Talk:Mali/GA1

GA Review[edit]

This article is not yet ready for GA status. Please review the comments below.

Much of the article seems to be compiled from very few resources, but what's worse is that I have found entire sections of text taken directly from the source material. For example, the first sentence in the history section "Mali was once part of three famed West African empires which controlled trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt, and other precious commodities" is taken directly from the Library of Congress source text without indicating so. While it is not a violation of copyright (because works of the U.S. government do not have copyright protection), it is by all definitions plagiarism; please correct any instances of such behavior. If entire sections of the work are from another publication, then it may not even be worth completely duplicating it in Wikipedia but rather just linking to the article instead. Please make sure that information and text from the sources is not lifted directly but instead used to create new prose in the article.
Even though more citations are better than too few, it is not always necessary to cite each sentence. If a group of facts come from the same source, then that source need only be cited once.
Sections of the article are rather slim as well. They could definitely be fleshed out to meet GA standards... not too long, but a little bit more than a few sentences per section.

When issues with sourcing are taken care of please renominate for good article status. Best, Epicadam (talk) 03:11, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am reversing my review as Wikipedia's policy at Wikipedia:Copyright problems#Plagiarism that does not infringe copyright does not require quotations of public domain material. As that was my primary reason for the GA fail,[User talk:Epicadam|talk]]) 13:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. miranda 18:21, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]