Wikipedia:Featured article review/Gray Wolf/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed 11:46, 19 September 2007.

Review commentary

 * GrittyLobo441, Sengkang, Mongo, Dark hyena, UtherSRG notified. DrKiernan 13:53, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Notified WP Dogs

The article is written with far too much capitalisation of Wolf, Gray Wolf and other variants. This has been discussed at talk for WP:MOS and the consensus is to use lower case letters except where a proper name (such as Bengal tiger but not Bengal Tiger). Owain.davies 12:01, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Need to standardise British/American spellings throughout. DrKiernan 13:53, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the comments of both Owain.davies and DrKiernan, above. Additionally, I find there are several areas that serve up potentially debatable statements that have no citations whatsoever. Just as one example, the last paragraph in the Reintroduction section talks about re-ordering food webs and delivering a banquet, etc, and there's not a single reference to support any of it. In fact, that entire section, I'd suggest, needs work in terms of citations. I'd also like to draw attention to the Taxonomy section and, specifically, to the table that lists the various subspecies of grey wolf. The entire table is based on a reference from 1978. A quick look to ITIS or, for that matter, to MSW, shows that most every one of those subspecies more recently has been placed into synonymy with C. lupus lupus, the subspecies names being considered deprecated or invalid. Both ITIS and MSW show only two valid subspecies for the grey wolf, namely C. lupus lupus and C. lupus lycaon. Finally, I find a lot of the stuff in that table about the colouration of the various "subspecies" to be kind of dubious, at best, based on the phenotypic plasticity and variability in all wolves. I know lots of people make general statements about various wolf populations and that's fine, I suppose, for some folkloric, vernacular sort of discussion. I'm not convinced it's rigorous enough to be cited in an encyclopedia. &mdash; Dave (Talk | contribs) 15:20, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment Capitalisation has been discussed again and again on the various biology projects without any consensus being reached. Certainly a discussion between less than 10 people, several of whom objected to the suggestion that capitals shouldn't be used can't be called a consensus. There is guideline for this at Naming conventions (fauna) where no discussion has taken place before the "consensus" was reached. The points on taxonomy and spelling are good but I'm just not sure that a FAR is justified for those changes. Unless there are any substantive arguments that the article doesn't meet the criteria I'd suggest closing this FAR. Yomangani talk 16:39, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Please see WP:MAM. You can capitalize or not capitalize, but whatever you do should be consistent. (I did write that section, so naturally I think it fair.) By itself, capitalization should not be used as an FA criterion. There are numerous problems with this article, besides; I'll try to go over it later. Marskell 17:42, 19 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Fixes needed - for mine the article is somewhat lopsided; there is no proper taxonomy section as with many recent bio FAs, - the stuff with it and dog is brief. I also understand there's an issue with the subspecies. The see also section is huge - do we really need a link to werewolf here? A better way would be to have a more developed folklore subsection under Historical perceptions. I haven't read the prose much yet but have spotted at least one typo which I shall fix posthaste.


 * Dog breeds with recent wolf ancestry: - rather than a list, this should be a short para which expands upon the topic.


 * similarly Extinct Grey wolves - something more on evloution in article too?


 * I realised why I couldn't find DNA and evolution stuff - it was in this vague Features and adaptations subsection of a vague Anatomy, physiology, and reproduction section. The sections are not arranged logically or hierarchically - with Courtship and mating and Breeding and life cycle (i.e. behaviours) not in a behaviour section (?). I will see what I can do - there are plenty of mammal FAs to choose from - Bobcat and the other felines have been arranged one way nicely by Marskell while I have played with Common Raven (yeah I know its not a mammal but it is an omnivore so what the heck) as well as Elk and a bunch of whales - Humpback Whale etc. cheers,  Casliber (talk · contribs) 13:49, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

...speaking of balance - there's a huge amount on behaviour and none on distribution...cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 13:50, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

LIVESTOCK PROTECTION DOGS

The dog breed which is the most capable to be the guardian for livestock against wolfs from Hungary is NOT the KUVASZ but the KOMONDOR! Its size, weight, mentality of independent guardian and the protective coat it makes the KOMONDOR dog fare more effektive for this purpose than the smaler KUVASZ. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Warrington (talk • contribs) 06:10, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

FARC commentary

 * Suggested FA criteria concerns are organization (4), comprehensiveness (1b), and MoS issues (2). Marskell 13:42, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep now not yet - see below . What I thought were missing bits were scattered around the article. I reorganized it more along the lines of some other vertebrate FAs and embellished a little, especially with a bit of systemic taxonomy. I removed the gallery and a few of us toned down some POV sounding adjectives about the place. A few others have gotten stuck in too. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Casliber (talk • contribs)  14:10, August 6, 2007
 * Comment Ref #64 is broken.--Rmky87 14:42, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Found, fixed. Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 21:25, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Cleanup needed. There are completely unformatted citations (blue-linked URLs only). Can those 3 lines of redirects at the top be manually formatted to one line (they're unsightly)? There are still some tags to be dealt with, and there are some one-sentence stubby paras, example:  In Alaska, for example, wolves are sometimes hunted from aircraft.  Can some of the See also be incorporated into the article and removed from See also ?Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 17:34, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I did some ref cleanup; I'm not convinced this article is well-sourced, there are numerous inline queries, and cite tags. Sandy Georgia (Talk) 21:25, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Remove—Sourcing as per Sandy, and MOS (e.g., 'wolf'—read MOS on "Words as words"). Why link "kilogram", etc? But I hope this one can be saved. Tony 00:04, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I thought most mentions of capitalised Gray Wolf now only referred to the entity-as-taxon rather than wild doggy thing, but am going though it. I concede it could still do with a bit of a copyedit as some language is a bit flowery. I don't have any nice wolf books so am a t a bit of a loss over some places where a ref is clearly required. I'd say give it 2 weeks. cheers,  Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:39, 23 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Update - I just got a book from the library which may help with the source problem. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 05:05, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I've been really tied up elsewhere and haven't had/won't have time to revisit this article over the next week or two. I don't feel strongly one way or the other, and defer to whatever Casliber concludes.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 13:22, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I started to work on this again, but there are now blue-linked URLs in refs, See also hasn't been worked into the article, dashes are out of whack; in other words, I'm not sure the article is stable or being maintained. I have time to work on clean up if any decides it's worth it.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 23:50, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Closing: I have been agonizing over this one, hence the long review. No, I don't think this being actively maintained. But there's a lot of good info here—this page is far from an embarassment to our TOL articles.

But there's just too much wrong, particularly considering the great animal articles we're seeing now at FAC.


 * A LOT of wordiness (e.g., "...components of the ecosystems they typically occupy" --> "...components of their ecosystems."; "...weigh about 20% less than their male counterparts" --> "...weigh about 20% less than males"; "...include, but are not limited to, temperate forests..." = legalese).
 * The U.S. POV tags are correct. Outside of the subspecies list, 'Russia' occurs once and 'Canada' not at all. These, not the U.S. (and certainly not the U.K., which gets two paragraphs), are the principal range countries.
 * Suffers from the last half problem. Sourcing is fine until near the mid-point and then drops off. See, for instance 'Body language'—all of it sourced to a personal website. In general, I wouldn't call this terribly sourced but compare to Lion, an animal of similar stature that Cas and others are preparing for FAC. Clearly not to the same standard (ditto on the LEAD).
 * Proportion of journal refs needs to increase.

But the bright side: given how much is here to work with, it wouldn't be so hard to bring it back to FAC. It needs a full audit in the meantime. Marskell 11:41, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.