Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Mali/1

Mali[edit]

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Result: listed. Article met GA criteria miranda 04:39, 13 June 2008 (UTC).[reply]

Recently, Epicadam failed Mali due to these reasons. I personally feel as though this article was not assessed fairly per these reasons:

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.

Under public domain, Wikipedia can use content from the public domain. However, they have to be attributed to the source, under WP:V. The citations should suffice for attribution.

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.

Under V and NOR, attribution is required in order to decipher facts from fiction.

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.

Under the GAC, I don't see any assessment criteria regarding length requirements. The one section that has the fewest paragraphs is the "Regions and cercles" section.

I applaud this user for taking the time out of his schedule to assess this article. But, I feel as though this user did not evaluate the article per GA criteria and would like to request a full re-assessment from an experienced user. Thanks. miranda 05:03, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have gone and taken a second look at the article and would like to reverse my own review and list Mali as a GA. First and foremost, I really must apologize and say that I was unaware that Wikipedia policy did not require quotation of public domain material; I was relying on policies from other academic communities. As a teacher, I expected students to quote all material taken from other sources, even those in the public domain; however, after reviewing Wikipedia's guidelines at Wikipedia:Copyright problems#Plagiarism that does not infringe copyright, it appears that this academic community does not require quotations of public domain material, only citations. As citations are indeed more than fully provided, the article does fulfill its obligations to supply proper references.

My alternate concern, which I did not make clear, was that since portions of text were taken from public domain sources, it was possible that text from other sources, potentially those that do have copyright protection, may have been used without quotations. Reviewing the article further, the text from sources likely to be covered by copyright is little and conforms with the rest of the surrounding text; it is therefore unlikely that there is any such infringement. Since "Mali" does reflect GA standards I would be happy to reverse my review and list it as such. Best, Epicadam (talk) 13:15, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the reassessment. I think we can close this now. miranda 18:23, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]