Wikipedia talk:Good article reassessment/Peak water/1

Individual issues and responses moved from reassessment

We can look at individual issues, but these could have been given some time to correct [... see the reassessment page.]

Reviewer: — I am failing this article for a number of reasons. Extremely representative among them is this statement: Turkmenistan, one of the republics of the Soviet Union ... Oh ... my ... God. That casts the credibility of the entire article into deep doubt, and keeps Wikipedia's critics in business (among many others). It's one thing to read quaint things like that in my parents' vintage 1950s World Book set. It's another to read it here. Was this just cut-and-pasted from source text? I actually hope so, for the editor's sake.

Turkmenistan *is* in fact a former republic of the Soviet Union. I don't see the problem other than that we missed the word "former". This could have been flagged under a factually accurate and verifiable section. It's a simple oversight and not a tragic disaster.

Most editors print out articles and go through them with a red pen to avoid "simple oversight"s like these. To fail to do so before nominating an article is reckless. Daniel Case (talk) 17:24, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Reviewer: Beyond that, despite its 41 footnotes there's still plenty of places where citations are needed ("However, over-exploitation often results in a Hubbert peak nonetheless.", everything in the "water supply" section after footnote 7, "Agriculture, industrialization and urbanization all serve to increase water consumption.". I could go on but I won't). (However, someone thought to cite "Water conservation refers to reducing the use of water". Priorities ...)

OK .. the reviewer could have tagged some places needing more verifiability. There are references to several articles that point out why water, although renewable, behaves like a finite resource. If more references are needed in certain places, they can be added. But this in itself is not tragic.

But that does fail the "well-referenced" criterion. Quantity isn't a substitute for quality. A statement like that first one is something we should see a footnote for right after the period, especially since it contradicts the statement just before it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Daniel Case (talk) 17:24, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Reviewer: There's also uses of words to avoid like "but" and "however" at the beginning of sentences. Inconsistent switching between metric and English units. Peacock terms like "the mighty Indus and Ganges". Unencyclopedic sentences like "Whenever possible gray waste water should be used to irrigate trees or lawns." It almost reads like an essay, particularly when the very first section after the intro tells us about the similarities between peak water and peak oil.

This seems to be a stylistic issue. I am an engineer and use Wikipedia to practice writing. I would have been better to point out those paragraphs that are poorly written.

That's why I quoted them there. Daniel Case (talk) 17:24, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Reviewer: Much of the article consists of indiscriminate, sketchy, sometimes single-sentence grafs broken by tables. For some reason we have short discussions of issues related to a few specific countries, without any indication as to why they were chosen, and hatnote links to longer articles. We have a "See Also" section with way more links than it needs (that whole "peak resources" section should really be a navbox).

This can be fixed. The purpose of a GA review is to point out problems like these.

Yes, so they can be fixed and the article renominated later. Daniel Case (talk) 17:24, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Reviewer: If this were handed to me as a paper in response to an assignment, I would have no reservations about giving it an F. Since it isn't, and this is Wikipedia, I'm tagging it with {{cleanup-rewrite}}. Daniel Case (talk) 08:00, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

OK ... I get an F if it were a paper. But it's Wikipedia. I'm looking for collaboration on the article.Kgrr (talk) 15:47, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

[See the reassessment page for response to this general comment.]

Some examples of article/source similarities

Article:

India has 20 percent of the earth's population, but only four per cent of its water. Water tables are dropping fast in some of India's main agricultural areas. The mighty Indus and Ganges rivers are tapped so heavily that, except in rare wet years, they no longer reach the sea.

Source:

India... has 20 percent of the earth's population, but only four per cent of its water. Water tables are dropping fast in some of India's main agricultural areas... The mighty Indus and Ganges rivers are tapped so heavily that, except in rare wet years, they no longer reach the sea.

Article:

In western China's Qinghai province, through which the Yellow River's main stream flows, more than 2,000 lakes have disappeared over the last 20 years. There were once 4,077 lakes.

In Hebei Province, which surrounds Beijing, the situation is much worse... The water tables have been falling fast throughout Hebei. The region has lost 969 of its 1,052 lakes.

Source:

In western China's Qinhai province, through which the Yellow River's main stream flows, there were once 4,077 lakes. Over the last 20 years, more than 2,000 have disappeared.

The situation is far worse in Hebei Province, which surrounds Beijing. With water tables falling fast throughout this region, Hebei has lost 969 of its 1,052 lakes.

Article:

The Yemeni government has drilled test wells to search for water in the basin that are 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep, depths normally associated with the oil industry, but they have failed to find water. Yemen must soon chose between relocating the city or to build a pipeline to coastal desalination plants.

Source:

In the search for water, the Yemeni government has drilled test wells in the basin that are 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep, depths normally associated with the oil industry, but they have failed to find water. Yemen must soon decide whether to bring water to Sana'a, possibly from coastal desalting plants, or to relocate the capital.

I included the last sentence of the last example above because the article (correctly) paraphrases the source. However, it also introduces a grammatical error ("between relocating" and "whether to build" are both fine, but "between to build" and "whether relocating" aren't) and makes a stronger claim than the source does. Geometry guy 21:35, 12 February 2009 (UTC)