Wikipedia:Peer review/Domestication of the horse/archive1

Domestication of the horse

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because the article has been very well organized and the sources and references have been quoted very meticulously. It has all the what it takes to be a GA. Thanks, Nefirious (talk) 09:35, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is certainly broad, cleanly written, and interesting. My main concern is with sourcing and interpretation; it's hard to tell whether an interpretation is coming from a reliable source or from the contributor(s) to the article. The fix for this is to source the interpretations or, if they cannot be sourced, to omit them.

• Sourcing: A good rule of thumb for citations is to give a source for every set of statistics, every direct quote, every claim that might reasonably be questioned, and every paragraph. There may be exceptions to these guidelines from time-to-time, and the lede may not need many citations if the equivalent material is cited in the main text sections. I note that some of these unsourced claims or paragraphs have been flagged with "citation needed" tags, but others might easily become flagged as well. For example, the entire "Horses in ancient warfare", which includes many dates, quantities, and other claims that are not common knowledge, is almost entirely unsourced. That means it does not satisfy WP:V. The same can be said of most of the "Horses interred with chariots" section and other substantial parts of the article.

• Analysis: The "Archeological evidence" section begins with unsourced material, including the sentence, "Few of these categories, taken alone, provide irrefutable evidence of domestication, but combined add up to a persuasive argument." This is a conclusion presumably based on evidence, but it needs a source; otherwise it appears to be a conclusion drawn by a Wikipedia editor or editors. Wikipedia editors, even specialists in the subject matter, are not usually reliable sources in the sense defined by WP:RS. Ditto for any other analysis of the evidence presented. The conclusions or interpretations need to be sourced as well as the evidence.

• Date ranges such as 4000-3500 BC take en dashes rather than hyphens, thus: 4000–3500 BC. Other ranges such as "Botai settlements in this period contained between 50-150 pit houses" also take the en dash.

• WP:MOSNUM#Unit conversions says in part, "Generally, conversions to and from metric units and US or imperial units should be provided, except:... ". Thus "two spoked wheels set in grave floors 1.2-1.6m apart... " should appear as "two spoked wheels set in grave floors 1.2 to 1.6 metres (3.9 to 5.2 ft) apart... ". I like to use the {{convert}} template for the conversions because it automatically spells and abbreviates the quantities correctly as well as doing the math. Any quantities in the article that appear in metric only should be expressed in imperial units as well. Thus 3mm would become 3 millimetres (0.12 in).

• Linking. Terms such as phenotype and genotype in the lede should be linked on first use. On the other hand, a common word like meat, which is linked in the lede, probably does not need to be linked. Warfare should not be linked twice in the same paragraph of the lede. Reviewing all of the links and possible links in the article is a bit tedious but a good idea.

• The dabfinder tool that lives here finds at least seven links in the article that go to a disambiguation page rather than to their intended targets.

I hope these few suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing an article on a topic of your choice. Finetooth (talk) 20:46, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi Finetooth. Thanks for your helpful comments! I am going to leave the metric/endash/wikilinking/etc. cleanup to someone else for now (Nefirious? You want to help?? Please do!), but I am curious about some of your sourcing comments. I think some of the things you mention might be sourced, just several sentences go to the same source and hence the footnote is a ways off, but I think you have caught a couple of things that needed to be caught as well -- but the article is one I have looked at so many times that my eyes are rummy-- so if you could be so kind, can you just toss in a few "fact" tags at the spots where you are seeing problems? I can see what I can do to fix those. A lot of the sourcing was done by an editor who is no longer on wiki, so I may have to do some digging to find additional material. Thanks again! And Nefirious, doing the metric conversions and adding the endash syntax is pretty easy, I'd sure appreciate some help with that stuff! Montanabw^(talk) 06:13, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

I sympathize. It's often harder for me to improve an existing article that's long and complicated than it is for me to start from scratch or from a stub or start-class article because the long article requires that I check all of the sources and compare what the sources say with what the article says. I don't have time to do that kind of close checking for each of the articles I review, but I sample here and there when something looks suspicious to me. In this case, reading as a non-horse person, I got the impression that a general overview was being imposed on the article from somewhere, but I couldn't tell where. Finetooth (talk) 20:02, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Nefirious loves the article, and I'm flattered. And a general overview/Pre-GA review IS useful! But I have also run the GA gauntlet, and know that it's not quite there, but I don't have the energy to take it all the way through right now, especially because I'm helping someone else shepherd an article there. So like I say, I'm fine with tagging any potential sourcing problems to fix as we go! Thanks! Montanabw^(talk) 23:03, 10 August 2009 (UTC)