Talk:Hans Thewissen/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 01:48, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

It is rather doubtful that, with a single-digit h-index, the subject passes Wikipedia's academic notability standards.

The only source for the "Early life" section does not even mention Thewissen. Nothing in that section is sourced.

Almost the entire "Educational background" section is unsourced. One of the two sourced paragraphs is sourced only to one of Thewissen's own books, with no page numbers given for where in the book the claimed facts can be sourced, and no hint that the book contains any of the autobiographical detail in its paragraph. It can probably only be considered to be a source for the final sentence of its paragraph, background about whales, but even for that a page number is needed. The other source for the paragraph again sources only the last sentence of its paragraph (not the biographical detail in the earlier part of the paragraph) and again is a book source with no page number.

The "Career" section is entirely unsourced.

In "Discovery of Ambulocetus", references 5 and 11 are Thewissen's own publication, not secondary sources. And they are duplicates of each other.

"Discovery of Kutchicetus" has only one primary source (Thewissen's own book), again with no page numbers.

The "Embryology" section is entirely unsourced.

The "Sensory organ evolution" section has no secondary sources (it uses only two of Thewissen's own publications), and one of the two footnotes does not appear to be attached to anything.

"Brain evolution research" has only background sources (one of them again primary and by Thewissen) with no sourcing for the claim that this is his current research area.

I'm also skeptical about the provenance of the images. For instance, the last one, File:CT scan of 43 million year old Remingtonocetus.jpg, is claimed to be "own work" by the main editor of the article, Akrasia25, and dated 2018; however, in shape and pose it closely resembles a model in a paper by Thewissen from 2011. Is there undisclosed autobiographical editing going on (a violation of Wikipedia policies), is the image or the 3d model copied without permission from Thewissen, or is there some more benign explanation?

Overall, I think this is very far from meeting the Good Article sourcing standards, and has very likely COI, notability, and image sourcing issues as well. As such, I think it meets the "immediate failure" criteria in WP:GAFAIL.

—David Eppstein (talk) 02:02, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the review of the article. All very constructive arguments and helpful to me in my future editing. I will continue to work on the page over the coming months and improve it. I have a few wiki projects on the go right now. There is no COI. As I mentioned at the beginning on the article's talk page, I know the professor and read his books. I asked him for permission to use a photo. But to be more useful I will try to get my own photos. Again, thank you for the time spent on the article. A real life example helps me to learn. --Akrasia25 (talk) 13:01, 20 January 2019 (UTC)