Wikipedia:Peer review/List of Costa Rican monkey species/archive1

List of Costa Rican monkey species

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I hope to use it as the lead article of a possible good topic, as a list of limited subject matter.

Thank you, Rlendog (talk) 03:31, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't have time to review this fully right now, but one thing you might want to incorporate in this article is a slightly broader discussion of biogeography: as I read the article, Aotus and Saguinus reach the northern limit of their distribution in Panama, Saimiri in CR, and Alouatta, Ateles, and Cebus further north in Central America. It might be interesting to discuss that pattern a little; I think there have been some publications on Central American monkey biogeography which would have some information on this. Ucucha 00:18, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. I stuggled with how much to include about the ranges of each species outside Costa Rica. I added back the information on the full range of each species. I also incorporated a little about the biogeography, but specifically in reference to the Central American Squirrel Monkey, and in particular its restricted range. I was a little concerned about going too far down this path though, since it is somewhat tangential to the article subject and some of the feedback I have received at WP:FLCs has been critical of going into too much detail in the prose section of a list article. For that reason too, I did not address the biogrepgraphy as it relates to Saguinus or Aotus, since those species do not likely occur in Costa Rica at all. However, I think it is a good idea to add some of this information to List of Central American monkey species when I get around to expanding that article. Rlendog (talk) 02:53, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Review comments will follow Brianboulton (talk) 20:01, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Comments: I apologise for the time it has taken to post this review, but we are very short of peer reviewers at the moment.

My chief thought after reading the article was to wonder why it is being presented as a list, since there are only four items in it. This is very few; if for example there had only been four US presidents I doubt you would make a list of them. Why not make it a regular article based on a comparison of the four species? I think you need to consider the most appropriate format for this page.

I have been through the prose, and have the following comments:-

• First paragraph
  • Overlong sentence with confusing punctuation: "Two of the species, the Central American Squirrel Monkey and the White-headed Capuchin, belong to the family Cebidae, the family containing the squirrel monkeys and capuchins and the other two belong to the family Atelidae, the family containing the howler monkeys, spider monkeys, woolly monkeys and muriquis." The sentence needs dividing and repunctuating along the lines of: "Two of the species, the Central American Squirrel Monkey and the White-headed Capuchin, belong to the family Cebidae, which contains the squirrel monkeys and capuchins. The other two species belong to the family Atelidae, which contains the howler monkeys, spider monkeys, woolly monkeys and muriquis."
  • Next sentence is rather clumsily phrased. Also, national parks and "the wild" are not the same thing. I suggest the sentence is rewritten along these lines: "Each of the four species can be seen in national parks within Costa Rica, where viewing them in natural surroundings is a popular tourist attraction."
• Second paragraph
  • I can't figure from this the reason given why the range for the Central American Squirrel Monkey is restricted.
  • You say the conservation status of this monkey was upgraded from endangered to vulnerable? Is this "upgrading"? Also, it should have been mentioned earlier that the species was endangered, and when it became so.
• Third paragraph
  • This sentence appears twice in the paragraph: "The IUCN has rated it as "least concern" from a conservation perspective." Try to vary the expression the second time round.
  • I assume that "least concern" is an expression of security for the species, and this should be mentioned.
• Fourth paragraph
  • "The western edge Geoffroy's Tamarin's known range is..." Is there an "of" required after "edge"?

Good luck with the article, however you decide to take it forward. Brianboulton (talk) 23:34, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

• • Thank you for peer reviewing the article and for your comments. I think I addressed all the wording issues, and expanded on the Central American Squirrel Monkey range issue to (hopefully) make that clearer. As for why I named this as a list article, it was largely to be consistent with other similar and related (albeit longer) articles, such as List of Panamanian monkey species, List of Central American monkey species, List of lemur species (Malagasy is unnecessary there since all lemurs are endemic to Madagascar) and List of mammals of Costa Rica, and other such lists that will hopefully follow. Unlike the other similar lists, this article's lead is able to touch on each of the species in the list specifically, due to the small number of species. I could name the article Costa Rican monkey species, but I already set that up as a redirect to this article, and I think the structure would be the same regardless: a general overview of the monkey species in the country followed by the list. Rlendog (talk) 01:59, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Comments:

• What about linking the countries mentioned as [[List of XXXan monkeys|XXX]] or [[List of mammals of XXX|XXX]]? Links to the countries themselves are not extremely helpful, as the articles about the countries don't give much information about the monkeys there, which is what someone clicking the link should expect to get. I recently introduced this in one of my articles, Lundomys, and would like to offer it as a suggestion here too.
• To me, the sentence about the change of conservation status of S. oerstedii reads like the IUCN singlehandedly improved the species' situation, when it should only mean that they changed the rating. Would just changing "improved" to "changed" work?
• Referring to a scientific name as a "Latin name" is commonly done, but I feel it is inaccurate, as no scientific binomial name would ever have been used in Latin as the normal name of a species. Some scientific names do derive from Latin words (Cebus, for example), others are actually Latinized Greek in origin (Ateles), and still others are derived from other languages (Saimiri). Simply using "scientific name" avoids these problems.
• Would it be good to include the distribution in the table of species?

Ucucha 18:26, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

• Thank you for your comments. I took care of the 1st three. I am not sure that including the distribution in the list itself would do much. In List of Central American monkey species I listed all the countries that each species occurs in within the list, but those were almost all Central American countries (or else close neighbors) so it was related to the subject of the article. But in this list, the various countries a given species occurs in outside Costa Rica are not germane to the subject. And even within Costa Rica, only one of the species has a geographically restricted range, which I think is dealt with better in the text. Rlendog (talk) 02:15, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Good, thanks for that. As for the distribution, this remains your call as the main author, and I see your arguments for excluding the distribution, but the table already includes a piece of information (the conservation status) that refers to the whole range of each species, not just to the segment in Costa Rica. The full distribution, which could be listed concisely as "Mexico to Ecuador" or similar, provides a nice piece of background information that can easily be included in list form. Ucucha 03:07, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

That makes sense. I added that. The links in the table are to the actual countries, which I think makes sense in that context. Rlendog (talk) 17:04, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Great. This article would certainly make a nice lead for your Good Topic. I do find it somewhat odd to have a list with only four items and an introduction that is several times longer than the actual list, but you already addressed this above. Ucucha 17:21, 7 November 2009 (UTC)