Talk:Sichuan Basin/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 03:38, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

As I usually do with GA candidates, I will be printing this one out and going over it with a red pen, likely to be followed by a light copyedit, after which I will review this here. This should take a few days. Daniel Case (talk) 03:38, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

OK ... I did my copyedit. And I have reached my conclusion. This article fails the GA standards as it presently exists. I do not believe the issues I found can be rectified within a day or two's time. I think it can and should cover the subject more extensively than it does; getting it to that point will require considerable expansion.

First, I should talk about the article's good points. The prose may have had a bit of second-language quality to it before I edited, but it was not horrible, merely some turns of phrase and quirks that suggest a native Chinese speaker or speakers wrote most of the article (an unwillingness to use relative pronouns to join sentences, for one thing). There were no serious grammatical or usage issues. I've edited worse from native speakers.

The article also did attempt (more on this later) to cover all aspects of its subject. I've seen some articles like these that give short shrift to things like culture or the economy; this one does seem to recognize that they require more than that.

But now to where improvement is needed ...

First, per the tag, the intro is too short. I get the feeling that that was what was there before the article was expanded, perhaps the original stub text. But when the article is expanded, the intro needs to grow with it. The usual four grafs could easily be wrung out of even what's here; an adequately expanded article could do even better.

And an expansion would help the intro do a better job telling the story in brief. As it is it feels, particularly at the end, like sentences were just thrown there because they needed to be without anyone checking to make sure that they flowed logically.

I was also wondering why the hanzi in the lede only used one of the systems, until I checked and found that those four characters are the same in either simplified or traditional characters. We should put in a endnote to that effect. It would also be a nice idea to follow the example of so many other articles about Chinese subjects and put in Infobox Chinese, so that readers can see how the words are pronounced in various dialects of the language.

I moved the geography section to the first position after the intro. The first thing a reader needs/wants to know is, where in China is this and what kind of place is it? Not what kind of bedrock it has.

And in that vein, given the surfeit of maps in the article, to the point that a gallery is necessary, we really need a map of the basin that illustrates the accompanying text, showing us where all these mountains and rivers are in relation to Chengdu and Chongqing. A satellite image won't do that.

The "biodiversity" section should really be renamed to "Flora and fauna" and discuss generally what types of plant and animal life dominate the basin, as such sections in other geography articles do. We need/want to know about more than just the evergreen broadleaf forests, which after all have their own article for readers who want to know more.

"Human development" should be broken up, with most of the subsections promoted to full sections. "History" comes first, as it should, and is for the most part a pretty well-done summary. I learned something about how it slowly but inevitably became part of Imperial China, understandable because of its geographic isolation, going back to being the independent Shu state three times in the process.

However, it seems to cut off too soon, right at the Second Sino-Japanese War and Chongqing becoming the ROC's temporary capital. I was asking myself well, what then, as part of the PRC? And it seems like some of what should be in that section after that is in the next section, on the economy, with some mention of the Great Leap Forward and what the Chinese government is doing today to promote development. Certainly that could be added to the history section and fleshed out.

I also think more could be said about the region's demographics and economy.

Is Sichuan culture just a matter of spicy food and a distinctive local dialect? I think not, and while those certainly are the first things that would come to mind for many people inside and outside of China, there's got to be more to it that that. Certainly there have to be writers, poets, singers, actors etc., who have come from Sichuan. Those sort of things could at least be discussed in that section.

I like the use of that Li Bai quote to introduce the historical difficulties of getting in and out of the basin—that shows just how long it's been a problem, and it's exactly how we should use quotes like that. Other than needing the footnote at the end, there really weren't many problems with the transportation section.

As for the maps, either expand the article and find a way to use them, or get rid of them.

I will also point out that one of the footnotes—22, I think—appears to cite a Chinese-language source but does not state that it does, as the other footnotes that use Chinese sources do. The lang=Chinese parameter needs to be added to that reference. And I saw some that did not use the standard citation templates ... that needs to be brought up to code, as it were.

Overall, this article feels more like a high school paper written by someone determined to make sure the teacher saw they did their research. In places this becomes clear as information seems to be presented indiscriminately, rather than in a way conscious of building a narrative.

As a teacher, I realized, I would give this a C. And as it happens, I noticed, the article has never been assessed by WP:CHINA (I have also added it to the WP:GEO worklist). I realized as I was reviewing it that this is a C-class article, not a good article, and I will so assess it for both projects.

To get it up to GA level, it might be useful first to think about developing subarticles, or looking at what we might be able to either leave to the main Sichuan article or pull from it. I think a case might be made for discussing the basin in primarily geographic terms, and leaving a lot of the history and economic stuff back in the article on the province except as relevant to the basin.

If you want to work on it and have me copyedit the article again afterwards, do not hesitate to ask. Daniel Case (talk) 06:16, 18 March 2018 (UTC)