Talk:Netball in the Cook Islands/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Canadian Paul 05:28, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I will be reviewing this article in the near future, hopefully tomorrow because I refuse to give in to the cold I feel coming on. Canadian Paul 05:28, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing more than a bit of a sore throat, so here we go!

GA review (see here for criteria)

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
It is stable.
No edit wars, etc.:
It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Overall:
Pass/Fail:

I know it's not mandatory to have images for a GA pass, but are there really no free images out there that could help illustrate the article? I just feel like, considering how recent of a phenomenon this is, that there would be a free picture of a prominent player or a match or something out there. Not a requirement to pass, but something to think about.
The "history" section, in addition to being really short, doesn't flow well. It's fact after fact after fact with not much connecting flow between the sentences. In fact, continuing my reading, this seems to be a problem throughout the article. For example, the first two sentences under "World stage" are "Participation in the international netball community has helped raise the Cook Islands' profile globally.[19][21] The national organisation is a member of Oceania Netball Federation." Instead of two back to back facts with no connecting idea, you could start with more of a narrative flow: "A member of the Ocenia Netball Federation, the Cook Islands' participation in the international netball community has helped raise the Cook Islands' profile globally." Even with just this change, you could probably get by without changing the rest of the paragraph. Now instead of a list of facts, it would be an idea or a claim with supporting evidence. Overall what I'm saying is that the article lacks this flow and reads like a chopped up series of facts, which cannot pass the prose requirements of a Good Article. It's kind of difficult to put this into words, but hopefully my example gives you a bit of an idea of what we're looking for.
I think that the "Grass Roots" and the "Men's netball" sections should be worked into the "History" section to, again, create more of a narrative. Right now, the organization of the page reads "Here's a bunch of things I have to say about Netball in the Cook Islands". In addition to making the article choppy to read, it also makes me unable to judge how complete the article is. With a narrative, you can tell where information might be lacking, but here I have no way of knowing whether these are just the basic facts (or topics), some of the facts, all of the facts, or random facts without doing the research myself.
Under "Competitive History", the criteria you have used to select the tournaments/matches is unclear. It should be highlighted with some prose why the list items have been selected (top 10 finishes, best results, all matches on the international stage, or whatever)

There are other, smaller concerns, but I think that right now the overall structure of the article needs to be redone and that extends beyond the reach of a seven day hold. For that reason, I am going to fail the article at this point and encourage another GA reviewer to pick it up once the article has developed a little more. Once these concerns have been addressed, the article may be renominated. If you feel that this assessment was in error, you may take it to WP:GAR. Thank you for your work thus far. Canadian Paul 17:45, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for feedback. I think most of these have been address.

re: #1. I've contacted the people with pictures on Flickr, asking if they could change their license so I can include their images on Wikipedia. I also contacted the Cook Islands Netball Association via e-mail to ask if they could release pictures. I have not heard back from either set. I've also posted on commons asking for pictures from the country and have asked on Twitter. The country itself only has 29,000 people so this may be difficult.

re: #2 and #3. I integrated the three sections together in an effort to improve the narrative flow. I also asked another contributor to go through the article and try to improve the wording to make a more coherent narrative flow.

re: #4. I changed the word some to sample to better reflect that these are just a sample of them. The scores were intended to provide an idea as to how different levels were globally competitive over time.

As I feel like I've addressed your major concerns, I'm going to go ahead and resubmit the article for a candidate as a good article. --LauraHale (talk) 01:24, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]