Talk:Geography of North America/Archive 1

What a mess

So I began to copyedit, and continued to find more and more problems until I gave up. Why is this article so bad? There is random capitalization of words throughout (eg, "...all the mainland and related offshore islands lying North of the Isthmus of Panama"). Some passages with problems include:

"Its natural features include the Rocky Mountains, Micheal Jackson, the Appalacian Mountains (the largest mountains on the east), the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi, Missouri, Rio Grande, and St Lawrence Rivers." (seems like a fairly random list, and US-centric)

"The western half of North America tends to have wilder and wetter climate than other areas with equivalent latitude." (wetter? much of western North America is desert!)

Section titled "Geographic Interests"... what does that mean anyway?

"Plant life in the arctic consists mainly of grasses, mosses, and arctic milows. Coniferous trees such as spruce, pine, hemlock, and fir. These are indigenous to the Canadian and Western U.S. mountain ranges as far as San Francisco." (milows? ..lots of plants are indigenous, why pick out conifers? It's not like spruce, pine, hemlock, and fir are unique to North America anyway...)

Section titled "Coastal line" ... is that supposed to be "Coast line" ? Strange that most of the section's text doesn't seem to have anything to do with coasts or lines.

"The Rocky Mountains stretches from north to south. In Contrary to South American cordilleras, lean on, west, elevated plateaus, which helps to develop large-sized rivers; less high and send to the east more expanded ramifications. The mountain systems do not allow indefinite connection with the cordillera system with exceptions, lies in chains parallel to the nearest coasts, are in, North America.[3] They are the Appalachians or Alleghenies." (I can't even understand what this is trying to say)

Then there is a gallery of random images, randomly inserted into the middle of the article.

"In North America, there is about ½ of the Great Plains. The Narrow plains in the Mexican coast correlate to the Patagonian steppes and the savannas of the Mississippi to the pampas of the Parana, Paraguay, and Rio de la Plata; thus in the same manner the Appalachians and the Mountain chains of Brazil are regarded as creating similar interruptions to the community to the plains.[5]." (... huh?)

Why is there suddenly a table of "greatest snowfalls"? Seems like a non-sequitor, and barely related to "Geography of North America".

"Among the MR, is the St. Lawrence, which is at length is 600, 000 square miles and just like the MR, opens up the "heart" of the continent, while other rivers cross the northern plains." (What is MR? How can a river's length be in square miles? And I can think of a few other rivers that don't cross the northern plains, like, oh I don't know, Rio Grande? Columbia?)

"the Mississippi is almost lived 1, 000 miles long."

I can't bear to list all the problems with the "River systems" section. It's painful to read!

Continuing on, there's no improvement. Why is this article so amazingly bad? There are so many great "Geography of --" article on wikipedia... I expected one on a whole continent would have been better than this. What happened? Pfly 08:52, 29 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay?

I do not feel this article is amazingly bad but i do believe some of your comments are true. I should have capatilized certain words and spelled out some words as well. Yes the greatest snowfalls is random but I thought that it would go with the Climate. Thanks for correcting me with Coast line and the images are random but I thought that the article needed some. Some sentences do not make since I agree, but I'll try to fix them up.

Oop, sorry for being harsh.. sometimes I forget actual people are involved here.. my apologies I should have written more constructively and less mean, sorry. Pfly 23:03, 29 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

GA failed

As mentioned by User:Pfly in the thread above, per WP:WIAGA, I failed this article for Good Article status. There are other things that I'd like to add:

There are redlinks images, because - I assumed - that those images were deleted, due to WP or Commons rules for image copyrights violation. Avoid also gallery, as is given in the Surface and climate section. This is a Wikipedia not a Commons article.
Please make a consistent citation style, per WP:CITE.
There are some stubby sub-sections that are still needed to be expanded.

If the above and Pfly's issues are resolved, then this article can be renominated again. Cheers. – Indon (reply) – 15:34, 9 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've done a bit of editing, mostly cleaning up grammar and so forth. But there remains much work to be done. Keithius 02:34, 10 January 2007 (UTC

Harmonization with other geography articles

Articles where corresponding copy should be compared/integrated/fixed:

Geography of Canada
Geography of the United States
Geography of Mexico
Geography of Central America (needs creation...)
all attendant sub-articles to the above, e.g. Geography of Alberta, Geography of Montana

Many descriptive name-links in the current article are USPOV/context, e.g. the use of Great Plains vs Interior Plains, the latter being a non-national term shared by both countries (Great Plains vs Prairies/Cdn Prairies); and in general a basic breakdown of the Physiographic regions of North America should be more visible (the US article has similar problems as far as that goes, and needs major cleanup; haven't really looked at Canada's will do that in a bit). A list of related articles to this one could also include

More after breakfast, maybe.....Skookum1 (talk) 14:44, 25 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Cleanup

I've re-organized a bit and chopped some poorly written and/or too local specific (Mississippi river bit). If I've gone too far or chopped anyone's fav bit - well discuss, I'm all ears :-) Seems there's still more cleaning needed - I'm on pause for awhile. Vsmith (talk) 00:23, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]