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

The article was not promoted by Ian Rose 08:00, 1 April 2014‎ [1].

Daboia

[edit]
Nominator(s): Dendro†NajaTalk to me! 05:42, 29 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the Russell's viper, a common and highly dangerous snake species responsible for many human fatalities across its geographical range annually. The article is currently a GA level article. It is extremely well-written, focused, comprehensive and has many images. The article is also very stable - no edit wars or vandalism. Dendro†NajaTalk to me! 05:42, 29 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, suggest withdrawal. I'm afraid I think this article is quite a way from ready. Here are a few comments.

  • The lead is short, and doesn't seem to well-summarise the article. The second paragraph is one line long, and I'm left wondering why there're so many references.
  • Your citation style seems inconsistent- sometimes you use in-text publication dates, but you mostly rely on footnotes. Items in the footnotes and bibliography are inconsistently formatted. (Date formatting, brackets, stray full stops, name formatting, locations...)
  • You've got a few bare urls as references, as well as dubious online sources. Ideally, we'd see these references expanded or replaced with better publications.
  • You have a massive further reading section- why not incorporate these sources into the main reference list?
  • You also have a number of external links of dubious value.
  • Are all those pictures adding anything? They don't seem particularly well-chosen/placed.

All of this comes from without really looking closely at the article text, so I'd be inclined to say that this article is not ready for FAC. I suggest you find someone with experience of taking biology articles through FAC and have them take a good look through the article; perhaps a nomination at PR would be helpful, too. Sorry. J Milburn (talk) 21:33, 30 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose: I have had a fairly close look at the text, and unfortunately it's just as problematic. I note the elevation to GA happened in 2007, making it well overdue for peer review if not a total reassessment. Not sure how it was concluded that this article is 'extremely well-written' while including the following among other issues:

  • "Apart from being a member of the big four snakes in India, Daboia is also one of the species responsible for causing the most snakebite incidents and deaths among all venomous snakes on account of many factors, such as their wide distribution and frequent occurrence in highly populated areas." --This awkward run-on sentence is the main body of the lead. No other characteristics of the snake are given. Even the snake's common English names, which are of primary importance (not least in helping the reader recognize they've got the right article), are relegated to an odd little tacked-on sentence under this.
  • The 'Common names' section includes an apparent attempt to collate every name the snake has across its range. This would be serious overkill even if the names weren't given in the languages in question with no English translation -- a major problem for readers of the English Wikipedia, for whom this section is thus rendered largely useless.
  • "Brown (1973) mentions that it can also found [sic] in Vietnam, Laos and on the Indonesian island of Sumatra" --These kinds of typos are the sort of thing that should be caught well prior to submission for FAC. And I'm having a hard time believing that there's not been more authoritative research conducted into the snakes' presence in Vietnam and Laos (let alone Indonesia) in the last forty years.
  • "Adults are reported to be persistently slow and sluggish unless pushed beyond a certain limit, after which they become aggressive." --Surely there's been enough investigation into the snake's behaviour that a detailed, authoritative description can replace this single vague sentence. For starters, the 'limit' needs to be defined a lot more precisely than that. And there's no description of feeding, mating or territorial behaviours, the basic building blocks of any zoological article.
  • "When threatened they... produce a hiss that is supposedly louder than that of any other snake." --Who's doing the supposing? And why are we giving them credence? Has this never been precisely measured?
  • "It seems that sexual maturity is achieved in 2–3 years." --Again, this is unsourced and 'seems' is unacceptably vague in a scientific article concerning a common and well-studied species. To echo JMilburn above, you've got a ton of reference material to work with, and almost none of it appears to have made its way into the article.
  • Suddenly in the 'Venom' section we get into all the well-cited detail that's missing in the rest of the article. Between this and the focus in the lead, I'm getting the distinct impression that this was originally written out of a fascination with how deadly the snake is, and the rest of the article hastily fudged around it.
  • Sorry, but no scientific article should be citing tabloids, let alone one as notorious as The Daily Mail.

I strongly second JMilburn's recommendation: withdraw the article from FA consideration, get it a thorough peer review, and only then think about resubmitting.Shoebox2 talk 23:58, 30 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose. I'm not sure why this uses AE when India uses BE, but more concrete reasons for opposing include
  • A list of names in various languages without any explanation of their relevance to an English language article. This isn't a dictionary.
  • It is not restricted to any particular habitat, Oceans? Himalayan peaks (map suggest it occurs there, although it seems unlikely)?
  • Books don't have page numbers, some refs are bare urls

I don't know how this got through GA, I wouldn't have passed it, sorry Jimfbleak - talk to me? 15:55, 31 March 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.
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