Talk:Geography of North Macedonia/GA1

GA Review

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Reading through the article, it is close to being a GA, but has a few obvious things than need fixing or cleaning up.

• The first thing that I noticed is that the references need tidying up a bit. One gives the date retrieved, and the rest don't. Some are simply the link. They should all be the same style really. See Wikipedia:Citing_sources#How_to_present_citations. Sources are one of the most important things in an article so this should really be cleaned up. Also always make sure that the reference number comes after the punctuation, for example "The boundary with Albania that is long 151 km was marked first in 1926 and then remarked with the Treaty of Paris in 1947[10]." should be corrected.
• The table in topography seems to break the article up a bit unnecessarily. Is there any other way this could be presented?
• The images on the article are good and illustrate the topic well. However, none of the images have alt text. "Alt text is meant for readers who cannot see the image. It summarizes the image's appearance, not its meaning, and typically has little in common with the caption."
• The article links to 6 different disambiguation pages:
  • Jablanica
  • Morava
  • Spring
  • Treaty of Bucharest
  • Treaty of Paris
  • Veles
• Also links to Climate of the Republic of Macedonia (redirects back to this article)
• Ref 21 is a dead link.[1]
• At the end of Geography_of_the_Republic_of_Macedonia#Characteristics_and_advantages, "Macedonia Timeless are a series of few videos, financed by". Is this necessary to the article? And it makes no sense as the ending seems to have gone astray.
• Some of the English is poor, such as "However the rate of unemployment decreased in 2009 on 30%", and although minor, should be fixed if it's going to be GA.
• Some facts are completely unsourced, and should really have a source or external link to prove them.

This is just a short list of things that need to be fixed. For each point raised, there is probably another issue similar in the article. Read through the article thoroughly and check everything is up to good article standard. If you are stuck with any of the English, do not hesitate to ask me!

Reviewer: -- bydand•talk 07:48, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

I fixed the six links to disambiguation pages, removed the link to Climate of the Republic of Macedonia, removed the dead link and the statement it supported, removed the unfinished and unnecessary sentence at the end of the Characteristics and advantages section, added alt text for all of the images, and moved punctuation before the reference numbers where it was needed. I also fixed some of the English. I'm not sure, however, what to do with the table in the topography section. --Local hero ^talk 19:39, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

I made a special template with the biggest mountains in the Republic of Macedonia that is currently used in that article. We can use it hear too. I will put it instead the table so maybe the look of the article will change on better. Greetings Tomica1111 (talk) 23:27, 17 August 2010 (UTC)1111tomica

It looks like all that needs to dealt with from the list above is adding references to unsourced statements and fixing up some of the English. --Local hero ^talk 17:39, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

What's the status on this review? It's been over a month without any comments on either side. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 19:43, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

The reviewer seems to have disappeared so I'll do a second review shortly. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 04:51, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Here are the issues I found in the lead, box, and Climate section:

• The infobox confuses me; "% land †% water" I would think numbers are supposed to be there?
• "The southern border is also only about sixty miles from the Aegean Sea" Okay, but I don't get what this has to do with the climate; that's not explained.
• "Winters are characteristic for their coldness, wetness and the snow falls very often." the tense and subject jumps mid sentence to me; can the snow part be tweaked/reworded?
• "The average annual temperature of air is 11.5 °C, but the plains are experiencing a higher temperature, 15 °C." fix tense (experience instead of are experiencing.
• "The warmest month is July, which has an average of 22.2 °C and the coldest is January, with a temperature of 0.3 °C." use "average temperature" on both parts rather than just one word.
• "till now" ick, remove.
• "This region is experiencing more of warmer winters through vardarec, wind coming up the river from its mouth and brings warm air." huh? I think "vardarec wind" is a term in itself, so the comma is definitely out of place. This sentence in general needs rewording though.
• "Skopje, low-lying city, has an average of 64 rainy days per year, the month of October is the wettest with 61 mm, the driest is August with 28 mm" Skopje should be linked, and there should be an "and" before the driest.

I'll give you a few days to fix these up, most likely. Tomorrow I'll review the rest of the article and decide whether to put this on hold or just flat-out fail it, because the prose and grammar has not been good so far. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 03:23, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Here are more issues I found:

• "The country has some 748 km of boundaries," some isn't really needed, I'm sure there's an exact number to be found.
• "Rather more than half of the boundary" huh?
• "The east border with Bulgaria has length" a length
• "The region is seismically active and has been the site of destructive earthquakes in the past, most recently in 1963 when Skopje was heavily damaged by a major earthquake, killing over 1,000." citation needed.
• "and that Black Sea basin." the Black
• The River Vardar section and the section above are a slew of one or two sentence paragraphs that don't really create a cohesive section. Beyond that, most of it is uncited.
• Lake Ohrid is uncited, as is Lake Prespa.

Just from reading through this much, I can tell that this article still needs a lot of work yet, so I'm failing the GA. After the above is finished, I would suggest taking it to WP:PR before trying GAN again. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 19:20, 10 October 2010 (UTC)