Talk:Sustainability/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Sasata (talk) 04:23, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Greetings, I've signed up for this review. I think it's fantastic this is at GAN, it's a subject I'm very interested in. I will read through carefully and make minor copyedits as I go along, and bring other stuff up for discussion here. The review will probably take me up to a week, as I have to balance my wikitime among several projects :) Sasata (talk) 04:23, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi Sasata. Glad that you are able to do the review. Feel free to discuss things as you go along, as we have a number of editors who will be watching this page, and who should be able to help :) Johnfos (talk) 04:51, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for taking up the running with this Sasata - haven't we met somewhere before? J, I like what you have done and am not requesting change. I like the way you have saved the culled information. The following thoughts are to possibly tease out issues and better presentation of ideas only.

• The headings ‘environment’, ‘society’ and ‘economics’ reflect the “three pillars” of sustainability. Would it help either the understanding of the reader or editor presentation of these topics if they all had identical subheadings? So, since we have the subheadings “environmental management” and “management of human consumption” under Environmental dimension, why not “economic management” with “management of human consumption” under Economic dimension (or, vice-versa, have different subheadings under Environmental dimension?

• Similarly we have a Main sub-article “Sustainability and environmental management”, for consistency should we also have “Sustainability and economic/social management” sub-articles?

• We can worry about it later but the “Sustainability and environmental management” sub-article is currently rather illogically presented – and clearly a “dumping ground” for extraneous info – the headings don’t relate and the content is not intuitive. Most of it is actually in the current sustainability article so what is its purpose?

• We have removed the “Extinctions” section – but wouldn’t some argue that sustainability and irreversible loss of biodiversity are intimately connected. Do they have a point and should extinction at least get a mention?

• Various sources quote biological invasions as the third greatest impact on biodiversity after climate change and land clearing. Is this relevant to sustainability and if so perhaps some mention could be made of it in the article as the "Biological invasions" section has now been removed?

Granitethighs 11:17, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Sustainability is a huge topic and not everything about it can be included in a single WP article. So some material appears in sub-articles, and recently the sub-article Sustainability and environmental management was created. This was in response to a tag at the top of this article suggesting that the article was "too long" and that WP:Summary style should be used. As this main article expands other sub-articles may be spun off, but for now it is within WP length requirements, and so there is no need for more sub-articles at this stage.

When an article is spun off, and a summary left here, there is inevitably some loss of detailed information in the main article. And the loss of information relating to Extinctions and Biological invasions has been questioned. So I have added links to Extinction and Introduced species in the See also section. This gives these topics a mention in the main article but still helps to keep the "Environmental dimension" section manageable.

As for the "Economic dimension" and "Social dimension" sections they are not too long and are fine as they are. I don't see any advantage in making the sub-headings there follow those used in the "Environmental dimension" section. Johnfos (talk) 20:40, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

That's fine. The only remaining query is why most of the sub-article Sustainability and environmental management is the same as the section in the main article? Granitethighs 11:10, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

The summary in the main Sustainability article (reproduced at User:Johnfos/Drafts) is 8,827 bytes long with a total of 16 references, whereas the Sustainability and environmental management sub-article is 20,809 bytes long with 36 references. So the sub-article is a lot (12k) longer than the summary section in the main article, which is the way it should be. And as the new sub-article expands that difference would get greater. Johnfos (talk) 16:14, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

I've read through the article and made a number of minor copyedits, feel free to revert anything you don't agree with. I thought the article was very well done—engaging prose, good use of summary style, amply cited. Here's a few thoughts I had: Sasata (talk) 16:14, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• why include a year in the captions to the images in the definition section? It's not vital information to understand the concepts presented, and readers can check the citation if they want to know when it was published.

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 01:59, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• in a few cases a citation was in the middle of a sentence when I thought it would do equally well at the end. For example,

• "But sustainability is also a call to action, a task in progress or “journey”[20] and therefore a political process, so some definitions set out common goals and values." here the placement of the cite indicates (to me) that emphasis is placed on showing the source of the quote word "journey". So is the remainder of the sentence OR, or is the idea also from the same source? If it is, then the cite should be placed at the end.

Fixed Granitethighs 21:43, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• "...because the number of children under age 15 in developing countries will decrease." How do we know for sure? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "...is predicted to decrease." ?

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 01:59, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• "Long-term estimates of global population suggest a peak at around 2070 of nine to ten billion people, and then a slow decrease to 8.4 billion by 2100." This is interesting, is there any explanation of why this (predicted) decrease will happen?

Readers can look up the cited article - the explanation would probably take up quite a lot of space and there are other large articles on WP about population - and the article does give links to these.Granitethighs 21:49, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• In the "Environmental dimension" section, it should be possible to discuss the two major ways of reducing human impact without having to indent paragraphs and dividing into a and b

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 18:21, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• "At the local human scale, major sustainability benefits accrue from the pursuit of green cities and sustainable parks and gardens." benefits accrue from just pursuing them? I would have thought benefits would accrue from implementing them.

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 18:21, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• "The ideas of embodied resource use (the total resources needed to produce a product or service), resource intensity (the resources needed for each dollar spent on a good or service), and resource productivity (the amount of good or service produced for a given input of resource) are important tools for understanding the impacts of consumption with simple key resource categories indicating human needs being food, energy, materials and water." This long sentence seems a bit awkward to me.

Fixed Johnfos (talk) 18:56, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• "... this percentage is likely to increase if climate change worsens ..." How are we defining "worsens"?

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 18:56, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

• "Humans currently use 40–50% of the globally available freshwater" when is currently? Better to use "According to a 1998 estimate" or something similar that gives a date.

Fixed Granitethighs 21:56, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• "The World Health Organization has published a Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health which was endorsed" missing something like "... has published (a set of recommendations titled/a report) ..."

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 21:06, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• "water-self-sufficient" should reword to avoid the consecutive hyphens

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 04:31, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• "The average human uses 45–85 tonnes of materials each year." Could this be clarified? What exactly does "use" imply here?

Removed this confusing statement. Johnfos (talk) 21:06, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• "In the second half of the 20th century world population doubled, food production tripled, energy use quadrupled, and overall economic activity quintupled." Compared to what? The first half of the century?

Have removed this confusing sentence which added little. Johnfos (talk) 09:25, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

• "etc." should be used sparingly, and removed if possible. For example, in the sentence:

• "One approach to this dilemma has been the attempt to "internalise" these "externalities" by using market strategies like ecotaxes and incentives, tradeable permits for carbon, water and nitrogen use etc., and the encouragement of payment for ecosystem services."

Here the use of the word "like" before giving the list implies that it's only a reprentative sampling, and the etc. isn't really required. There's some other instances in the article that might be tweaked out. Also, is water and nitrogen use a "market strategy"?

Removed "water and nitrogen use etc." so sentence makes more sense. Johnfos (talk) 08:55, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

• "Community currencies such as LETS... " should spell out the acronym (at least on first usage)

Fixed. Johnfos (talk) 04:31, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

• there are a few citations to books that don't have the page numbers
• citation formatting not completely consistent: most use templates, but some don't; listing of authors varies sometimes (e.g. compare Hawken, P, Lovins, A.B. & L.H. versus Devall, W. and G. Sessions); et al. should be in italics. It's not a huge deal for GA, but since we're here, we might as well clean them up a bit, no?

Have changed et al. to et al. Johnfos (talk) 20:51, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Many thanks for reviewing and for your help, Sasata. I hope enough improvements have been made to bring the article up to GA standard, but agree that more work on the citations would be needed if the article was to proceed to FA. Johnfos (talk) 20:51, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

We're pretty close... there's a few dabs that need to be fixed up, listed here. Sasata (talk) 15:51, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I've fixed the dabs - except for the "sustainability governance" thingy - not sure how to do this. At some time (too busy now) I will go systematically through all the references for consistency.Granitethighs 22:15, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• One more thing, the lead needs a bit of work, it's not really functioning as a summary of the article now as the MOS suggests. For an article this size, I'd expect it to be a full three or four paragraphs. Also, there shouldn't be quotes in the lead, especially those not in the article body. Should Wikipedia be giving such a prominent spotlight to a Californian environmentalist, in an important article that's viewed several thousand times daily? (no offence to Paul Hawken, btw, I just think the quote should be moved, not removed) Sasata (talk) 04:59, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Lead now provides a better summary of the article. Johnfos (talk) 06:16, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Alright, I think my job here is done. Thanks Johnfos and Granitethighs for your improvements to this article. Sasata (talk) 14:56, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Results of review

GA review (see here for criteria)

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The article sustainability passes this review, and has been promoted to good article status. The article is found by the reviewing editor to be deserving of good article status based on the following criteria:

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

   Prose is well-written, uses summary style; article complies with MOS. Reference formatting consistency sufficient for GA.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   Several references were checked, nothing was amiss.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   All images are PD or are appropriately licensed.

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail: Pass