Talk:Monarch butterfly migration/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 09:39, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your patience in waiting for me to respond. Barbara ✐ ✉ 15:38, 28 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks. I'm back now and hope we can close this out promptly! Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:40, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You are the one deserving thanks, you have been quite patient in the whole process. I am content with this leisurely pace instead of trying to complete the review in a week or so. If this becomes too tedious, let me know and I can withdraw the nomination. I can then continue to work on it and contact you when I believe I have addressed all the issues with the article.

The Very Best of Regards, Barbara ✐ ✉ 12:25, 11 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

References

~~Several paragraphs are uncited, or end with uncited statements. Some of the latter may belong with the cited text above it, but this can't be assumed. All need citations, please.~~

I removed the entirely uncited section on Habitat since that information is contained in the Monarch butterfly article. I also made a section on the topic of day length not visible to the reader while I locate references for this content. Though I know I have read the content somewhere, it will take a bit to relocate it. Barbara ✐ ✉ 15:44, 28 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Several of the organizations listed in the table in Conservation programs are uncited; other are not bluelinked (and they could be); others are linked directly to external sites, contrary to policy: those links should (if reliable) be converted to citations.

I have begun the conversion of links into citations. Barbara ✐ ✉ 14:09, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

~~Refs 84 and 89 to Monarch Watch are not linked and are not published books, journals, or newspapers. Are the documents accessible in a library, or how?~~

These references have been removed and the content is still supported by the remaining references. Barbara ✐ ✉ 14:18, 14 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

~~Ref 93 to Brower Fink Brower Leong 1995 doesn't go anywhere.~~

I moved the whole journal section to my userspace. I want to spend more time in incorporating these sources into the article in the appropriate places. I'm not sure why the journal section even exists at this point. Barbara ✐ ✉ 14:24, 14 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Refs 139, 140, 142, 143 seem more like notes than refs, they don't verify anything so they need to be replaced with citations.

Structure

The article is divided into 17 chapters, for no obvious reason, and the intended structure of the article is not easy to discern. It would be helpful to have no more than about 7 chapters, chosen to make the article's structure and 'story' clear. For example, Extinction and Conservation are plainly related, and Conservation programs and Proposed policies (and maybe Politics too) could go inside that section too. Similarly, you could usefully group Migration routes, Roosting sites, and Overwintering sites (you might have a chapter on Geography, say). Then, why are there separate sections on Southern and Northern migrations, with a third on Migration routes? A bit of reorganisation would help here.

Comment- I will locate the MOS for entomology topics since I wrote this article before I had even heard of MOS and restructure the article to the appropriate guidelines. Barbara ✐ ✉ 15:58, 28 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

MoS or no MoS, some kind of logic to the structure is required. Basically we need a small enough no. of top-level sections that the bones of the article are immediately comprehensible. 17 of anything isn't that. Further, the structure can be rationalized by regrouping sections to make more sense, not a MoS matter, as I've now proposed in the article. We're down from 17 to 8, by the way. Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:24, 11 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have been working on making the article more 'compact' and reducing the number of sections. Though this task is not finished, I hope you concur with how the sections have been restructured. Barbara ✐ ✉ 12:28, 11 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the organization/topics/headings have been improved to a more logical structure. Barbara ✐ ✉ 14:24, 11 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Me too.

Comments

The subsections of 'Direct observations', especially 'Types of data collected' go into far too much detail. Suggest that whole section is reduced to one paragraph summarizing the main points. The material seems to overlap with the accounts of monitoring methods in 'Butterfly counts', so some rationalization is required.

I've removed the redundant material and the content that is too detailed. I am taking a look at the whole article to see if it is over-detailed in other places. Barbara ✐ ✉ 14:26, 11 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The 'Butterfly counts' text is verbose and repetitive within the section as well as with other sections as just mentioned. Some of it is not far off duckspeak: "Determining the range will reveal the expansion or contraction of the butterfly's normal range. The range of the monarch does vary year." Whole section needs cutting down and copy-editing.

This section has been whittled down and is less verbose. Barbara ✐ ✉ 14:26, 11 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The 'Tagging' section is also verbose, in fact, why don't you copy-edit whole article for verbosity and repetition. The paragraph in Tagging, "The official record for the longest tag-recovery ..." is way over the top; it might merit one sentence or so.

I agree with your assessment on this section. I have removed a large part of the content into my draft space because there is enough material still 'out there' that will support a stand-alone article some time when after this review. Barbara ✐ ✉ 12:31, 11 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Part of the verbosity problem is down to underlinking; for example, I've added a main link to 'Mark and recapture', which is the subject of another article; same goes for 'Butterfly counts'. There is no need to have more than one sentence on either of these here, as describing them is not the purpose of the article (a link is sufficient, with perhaps a brief word of explanation, in each case). In fact, that means there's no need for a section on it, the whole 'Population and migratory study methods' could be collapsed to a paragraph or so.

A Butterfly count is not the equivalent of a Monarch butterfly count. Butterfly counts include counting the number of Monarch butterflies along with other species. Monarch butterfly counts are performed to assess the numbers of migrating/roosting monarchs. So there is enough of a difference to have content on counts. I have whittled the section down a bit. Barbara ✐ ✉ 09:52, 15 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

~~'US National strategy' - having "three goals including:" followed by two bullet points is a bit strange!~~

Strange indeed! Now it's fixed. Barbara ✐ ✉ 09:59, 15 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

~~Why is Peninsula Point Light, Michigan needed in See also? The remaining articles could probably be linked in the article and removed, too.~~

The "See also" section has been trimmed and the topics are wikilinked in the article. Barbara ✐ ✉ 21:37, 16 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

~~The 'Policies' section is mainly bullet points, one uncited, two in sentence case; these might (all) be better as flowing text.~~

I have been working on this section and hope to finish it tonight. Barbara ✐ ✉ 02:21, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Done. I noticed some problems with a few of the references and I will be working on these in the next days. Barbara ✐ ✉ 02:41, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Images

Permissions are ok but we don't need 3 nearly identical images of butterflies roosting on trees.

Though monarchs roost in all three of these locales, the major roosting sites are in California and Mexico and so I retained those images and deleted the one from Texas. Barbara ✐ ✉ 15:52, 28 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Still not convinced by the logic - if the images were distinctive of place then I'd buy it but since it's just Ms in trees the image=place equation doesn't really work.

I certainly see your point. The roosting places are very different from one another and I am not sure that is in the article at this time. Migrating monarchs east of the Rockies end up roosting in mountains in central mexico where great care is taken not to disturb the butterflies, yet the largest roosting sites in California are in urban areas! This is an interesting distinction. Perhaps a description of the roosting sites needs to be added. Barbara ✐ ✉ 14:14, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea, if you do that then the images will slot into place naturally. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:38, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Closure

Nom has requested the closure of this GAN for external reasons. If anyone would like to complete the job, feel free to address the remaining GAN items above, to renominate the article for GAN, and to ping me; I'll then take up the reins where we left off. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:17, 7 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Source

A systematic review: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2019.00099/full Best Regards, Barbara ✐✉ 18:47, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]