Wikipedia:Peer review/Kohala (mountain)/archive1

This peer review discussion has been closed. Finetooth comments: I find articles about geology interesting, and this one is no exception. While reading through the article, I noticed and fixed a few small things related to prose and Manual of Style issues, and I have listed other suggestions below. After making any changes that might stem from my comments, it would be good if you could find someone with a professional understanding of geology to review the article too. (I'm not a geologist, just an amateur admirer of science.) You might ask someone listed at WP:PRV.


 * I wonder if it would be useful to include a separate section explaining a bit of the plate tectonics affecting the Hawaii in general. Some mention of the hotspot, the direction of plate movement, and Kohala's position in the chain would help readers unfamiliar with the background. Would completely submerged older volcanoes be worth mentioning? Would Loihi Seamount on the other end of the chain be worth mentioning just to put Kohala into a larger context?


 * A dabfinder tool shows six links such as "axially" in the article that go to disambiguation pages rather than to the intended target page. The tool lives dabfinder here, and you can run it on any article.

Lead
 * WP:LEAD says the lead should be a concise overview of the whole article. The existing lead is more like the introductory paragraph of an essay than a true lead. A good rule of thumb for a lead is to include at least a mention of the main text sections and not to include material that is not mentioned in the main text sections. (I see that the lead got a bit longer since I wrote the sentence before this one, so you are moving in the right direction.)
 * "reducing its height by over 1,000 m (3,281 ft)" - MOS:CONVERSIONS says to spell out the primary unit and abbreviate the secondary unit. Also, if you round the primary unit to the nearest thousand, you should probably round the secondary unit in the same way. I like to use the convert template because it spells and abbreviates automatically, and it does the math. You can hyphenate with the adj=on parameter, and you can add a rounding parameter. Here's what this particular conversion looks like: 1000 m or rounded to the nearest thousand 1000 m. The template will handle squared units, cubed units, weights, velocities, and almost anything you can think of.
 * Some of the primary units in the existing article are imperial, and some are metric. Since this is a U.S.-centric article, the primary units should be imperial. Thus the meters and feet in the example above should be flip-flopped.
 * "and thus constitutes 5.8% of the island of Hawaiʻi" - The Manual of Style suggests using "percent" rather than the symbol in simple cases like this one. Also, shouldn't this be Hawaii rather than Hawaiʻi since you use Hawaii in the infobox? Alternatively, you could add an explanation of the variant spellings. A separate "Name" section, with some etymology, is a possibility for expansion of this article. A general reader might like to know what the Hawaiian terms, even well-known ones like Mauna Loa, mean in English.

Geological history
 * "History" would be better than "Geological history" to avoid repeating a variant of "geology" in two heads.
 * "In addition, the two features align to one another more closely then does the ridge to Mauna Kea, of which it was once thought to constitute a part of." - Delete the last "of".
 * "a change in the orientation of Earth's magnetic field so that the positions North and South poles interchange" - Insert "of the" between "positions" and "North"?
 * "The rock in the younger Hawi section, which overlies the older Pololu flows, is mostly 260 to 140 thousand years, and composed mainly of hawaiite and trachyte." - "thousand years old" rather than "thousand years"? Also, "is composed" rather than "and composed"?
 * "the lowest layers may actually be in the Pololu sect," - Is "sect" the right word?
 * "obtained from Waipio Valley on the volcano's east flank in 1977, were dated replicably to 60,000 years" - "reliably" rather than "replicably"?
 * "The United States Geological Survey has, not surprisingly, assessed the extinct Kohala as a low-risk area." - Delete "not surprisingly", which is an interpretation.

Characteristics
 * "The volcano has several unique geomorphic features" - Wikilink geomorphic?
 * "There is a small string of faults on and near the main summit... " - Wikilink fault (geology)?
 * "The volcano stayed active well into the formation of these mountainside valleys, as the arrangement of the later-life Pololu lava flows, which separated into two directions and often went into Pololu Valley, shows this." - Delete "this"?
 * "and it is believed the valley formed formed from the tumbled-out rock from the landslide" - Delete the second "formed"?
 * "Rainwater easily seeps into the lava, creating a large lense of fresh water... " "lens" rather than "lense"?
 * "dikes cool underground into dense rock with few cracks and vesicles" - Wikilink vesicles?

Images
 * MOS:IMAGES suggests setting most image sizes to "thumb" rather than to a specific pixel width. The infobox image is an exception, and the Kohala side view might be an exception as well, but I don't think the others qualify.
 * MOS:IMAGES also says to avoid creating text sandwiches like the one in the "Districts" section. The section is too short to accommodate two images.

I hope these comments prove useful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 16:35, 21 June 2009 (UTC)