Talk:Childbirth in Sri Lanka/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

I am very sorry to say this, but I have read the article and am not able to list it as a GA at this time.

There are some smaller problems, but the most important is the failure to meet GA criteria #3b, "stays focused on the topic". Repairing this will take a lot of work, so I am closing this as not listed, and sincerely hope that the editors here will work, without any stress of a deadline, on focusing the article on its actual subject. When it is improved, please feel free to nominate the article again.

Focus on the topic
From the title, some readers might guess that the subject is childbirth itself, but I believe the actual subject of the article is broader: the social and medical aspects of having children in Sri Lanka, including pregnancy, childbirth, and rituals and care for babies.

Almost half of the article has nothing to do with pregnancy, childbirth, or baby care at all. In the entire introduction to the article, only the first sentence even mentions mothers or babies. The rest is material that belongs in Sri Lanka (the article about the country), not an article about giving birth in Sri Lanka.

I recommend the following as a starting point:


 * Remove almost all of the lead and the entire ==Background== section. Shorten the non-birth related parts of ==Health information==.  Most of that information does not belong in this article at all.  Its presence keeps the reader from finding the real subject of the article.
 * Remove information for which no sources exist, such as the ==Extrinsic factors== sections.
 * Create a new section on mothers in Sri Lanka, which can include (as subsections) contraception, infertility, marriage, and the ideas regarding pregnancy, as well as anything else that really describes mothers.
 * Merge both ==Circumcision== and ==Birth traditions== into the ==Newborn rites of passage==.
 * Wherever necessary, add back in the details removed from "Background". For example, rather than having a paragraph about the number of Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians in the country, add that information to the newborn rites:  "About 7% of people in Sri Lanka are Muslim.  Muslim boys are circumcised between the ages of..."  Information about women's literacy might be added to the section on mothers.  This way, the reader will see what connection that fact has to the actual subject at hand.  This is better than asking the reader to slog through a long paragraph of apparently irrelevant information, in the hope that perhaps later he will need to know it.

Other issues
After you have finished focusing the article on the main topic, but before re-nominating, please have someone check the article for typos and other small grammar errors. It is very easy to leave out a small word or punctuation mark. A common thing to do is to ask a friend or to leave a note with the WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors.

Again, while the article needs some significant work to meet the Good article criteria, I am impressed with the progress that has been made in just two weeks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 7 May 2011 (UTC)