Wikipedia:Peer review/Scientific opinion on climate change/archive1

Scientific opinion on climate change

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because Climate Change "opinions" are a Social Science topic:

1. WP:STRUCTURE and Wikipedia:NPOV_tutorial#Space_and_balance as necessary to balance the article with other sources and sections.
2. Wikipedia:OC#OPINION and WP:OC#SUBJECTIVE as applies to changing article title because its a single category of "opinion" and doesn't include other reliability sourced categories, from newspapers, religions or organizational members.
3. WP:HATNOTES as being used to WP:OWN and enforce the single category of opinion.

Thanks, Zulu Papa 5 ☆ (talk) 20:14, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

There appears to be a discussion on the article talk page indicating that Peer Review may not be the most appropriate place for this - a Request For Comment may be more appropriate. Also, I am having trouble understanding your request. Perhaps other involved editors could co-operate to either edit this peer review request for clarity, or suggest to ZuluPapa that it be removed from here and taken to RFC? Just a suggestion. hamiltonstone (talk) 23:53, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Ruhrfisch comments: I will be honest - I do not understand what Zulu Papa 5 is talking about here either. Looking at the article, it is not stable and seems to be prone to edit wars. I am not an expert on climate change, nor do I intend to get involved here beyond this peer review. Peer review is also not a place to resolve conflicts / disagreements among editors - RfC would be better there. Still, there are several issues in the article where it does not follow the WP:MOS and could, so here are some suggestions for improvement.

• The External links tool finds at least 13 dead links and several others that are problematic. These need to be fixed if at all possible.
• References are incomplete in the information they provide. Internet refs need URL, title, author if known, publisher and date accessed. {{cite web}} and other cite templates may be helpful. See WP:CITE and WP:V
• The article is a series of statements, followed by extended direct quotations. This is not how WIkipedia articles are supposed to be written. First off the large number of long direct quotes is almost certainly a violation of WP:NFCC, especially 3a Minimal usage. Multiple items of non-free content are not used if one item can convey equivalent significant information.
• I think it also violates WP:MOSQUOTE on the use of block quotes in multiple places (supposed to be at least 4 lines long, or more than one paragraph).
• The article is extremely listy and does not flow well - there is really not much of an article there beyond the "quote farm" aspect of it.
• It seems to me that a history section might be useful, outlining how opinion has changed over time (this is done to a small extent in places, such as the Surveys of scientists and scientific literature section.
• This uses almost all primary sources - the statements of various organizations and surveys. Has anyone written articles on the topic looking at this from an outside point of view (secondary sources)?
• Could some images be added?
• I realize this is difficult to do, especially when there is an edit war ongoing or threatened, but I would try to write summaries, backed up by the refs cited and the judicious use of selected quotations, using secondary sources where possible. As an example of what I am talking about, please this from Science Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8). It merely states that these organizations agree without quoting their statements. Get the idea?

Hope this helps. I do not watch peer reviews, so if you have questions or comments, please contact me on my talk page. Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 05:54, 22 December 2009 (UTC)