Talk:Variable checkerspot/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Quadell (talk · contribs) 20:54, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Nominator:

I see that you are submitting this article as a GA nomination as part of a school project. I also see that the only changes you have made to the article so far have been a few changes to the headings. I'm afraid this article suffers from a number of shortcomings, and I can't promote it to GA status at this time. I can, however, give you some guidance as to the best ways to improve this article, so that it can hopefully become a GA at some point in the future.


 * The lead section of this article does not conform to our guideline at Manual of Style/Lead section. That guideline says "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article" and "Apart from trivial basic facts, significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article." This lead currently gives a lot of information that is not covered in the body of the article (such as the insect's range and wingspan), and it does not summarize the most important facts in the article (regarding lifecycle, courtship, diet, etc.). You'll notice that the article is tagged with a cleanup request regarding the lead section, for this very reason.


 * There are other ways in which this article does not conform to Manual of Style. For instance, section headings should only be capitalized at their first word ("Mate location" instead of "Mate Location"), and one image does not have a caption.


 * When a single source is used to support a paragraph of text, all important information in that paragraph should be supported by the source. The "Life Cycle" section has only one cite -- O'Brien et al (2004) -- but that source only supports the final sentence about a 15-day life span. All of the other information in that section is essentially unsourced.


 * Information from sources needs to be reworded in your own words to avoid close paraphrasing, a subtle form of plagiarism. In the "Mate Location" section, the source (Rutowski 1991) states "males that... mate with virgin females will experience the highest fitness gains." Compare this to the text in the Wikipedia article: "Males receive the highest fitness gains from mating with virgin females" These are too close to be acceptable. Or consider the Rutowski et al 1983 source, which states that similar species "appear to be passing roughly similar nutrient investments to their mates." Then compare the text in this article: "these species pass roughly similar nutrient investments to their mates". I know that you,, did not write these sections of text, but the article as a whole is not ready for GA status if these problems remain. I suspect there are other examples of close paraphrasing in the article.

This article does not merit GA status at this time. To fulfill our GA criteria, you will need to move all information from the lead into the article body, and then rewrite the lead from scratch. You would need to check all sources used to make sure the information in the article is fully supported without plagiarism. And you would need to make sure all important information about the species is provided in the article. (For an example of an excellent article on a similar species, see Chrysiridia rhipheus.) If all this is done, feel free to renominate the article for GA status. – Quadell (talk) 21:24, 14 November 2013 (UTC)