Talk:Malagasy civet/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: J Milburn (talk · contribs) 13:21, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Happy to offer a review. J Milburn (talk) 13:21, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

The first (quick) comment I have is that this doesn't really compare to Gerp's mouse lemur or ? Nycticebus linglom- those are articles about very poorly known and recently discovered taxa. This species has been known about for a long time, and, indeed, has been fairly extensively studied. "Fossa fossana" has 143 results on Google Scholar, at least some of which must contain useful information which could be added to this article, while "Nycticebus linglom" has two hits (three if you count the Wikipedia mirror) and "Microcebus gerpi" has three hits. The first result about this species,, will almost certainly be useful, and the rest should be looked through if possible- there's a lot about distribution, activity and phylogenetic relationships, for instance.

More specific comments follow:
 * The lead is disproportionately long; it's not far off the length of the rest of the article combined. The lead should contain a brief summary of the contents of the remainder of the article without introducing information not present elsewhere. See WP:LEAD and WP:LEADLENGTH.
 * The article contains nothing about the original discovery/description
 * No mention of the fact that it's hunted by humans (which I think is the case?) or any other uses (skin, traditional medicine, pet trade...)
 * How can it be differentiated from the Indian civet?
 * The claims in the article about distribution don't seem to match up with the distribution image.
 * There's no year of description category

This is a fairly solid B-class article, but it doesn't really go into the detail I'd expect for a GA on a species like this. You might be able to recruit some help to work on the article at WikiProject Mammals or WikiProject Madagascar. is something of an expert on lemurs, and conominated fossa for FA status with, and. writes a lot about Madagascar, but I believe she is more interested in history/society than biology. One or more of these users may be able to offer advice on and/or a helping hand with expanding/improving the article. J Milburn (talk) 14:01, 6 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I concur with this review, and encourage the nominator to improve it. The Google scholar link provides several articles that are avilable in free PDFs that can be used to address some of the reviewer's comments. If the nominator would like some help getting started on figuring out how to go about this work, I'm available to assist. Oh, and I've taken care of the easiest of the fixes. Cheers! - UtherSRG (talk) 14:51, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Some help would be great! I mostly rely on Google Books, I can look at Google Scholar too, though. :) PS, that distibution page is kind of hard to describe. -- Amaryllis Gardener  talk 23:41, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Google Scholar can be handy in finding some material to flesh out the article, but you'll have to skim through a ton of highly technical language to find what you need. Take a look at the "143 results" link above. Most of the result links you'd have to pay for, but Google also gives access to free PDFs to the right. Get a bunch of them that seem like they might focus on the subject you are looking for. You might find that there is some implied information you may need to dig even deeper for. For instance, the Malagasy civet seems to often be used as a root when doing phylogenetic studies of Herpestidae. Why is that? Find a bunch of articles that have some good information. Print them out. Highlight the information that you can use. Possibly use different colored markers, using one color for one type of information (physical characteristics, for instance) and another color for another type of informaiton. Get a bunch of it together and let's see from there where I can help. - UtherSRG (talk) 13:54, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
 * WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request (WP:RX) - Volunteers will get you a copy of any paid resources you require for improving Wikipedia content.- NQ (talk)  01:05, 11 January 2015 (UTC)