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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 User:Moni3 18:02, 24 November 2008 [1].

Malawi

[edit]
Nominator(s): Dana boomer (talk)

I would like to present this article on a poor, landlocked country in southeastern Africa for consideration for FA status. I've been working on this article on and off for the past several months, and I believe it is ready to become a featured article. Africa is one of the areas where WP is lacking in featured content, and I would like to help this change at least a little bit with this article. Thank you for your time and consideration! Dana boomer (talk) 16:28, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support—A very interesting and well written article! Sources look good, and all the websites look like they come from reliable/reputable sources. There is a disambiguation needed for European and Sena. The link checker is having problems connecting with [2], and for lists upenn.edu link as a redirect, and redirects to [3]. And, images check out. Good luck! JonCatalán(Talk) 17:56, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the support! I have disambiguated the two links (as a note, this turned one of them into a red link). The first website that you listed is the official government site for Malawi, and this had a tendency, in my experience, to go up and down fairly randomly. I would theorize that this is possibly due to a lack of internet reliability in the country, but I don't know for sure. I have corrected the redirect on the second link. Dana boomer (talk) 18:14, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - The article needs more information on the languages of Malawi in order to meet the comprehensiveness requirement. In many African country articles this is broken out into a separate "Languages" section. In this article, however, we only have a single sentence. Kaldari (talk) 18:21, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've added some more information on the languages in Malawi. As this article is supposed to be in summary style, with most of the information in daughter articles, I don't want to get too deep into any individual point. Please let me know if what I've added will suffice, and I'd love to hear any other comments you may have. Dana boomer (talk) 19:25, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Nice improvement. Seeing that English is the official language, however, it would be good to mention it somewhere in the article, i.e. how many people speak English, where it is predominantly used (education, business, government, etc.). Kaldari (talk) 18:10, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
See Ghana#Languages for a good example of an African country language section. Kaldari (talk) 20:05, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also, I think it would be more useful to discuss how the various languages are related to each other, rather than just giving statistics for each one. Right now the section reads rather like a table of statistics than a discussion of the various languages and their importance and relationships. Kaldari (talk) 20:11, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Query "Malawi was first populated during the 10th century" this presumably refers to the earliest agricultural communities, I think you'll find that hunter gatherers had lived in the area long long before that., suggest you review your sources and rephrase - 10th century might be earliest pastoralists, farmers, or iron workers but It won't have been the first population. ϢereSpielChequers 19:03, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've changed it to "settled"; does this work? Dana boomer (talk) 19:25, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Dana, I'm not happy with settled as it implies that no-one was there before, if you don't mind I'll suggest a wording in the article. Can you check your sources re the share of tobacco in exports? Currently the article quotes figures of both 53% and 70%, if these are from different years a small rephrase might be a neat way of showing how vulnerable the economy is to changes in the global tobacco price. ϢereSpielChequers 16:24, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure why "settled" implies that no one was there before, as settler means "person who has migrated to an area and established permanent residence there", as opposed to hunter/gatherer types who just moved through. Could you explain further? And, I'll take a look at the tobacco figures. Dana boomer (talk) 16:46, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Update: I've reworded the tobacco section, and pointed out the large jump from year to year, as well as removing some redundancy. Thanks for pointing this out. Dana boomer (talk) 17:08, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
No problem, neatly fixed. ϢereSpielChequers 15:46, 23 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, at least for now. The quality of the sourcing strikes me as rather poor. The article is sourced heavily to the cursory BBC country profile of Malawi, as well as the US state dept profile of Malawi, which are both not terribly scholarly. Also, the ethnologue website is generally regarded relatively poorly. Are there no high-quality books written about Malawi? Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:01, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment on sources: My library has approximately 25 books that mention Malawi in the title alone, so I'm skeptical that the article currently has the best choices for reliable sources. There might be a wealth of knowledge missing! I believe that further research is needed. Here are a few samples that may prove helpful:
  • Pachai, Bridglal. Malawi: the History of the Nation. London: Longman, 1973. ISBN 0582645530.
  • Pike, John G. Malawi: a Political and Economic History. New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968.
  • Rotberg, Robert I. The rise of nationalism in Central Africa; the making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873-1964. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965. ISBN 0674771915.
  • Williams, T. David. Malawi, the Politics of Despair. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978. ISBN 0801411491.

Not to mention the works available (at least in part) via GoogleBooks, NetLibrary, journal databases, etc. María (habla conmigo) 20:33, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I would agree with you, except that all of the books that you quoted are from the 1960s and 70s, meaning that they are 30 or 40 years out of date. They would probably be fine to source for part of the history section and some of the things that wouldn't change (geography, climate, etc), but other than that, most of the stuff in the article deals with more recent things, such as the economy, language/religion distribution, etc that needs to be sourced to current information. There may be, as you say, as "wealth of information missing", but I'm not really sure what that may be. Please keep in mind that this article is supposed to be in summary style, and so while using the books you recommend to give an in-depth history of Malawi's economy, demographics, etc might be tempting, it's really not the point of a summary article, IMO.
I'm glad to hear that you have such a comprehensive library, but I am not so fortunate. I did do a search at my local library, and tapped out their information on Africa, so please don't think that I've neglected that avenue. I'm sure you have a response to this, and I'm glad to hear it :) Dana boomer (talk) 20:48, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This article isn't about Africa, though, it's about Malawi. Africa is a big place, and I for one prefer to see a bibliography that includes works that are specifically dedicated to the subject matter. For example, if Florida consisted of book sources about the United States as a whole, but not Florida and its individual history/culture/etc., I would be similarly concerned. Perhaps I'm alone in thinking this, but a thirty year-old book dedicated to the history of Malawi seems more applicable than two pages from a nearly twenty year-old book about the history of the entirety of Africa. My library is actually very modest in size, so don't count me as lucky. :) But if you have access to an academic library, or even Interlibrary Loan, further research could help a great deal -- you could even perhaps enlist the help of someone who has access to such services. No need to go it alone! The examples I listed came from a quick, cursory search, but there's also a decent bibliography available on everything Malawi from the World Bibliographical Series (Vol. 8; 2nd Ed., Santa Barbara, Calif.: Clio Press, c1995). My point is that although currently verifiable, I am concerned that the article may not represent the best of Wikipedia if it neglects a breadth of available sources. María (habla conmigo) 21:25, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I fortunately have access to a university library. I haven't even gotten through the 2007 and 2006 publications on Malawi and I've already encountered a number of books on politics, government, the justice system, many on the AIDS crisis, several on the Millennium goals, etc. Dana, I would suggest finding the nearest university library to you and going there. If you live in the United States, I would suggest going to a state university library - they are there to help the residents of that state (that is you!) You can ask for help from the reference librarians and they will be more than happy to help you. Awadewit (talk) 06:31, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The problem being that the state library is a good 4 hr drive away :( I've checked out the local university library too, and they don't have anything either. However, I'm going to my local public library today and I will see if they can get any inter library loan books that deal specifically with Malawi. I guess I'm just a little bit confused about the fact that no-one seems to have specific concerns about places that are missing information, or references that are unreliable. You seem to be saying that simply because I've used mainly web sources instead of books means that I'm missing information. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, and if there are specific areas that are missing information, please feel free to point this out. However, over the next few days I'll work on getting more book sources into the article, so I'll let you know what I find. Dana boomer (talk) 12:11, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Update: I've been to my local library and now have several Malawi-specific books coming on ILL. The problem is, they won't be here for 7-10 days. What would everyone suggest - should the FAC be kept open during this wait period and I can keep working on other comments as they are brought up, or should I withdraw the nomination and renom in a couple of weeks? Dana boomer (talk) 15:53, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I would suggest withdrawing this FAC. Doing research takes a lot of time. The problem with the sources, as pointed out above, is that they are not Malawi-specific. Since there are hundreds of books published on Malawi itself, there is no reason to rely on books that are much more general. These general books will not have nearly the specificity of information on Malawi. Since FAs are supposed to be the "best of Wikipedia", their research is supposed to be the best, too. Awadewit (talk) 16:50, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

These should be quick fixes. Awadewit (talk) 06:48, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose Echoing others' statements above. I know this is Africa, but this article does seem a bit short on an entire country. This book, appropriately titled Malawi, looks like a very good source and I think Decalo has written several journal articles on African subjects (and it was published in 1995!). Also, the one reason I know of Malawi (pre-Wikipedia) is when Madonna adopted that boy. I'm not sure if this deserves a mention, just sayin'. ~the editorofthewiki (talk/contribs/editor review)~ 16:20, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've got a bit in on the foundation that Madonna started there (Raising Malawi, it's in the economy section), after the adoption. However, I wasn't sure the media hoopla around the adoption was appropriate to include, as mentioning that one incident in an article about a whole country seemed like giving it undue weight, IMO.
If people could point out exactly what sections they're looking at when they say the article is "short", it would be helpful. I'm not looking for people to go out there and find information, just give me section headers. Do you want more added to geography? Education? Demographics? A section that you think is missing completely? Please let me know. None of these concerns were even mentioned at GA or PR, so I'm a little startled by the flood here. Some general guidance would be nice. Dana boomer (talk) 16:46, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Just expand in general. I think Cameroon should be a good guide. ~the editorofthewiki (talk/contribs/editor review)~ 17:55, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The "Education" section in particular is fairly skimpy; specific works dedicated to solely to education in Malawi may help flesh it out. I'm also confused that although the article says "In Malawi, primary education is not compulsory", Education in Malawi states in the very first sentence: "Primary education in Malawi is compulsory". Which is it? The latter is sourced, so I'm not sure which to trust. I don't think I see anything about tourism (other than a brief mention of selling goods to tourists), although I can understand there being little to say about that. Another thing that may be of concern is that the "Culture" section is extremely brief; only one paragraph is dedicated to the Malawi people's cultural practices. What about their cuisine? Can more be said about their literary and musical legacy? What about holidays, celebrations? How about traditional dress/clothing? The image in the section says that the man is playing a traditional musical instrument, but what is it? Other examples? How has their culture changed over time? I still have so many questions after having read this section, which I don't believe should be the aim of an FA. María (habla conmigo) 19:57, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Withdrawing Nom - I'm not sure how to go about this, but it looked from what I've seen that I can just put a note here and Sandy will take care of it when she does her archiving runs. If this is not true, please let me know what steps I should take and I will go ahead and take them :) Thank you to all of the reviewers for their comments above, and I will spend time over the next few weeks working on making sure the article is comprehensive and referenced by the best sources available. I hope to have this article reappear on the FAC list at some point in the next couple months, much the better for this (apparently somewhat premature) nomination. Dana boomer (talk) 14:47, 23 November 2008 (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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