Talk:Common eland/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Stemonitis (talk · contribs · count) 17:37, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

There is a lot of good material here, but I'm afraid there are too many problems for this to pass as a Good Article at the moment. Since it will take quite a lot of effort to fix, I'm failing the article straight away, but I hope you will not be disheartened and will renominate it at some point in the future once the issues have been addressed. To help in that effort, here are some things that should be improved:

• A small thing to begin with. The article covers a (South) African topic, and should be written in the appropriate dialect of English, which is probably South African English (≈ BrE). Instead of writing "grayer color" for instance, it should be "greyer colour". Instead of "moose", use "elk" (as ref. 12 does).

• Disambiguate dominance, juveniles, Nyika, Omo, plains and territory.

• The taxonomy section needs more detail. It doesn't mention Peter Simon Pallas, and it doesn't name the subspecies, let alone describe their distributions or phenotypic differences.

• Link the national parks directly – most of them have articles (Kruger National Park, Kagera National Park, etc.).

• A bigger problem is with the sourcing. Quite a lot of the article is currently unsourced. Quite a lot of the sources that are used are not particularly reliable. Is this (refs. 2 and 3) really the best source for the Latin name? It certainly doesn't say anything about the synonymy. They are all formatted rather oddly, which makes it difficult to see which are authoritative and which are not. Ref. 12, for instance, is a very good source, and should be used much more. If the items in the Bibliography are sources, they should be cited inline.

• Finally, there are problems of plagiarism or close paraphrasing, which is unacceptable. This sentence, for instance, is reproduced verbatim from reference 14, including the badly-formatted units: "Like its distant gazelle and oryx relatives, the eland can conserve water by raising its body temperature as much as 7° Celsius (13.5° Fahrenheit) on hot days." I only checked that citation in particular because that claim seemed so unlikely. I then saw that a few other parts of that source had been copied or altered very little.

Given all that, I had no choice but to fail the article. Sorry. --Stemonitis (talk) 17:37, 28 September 2011 (UTC)