Talk:Bear/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: Sasata (talk) 07:02, 4 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Bear is an important, high-traffic article that deserves good workover. Unfortunately, this article has arrived at GAN prematurely. This main deficiency is the lack of citations, and lack of source diversity. There are simply far too many paragraphs (sometimes entire sections) without a single citation, and several others where a citation appears somewhere in the middle of the paragraph, so that the following sentences are unsourced. Because the research involved in attributing these unsourced bits is time-consuming (I know, I've been there!), I will have to quick-fail the GAN; please rectify this before returning the article to GAN. While I'm here, I'll list some other things that could help improve the article:

use convert templates to give both metric and imperial units

Done Beeblebrox (talk) 20:12, 6 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

there's bursts of unexplained or confusing jargon in the text that needs to be better explained. Examples:

"Even among its primitive species, such as C. minor, it exhibits typical ursid synapomorphic dentition such as posteriorly oriented M2 postprotocrista molars"
"The dental formula for living bears is: " I shouldn't have to go to another article to figure out what this means. Also, where's the ref?

The vocalizations section should be converted to prose form (and add a ref)

wikilinking destiny appears to be low. For example, the section on breeding has no links. I would suggest linking sexual maturity, litter, estrus. Remember that terms that may seem obvious to you may not be so to the grade 9 student reading about the topic.

Done except for the "evolutionary relationships" section, which is practically written in Latin. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:46, 6 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The "Names", "Myth and legend", "Symbolic use" look more like assorted collections of interesting (but largely unsourced) facts that need to be developed into paragraphs.

Reference formatting needs a makeover as well, several refs are little more than bare URLs; ideally, all refs would be in proper citation templates

A couple of those books in Further reading look like they would have been good sources for the article; a quick check of Amazon selections (category nature/bear) reveals quite a few other books that might be consulted.

In the section on Diet and interspecific conflict I think it would be more accurate to say "interspecific conflict" rather than "interspecies conflict". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alyjohnsonkurts (talk • contribs) 00:51, 14 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]