citation in list below the footnotes. Some style guides for print sources (Chicago) will run the first citation to a source and shorten after first usage, but we're not a print publication. Our footnotes can change order and repeat, so our practices can be a little different.
Several citations to books omit the place of publication, yet one includes it. Pick one method and stick to it. (I would suggest including the place of publication over omitting it; it almost never hurts to give a reader a little more information to find a source than less.)
A couple of citations link publisher names on first usage, and others do not. It's fine to link publishers or publication names, and this should only be done on the first usage to avoid WP:OVERLINKing. If you're going to link, then link, if not, don't.
Some book citations have ISBNs, and some none. I would suggest finding identification numbers for as many print sources as possible, whether that is an ISBN, OCLC, etc.

Now for more specific issues:

The wikinlinks in footnotes 3, 4 and 23–25 do not link to anything. Also, I don't think it's normal to use "et al." to omit a second author. If we do use that phrase, it is not italicized.
- There is a quick way to fix the linking problem. Copy the full citation into a "Works cited" section, or make a bulleted list under the {{reflist}}. Add |ref=harv to that citation. Then use {{harvnb}} with the author names, publication year
The name of the journal in footnote 10 (Biotechnol. Agron. Soc. Environ) is meaningless to non-specialists. We have guidelines that say it should be spelled out in full. Also, you should add |format=PDF to let readers know it is a PDF file. Not all readers can see the PDF icon. I also think if there are species names present that would be italicized in the prose, they should be italicized in the article title.
I'm not one for using general references. Given that Bencherlite has commented above that more citations are needed, I would take these general references and apply them wherever they apply as a start to get more footnotes in place.

I hope this helps. Imzadi 1979 → 07:50, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the in-depth comments. They're very helpful. I'm not sure what the process is for withdrawing a nomination, but I'd like to do so for now and work on the article more before resubmitting it. The article was started as "List of melons", and subsequently renamed to "Melon". I hadn't been considering it as the definitive article on the topic for that reason, and clearly should have. Thanks again for the comments. I'll get to work. Waitak (talk) 14:10, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There should be a source for "some varieties may be considered vegetables rather than fruits". I don't disagree that some of the plants currently on the list are considered vegetables (e.g. Momordica), but I don't agree that the culinary vegetables fall under any normal definition of "melon". "Melons" are culinary fruits, and Momordica is (per Google hits) just as often referred to as "bitter gourd" as it is "bitter melon". If the melon article is to be a list of every cucurbit with a common name that includes the term "melon", regardless of culinary use, then Praecitrullus ("round melon", "squash melon"), Cucurbita palmata ("coyote melon"), and Cucurbita ficifolia ("seven year melon") could be added. Plantdrew (talk) 16:25, 23 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This should really be a prose article, like scallop or whatever. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:26, 25 October 2014 (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. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 09:26, 25 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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