Talk:Marine debris/GA1

GA Failure

This article has the makings of GA or FA on an interesting and overlooked subject, but it's not there yet. There are just too many problems to fix.

Prose problems: It starts with the lede: "Marine debris, also known as marine litter, is human-created waste that has found itself floating in a lake, sea, ocean or waterway." Found itself? It's sentient? Later on, we read that "plastic comprises over 80% of all known debris ..." This is the wrong usage, and an all-too-common Wikipedia error. Near the end "Entire ships have been deliberately sunk in various attempts to do just that." Awkward, and too colloquial to be encyclopedic. And as a whole too many of the paragraphs within the article feel like they were just put together indiscriminately, as various editors added things and just left it at that. There's little narrative flow.

Sourcing: "An example of this would be the 1987 Syringe Tide, whereby medical wastes washed ashore in New Jersey, after having blown from the Fresh Kills Landfill." " Clean-up teams around the world patrol beaches to clean up this environmental threat." Both completely uncited, absolutely unforgivable when we're referring to a specific event as in the former. " It has also been suggested that persistent organic pollutants may be collecting and magnifying on the surface of plastic debris, adsorbing permanently to its surface and making oceanic plastic debris far more deadly that it would be on land." By who? These have been tagged appropriately. Also, that bit about California's proposed legislation is sourced to an advoacy group's page. A little searching should find a more neutral source.

Illustration: The pictures are mostly pertinent but there are some issues. I have lots of issues with the lead image. First, the picture has a huge cutline detailing everything found in that cleanup effort which goes on for several lines. Most of that information is rather trivial (and also see WP:NOT#STAT) and, if it belongs anywhere it belongs in the text. Cutlines should be short and sweet. If you go to three lines you need to have a good reason; there is no reason any cutline should be more than four lines long. Certainly it shouldn't nearly double the height of the image.
And secondly, the very next image would be a far better one to use, as it actually shows the sea and some debris that presumably washed up from it.
This leads to the one image that should go ... the no-dumping one from that lovely seacoast town of Colorado Springs, Colorado. This article is about marine debris. That means we're talking about debris in the oceans, not in streams over a thousand miles from the nearest seacoast.

See Also: This section absolutely fails the Wikipedia standard. Some of the links are already in the article (ghost net, cruise ship pollution); others really aren't directly relevant (space debris, for one). I would bet that judicious editing of this article would result in this section being eliminated entirely.

I have problems with this article as even a B-class. It's a perfect example of why C-class was needed, and I will appopriately downgrade the assessment as well as adding another relevant project. Daniel Case (talk) 19:55, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]