Wikipedia:Peer review/Coconut crab/archive1

Coconut crab
This peer review discussion has been closed. This article was a Featured Article in the olden days, back when referencing standards weren't so strict. I have been working to reference existing material, which isn't all that challenging, but I could do with extra input about what content it should include, where the tone might be inappropriate, and similar improvements. I would like to see it at least up to GA status before too long.

Thank you, Stemonitis (talk) 07:46, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Thanks for your work on this interesting article. The prose is clear and easy to read. The images are fetching. Here are a few suggestions from a non-biologist:


 * The lead should be an inviting summary of the whole article. My rule of thumb is to try to mention something from each of the main text sections. The existing lead says little or nothing about the "Respiration", "Sense of smell", and "Life cycle" subsections or the "Conservation" section.
 * ✅. I will also revisit the lead after any significant modification to the text. --Stemonitis (talk) 13:53, 21 August 2011 (UTC)


 * The lead should include nothing important that does not appear in the main text sections. The existing lead has interesting material about the crab's alternate names and the reasons for them, but I don't see this material in the main text. It might be useful to add a "Name" section that would include the material about rumors of pot-stealing and also the material from the "Diet" section that talks about the perception that the crabs in some sense steal coconuts. This material might fit nicely into the "Taxonomy" section as in Macaroni Penguin, a featured article. Perhaps the material about "unga or kaveu" from the "Relationship with people" subsection would fit in here as well.


 * I would consider moving the Taxonomy section to the top rather than the bottom, as it is, for example in Marsh rice rat and Bog turtle, both featured articles.


 * The layout would be improved by moving File:CoconutCrabDictionnaireDHistoireNaturelle1849.jpg down so that it does not form a text sandwich with the infobox.
 * ✅. --Stemonitis (talk) 09:51, 16 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't see a lot of overlinking, but I don't think I would link "tail", "leg", "abdomen", "lung", or any other words that I thought were commonly understood without an explanation. On the other hand, "pereiopods" (in the "Life cycle" section), a term few readers will know, might be linked to Decapod anatomy.


 * I found the tidbit about Amelia Earhart quite interesting. I will probably never forget it.


 * "Thomas Hale Streets" should be redlinked only once.
 * ✅. --Stemonitis (talk) 09:51, 16 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Claims such as "Coconut crabs often try to steal food from each other and will pull their food into their burrows to be safe while eating", which appears in the "Diet" section, should be supported by an inline citation to a reliable source. Most of the claims in the article are sourced, but in the case of paragraphs with a source for something in the middle, it's hard to tell what might support the rest of the paragraph. Every paragraph needs a source, but so does every unusual claim, every set of statistics, and every direct quotation.


 * The license for File:Birgus latro (Bora-Bora).jpg may not survive close scrutiny. It should include a specific date rather than the vague "old film picture". Was the scanned material really in the public domain? How can we tell?
 * I am confused here. The uploader User:Mbz1 appears to be Mila Zinkova, the author of the photograph, and has released the image under a free licence. The date of the photo is thus irrelevant, isn't it? I see no claim that anything is in the public domain. --Stemonitis (talk) 09:51, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh, oops! I read too hastily and misinterpreted "old film picture" to mean "movie" when it must mean a photo that Mila Zinkova took with a film camera and then scanned later. Finetooth (talk) 16:29, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
 * ✅. --Stemonitis (talk) 13:53, 21 August 2011 (UTC)


 * The Manual of Style generally frowns on fancy quotes and recommends block quotes for quotations of four lines or more. The Streets quotation is so short that I would include it in the text with ordinary quotation marks around it, or I might simply paraphrase it.
 * ✅. --Stemonitis (talk) 09:51, 16 August 2011 (UTC)


 * The bibliography entries for books should include the place of publication as well as the publisher. You can usually find this kind of information via WorldCat.
 * ✅. --Stemonitis (talk) 09:51, 16 August 2011 (UTC)


 * The ISBN numbers should include the hyphens. A handy converter tool lives here.
 * ✅. --Stemonitis (talk) 09:51, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 02:43, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

Interesting subject; certainly something that would make a good featured article. At this stage, the lead section is a little short; for an article of this length, the lead should be two to three times what it is now. See Manual of Style (lead section). J Milburn (talk) 21:33, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
 * ✅. --Stemonitis (talk) 13:53, 21 August 2011 (UTC)