Talk:Kendari/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 06:00, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

OK. This has been waiting a long time ... not as long as some of my recent reviews, but over five months.

I will, as usual, print it out, go through it with a red pen, and make some copy edits since I don't believe any article should fail for copy problems that are easily fixable. This should take a few days or so. After that, I will be be back with a fuller critique and any issues that may need to be addressed.

Happy editing until then! Daniel Case (talk) 06:00, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Review

OK ... I'm done with my copy edit now.

Spoiler: I am putting the article on hold.

I don't use those rubrics to decide whether to pass articles. I give longer critiques.

The first step is to talk about what I liked about the article, how it succeeds as an article.

In this case, I found it comprehensive in scope. It does not leave any aspect of a city on the other side of the world from me that I had never heard of before undertaking this review untouched. I know at least a little about every aspect of Kendari that I would want to know about, and a lot more than I did before.

It is also generally well-written, given that many of the contributors appear not to be native English speakers. Perhaps that is due to the copy edit several months ago. In any event, it was nice to finish my hard-copy edit and see very few red marks, and mostly minor ones at that. That is not always my experience doing this.

OK, now to the issues that need to be addressed. My copy edit wound up addressing most of a major one, but unfortunately I still have some gears to grind. In keeping with my other GA reviews, this part usually takes the form of a bulleted punch list.

• The intro. When the article was expanded almost a year ago (and subsequently), the intro was not—again another rather common shortcoming in GA nominees. It's still largely what it was here, last August. The added material is not reflected in this rather perfunctory summary of the city's geography and economy. There is, for instance, nothing summarizing the city's history despite the addition of considerable material on that (but more on this later ... oh, a lot more).

  I am happy to do this if you would like; I have lots of experience in that area.

• • Unfortunately the only mention of the city's history in the intro contradicts what's in the body. It says "The city was historically the center of the territory of the Tolaki people", yet further down we learn that "The kingdom's capital was in Rahambuu, a town known today as Unaaha, around 60 kilometers (37 mi) from Kendari" with no real explanation as to how this might have changed, much less an acknowledgement that this even happened, if it did.

    I have tagged it inline for this.

I have to eat dinner now. More later. Daniel Case (talk) 22:31, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

Alright. I'm back.

• • Also in the intro, while the assertion (which appears only in the intro, curiously) that Kendari has the highest HDI on Sulawesi is now sourced, it is still not anywhere near adequately sourced for a claim that extraordinary that appears only in the intro. All the new source can confirm for me is that the number is as reported. I cannot figure out how to tweak the data base fields on the other such that I can see how it compares with other cities/regencies in other provinces on Sulawesi ... indeed, I would imagine a reader unfamiliar with Indonesia's first-level subdivisions would have no way of knowing how to verify that claim.

    And this really should be elaborated on in the article body. If you can find a clearer source on this, please do. If you can't, take it out of the article.

• The history section. Oh Lord, the history section.

  A great deal of effort, perhaps more than on any other section of this article, went into this ... it is the only section with more than two subsections. Commendable, but for this we got ... a section that seems to be far more suited to be the beginning of History of Southeast Sulawesi, with only a few incidental mentions of Kendari.

  After starting with the Portuguese having first mapped the bay in the 15th century (and I would venture to guess that it has been "known" since well before that time; certainly the ancestors of today's Indonesians had already been living in the area for some time? Very Eurocentric), it takes us three of these subsections before we finally learn that in 1828, some Dutch sailors mapped it and it was named after one of them as a result. That's at least 300, maybe 400, years of history, even if it's boring history, we just skipped. I'd like to know what happened in the meantime. Do we know if any European expeditions came by? Certainly the Dutch knew it was there. Why did they explore it only in 1828?

  Having briefly checked in with our nominal subject, we are again off to the political intrigues of Sulawesi under Dutch colonialism, about which the writer seems to care more, enough to think we should as well, for the better part of the next two grafs, until we learn at the end of the section that, sometime between 1908 and 1937 (the article does not seem to find it necessary that we know the exact year), Kendari became ... the provincial capital.

  Well. What a development. Apparently, in approximately a century, along the shores of this bay that the Dutch had only recently mapped accurately (one presumes), some sort of settlement grew up that was large enough to make a regional governmental center. How did this happen? Again it must have been during the commercial break.

  Then the Japanese take over, then there's Indonesia's war of independence on Sulawesi, then we learn about the effect of the Darul Islam rebellion on Kendari (about which we should learn more ... did the refugee camps become part of the city, as often happens in developing countries (or, really, anywhere there's been refugee camps on the outskirts of large cities)? This would be interesting to know.

  Finally Kendari is made the capital of Southwest Sulawesi upon the province's creation, and it's all the article can do to mention city and kotamadya status before the one last sentence that feels like it was added so someone could show they did their research about the city's modern problems, completely without any context which might help a reader understand why this is happening, like how much the city has been growing and whether it has adequate infrastructure to meet those needs.

  As I said this is the wrong history for this article. It tells us more about a pre-Islamic religious symbol's cultural significance than it does about how the shores of a bay became home to a city of almost 350,000. I will not promote it to GA (and nor should any other reviewer) unless it is thoroughly rewritten to be a history of the city, as indicated by the tag I have placed on the section. I realize the sources are sketchy—I searched for some myself—but that is no excuse, given that I learned more from this blog post, its imperfect English notwithstanding, than I did from the history section in our article. If that blogger can find enough sources to put a narrative together, so can the editors here.

OK, saving this ... Daniel Case (talk) 02:23, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

• Geography section: Just the basics and very thin at that. Reading it I get no sense of how the city is basically the entire shore of this very protected bay with a narrow inlet. I learn what other subdivisions of Indonesia it borders on, which is nice, but I really want to know things that I had to go to Google Maps to find, like where the city center is (off to the southwest, which then led me to adjust the coords so that anyone wanting to see Kendari via Street View lands in what appears to be the center of town, not some outlying farm track). You also do not understand how important that bridge is without looking at the map.

  I'd also like to be able to read, at least, about how land is used, such a major issue for any city, within the limits of this unusually shaped city. Are there other developed areas? It seems from Google that there are? Industrial areas? Residential neighborhoods? Do those vary in housing quality and value (like, where in the city would the rich and powerful live? And conversely the poor)? It also seems from Google that there are agricultural areas, and the article elsewhere mentions port facilities. Where are they in relation to the businesses and customers they serve?

  The article has a few maps already, but none that would even begin to help a reader—especially one who has never been there—better visualize the city. Perhaps the one from OpenStreetMap, or even one of those little template versions we use for our own scalable maps based on OSM, should be placed in the section.

  Lastly, some of the geological paragraph states that which is unsurprising and obvious: "Rivers and coastal areas contain the most abundant alluvium sediments". Well ... imagine that!

• Economy section: "The construction sector, retail, agriculture and fisheries, processing and manufacturing, education, logistics and the financial and insurance industries are also major industries". Is there room for anything to be a minor industry under that statement?

• That picture of the library has an ugly, unnecessary watermark in the middle. I have tagged it at Commons; it should be either removed or another image taken or found.

  And some pics of the airport might be nice ... like at least this one that we use in the airport article?

OK, another break ... Daniel Case (talk) 02:53, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

• References. If I were not the kind of editor who does these c/e's on the GANs I review, this and the history section would have been the one-two punch that would have led me to a fail. But since I'm not, I was able to largely fix the references.

  However, I should not have had to do this. This was easily the sloppiest, laziest aspect of the article and it did not have to be that way.

  For the first thing ... by my crude estimate, about 98 percent of the cited sources were in Indonesian. That means that every single such cite needs at least the "lang=id". Less than half of those that needed it had it. And when that is the case, we further need the "trans-title=" field. Yes, it means spending a lot of time with Google Translate, as I did, but the article is now richer for it.

  In addition, there were many citations missing things like dates, access-dates, authors and publishers. Maybe that was a good thing, though, because in more than a few cases someone thought that information was satisfied with the words on the menu bar or whatever was at the top of the page. It reminded me of the GA review I did on University of Notre Dame a couple of years back, where I encountered many similar instances of past "editors" with no apparent understanding of what "first" and "last" mean in {{cite}} templates (and at least here we have the language issue as an excuse in some cases). It happened enough here, though, that like there I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.

  I inclined toward the latter, however, when I saw that someone, apparently aware of how the cites to the same reference with different page numbers are supposed to look, but unaware and (apparently) unwilling to find out that there is a wonderful template ({{rp}}) that does this, decided it was all done with hardcoded HTML inline formatting, giving us far too many instances of "²⁶ and such.

  Likewise with the look of the short footnotes (for some reason used only for two footnotes even though there are quite a few instances where it could be better employed): Someone figured that all that they had to do was type something between ref tags that looked like one, leaving readers without benefit of the intrapage link to the source that the proper template, {{sfn}} provides by default (And about this again more later).

  It fell to me to replace them with the proper templates, which will provide (I hope) sufficient instruction in their use as to forestall further occurrences of this issue. Whoever did this (I do not want to make any assumptions; I've spent enough time getting to know this article too well to really have the appetite for an extended deep dive into the history (but I have my suspects)), please, in the future, if you see something cool in an article that you'd like to emulate in your own work, look at the source to see how that was brought about and consider how you might use it, and also strongly consider going to the template page itself and reading the documentation to help you learn to do it. It's how I learned to do about 95 percent of the things I know how to do that Look Cool and make pages snap with informativity; there is no reason to think it can't work for you, either.

Daniel Case (talk) 04:35, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

• • OK ... my cleanup on the references took care of about 90 percent of the issues. Here's what was beyond my capability to address (as currently numbered):
    • My connection timed out before the PDF at note 3 could download, so I have no idea what it is or if it supports the cited statement.
    • There is no work by a "Womack" in the references so I could not make this a short footnote as whoever seems to have placed it intended. Nor is there any other work cited by an author of that name.
    • Notes 15 and 16 seem, one might charitably say, to refer to a previous footnote that was taken out. They are far too vaguely defined for me to even begin to guess at what source here (there are others from the national government's statistical office) they might be referring to.
    • Likewise with 20, actually even more so. I presume this is an Indonesian government law, but again it seems like someone was referring to a previously included source now removed. Or the footnote was exported from another article with about the same level of care this entire article's reference section has been handled with.
    • I was able to download the PDF in note 35 but since I cannot read Indonesian, I could not decipher enough in it to determine who the author is or what the title is. And since it's a 19-page document, a specific page or range in support of the stated facts would be helpful.
    • Only one of the three "references" actually supported something in the text, and that was the one I converted to {{sfn}}. I also converted the other two to the appropriate {{cite}} format, but I cannot guess what they are intended to support in the text, or if they are indeed intended to support anything in it all or are just there to impress us that someone did their research, not least because they're in Dutch, something that also was not noted in the cites until I came along.

Finally I make suggestions for how to improve the article further beyond GA if, as many do, the nominator so desires. Here I only really have one: I reviewed what's available on Commons and it does seem like we're using the best pictures we've got, but ... we can do better than that one of the bay and the city lights around it at night that's used in the effective lead in the infobox montage. I realize it's the only one of the whole cityscape but ... it looks like it could be anywhere, to be honest. And it doesn't look at all special.

All right ... as I've said I am placing the article:

 On hold

I realize these may be a lot of issues. So you have a week to get started on them; if I see progress, I'm willing to give you more time as long as you're working in good faith. I'll be back around that time to see where we are or where we aren't and think about where we're going, or not going, from there.

Happy editing!

Daniel Case (talk) 05:25, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

@Daniel Case I apologize for late reply. Thank you so much for a very detailed review, I was currently quite busy in real life. However, I will try my best to address the problems here (especially regarding the history section that seems more on regional side instead of the city itself).

Again, thank you very much for the review. Nyanardsan (talk) 00:56, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

@Daniel Case

I really apologize for sudden change, and I really appreciate your very thorough and detailed review.

However, I cant continue editing the article and finish it within a reasonable time. Hence I apologize but unfortunatelly this should be failed for now.

I am really really sorry and appreciate your review.

Have a nice day~ Nyanardsan (talk) 11:02, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

No shame in that ... I have offered other nominators that option. Daniel Case (talk) 16:01, 27 July 2022 (UTC)