Wikipedia:Peer review/Quoll/archive2

Quoll

Previous peer review

This peer review discussion has been closed.
We've listed this article for peer review because we are trying to get new suggestions to get back into the flow of wikipedia. We are hoping to have an FA by June, so critical reviewing is welcome.

Thanks, Marissa927 (talk) 04:42, 11 January 2012 (UTC) and user:Savetheoceans

Finetooth comments: This is interesting and generally well-done. However, it will need further improvement to have a chance at promotion to FA. I'm not a biologist, and I can't give much advice about content or comprehensiveness. Nonetheless, I have quite a few suggestions related to prose, layout, and Manual of Style issues.

Lead

• "deposits in Queensland" - Link Queensland and mention that it is an Australian state?

• "indicates that the quoll evolved around 15 million years ago in the Miocene" - Link Miocene?

• "which occurs during the winter season" - Tighten by one word by deleting "season"?

• "A female gives birth to up to 18 pups, of which only 6 survive to suckle on her teats." - This has a slightly comical unintended meaning. Do the other 12 survive for other reasons? I think I would stop with a terminal period after "survive".

• "All species have drastically declined in numbers since Australasia was colonised by Europeans, with one species—the Eastern quoll—becoming extinct on the Australian mainland and is now found only in Tasmania." - This is not a grammatically correct sentence. Suggestion: "All species have drastically declined in numbers since Australasia was colonised by Europeans. One species, the Eastern quoll, became extinct on the Australian mainland and is found only in Tasmania."

Taxonomy

• "The name Dasyurus means "hairy-tail", and was coined by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1796." - I would expand on this a bit and make it into at least a two-sentence paragraph instead of a one-sentence orphan. Who was Saint-Hilaire, and what was his specialty? Did he have a particular interest in marsupials?

• "There is no evidence the local indigenous people used the word in the Sydney area." - Link Sydney and explain where it is (not in north Queensland). You can't assume that foreign readers will know that it is on the east coast of Australia.

• Link "polecat" and "marten"?

• The Manual of Style recommends using straight prose paragraphs rather than bulleted or numbered lists, if feasible. It would be easy to turn the list in this section into prose paragraphs, and that's what I recommend. While doing that, you should remove the double bolding from the six names; double-bolding is another Manual of Style no-no. The links by themselves are sufficient, and you shouldn't use even those for the three of the six that have already been linked on first use earlier in this section.

• "Rising sea levels due to an increase in global temperature caused a land bridge that once connected Australia and New guinea to be covered up with water." - It might be useful to say when this happened. Also, use a big G on Guinea.

• Link University of New South Wales.

Description

• The sections toward the end are short enough that the article begins to look choppy, and the images do not fit into the appropriate sections in every case. Ideally, images do not overlap section boundaries or displace edit buttons. I would consider merging sets of two short sections to make fewer but slightly longer sections. For example, "Description, distribution, and habitat" could be a section, and "Behaviour and diet" could be another. When combining, it would be good to eliminate repetition such as "The quoll is a mostly solitary creature... " , which partly echoes "Quolls are largely solitary, nocturnal animals." Another repetitious sentence begins "The quoll is mostly carnivorous... ", which echoes the earlier "The quoll is a carnivorous marsupial." My advice is to merge and tighten these sections and to rearrange the images to avoid section overlap.

Diet

• Link bandicoot.

Threats

• "The meat is supposed to be buried at least 8 centimetres (3 in) underground, but has been found under minimal dirt that a quoll can dig around to get to it." - This is not a sentence. Suggestion: "The meat is supposed to be buried at least 8 centimetres (3 in) underground, but it has been found under minimal dirt that a quoll can remove."

Conservation efforts

• "a University of Sydney project revealed in 2010 is teaching them to avoid eating the invasive amphibians" - More detail would be helpful here. How do you teach a quoll not to eat a cane toad?

• "The reason for the young parents was the fact that older male quolls can become violent and kill the female if they do not want to mate." - Do you mean that the park managers selectively bred young quolls with other young quolls, or do the quolls themselves make this choice?

References

• Citation 3 is incomplete. Citation 16 is incomplete. Citation 26 lacks the date of most recent access.

• A single p. is the abbreviation for a single page. Citation 7 should therefore be "p." rather than "pp."

Images

• The images look good. The distribution map File:Quoll range map.jpg is good; however, if you can find out what the source of the data was, it would be good to add that to the image license page. In other words, how did the mapmaker know where to put the shaded areas on the base map?

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 04:17, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

• A few comments, mainly on the biology:
  • I find the reproductive behavior of older male quolls (mentioned in the conservation section) rather weird. Normally, it's the females of a species, who have to bear much more of a burden usually, who are "choosy". Any ideas in the literature as to why this happens?
  • Also in the conservation section: Why should the female be inexperienced? The male needing to be inexperienced due to the weird behavior mentioned above, I can see, but what was the logic for the female being inexperienced?
  • I did one slight bit of cleanup in the initial paragraph.
  • You might want to mention the connection with the likewise-endangered Tasmanian Devil a bit earlier, as in part of the lead - people are likely to find it interesting.
  • Is there any phylogenetic research not using the mitochondria (rRNA being the most likely)?
  • I note that the "Extant Dasyuromorphia species" banner (at the bottom) doesn't classify by tribes, resulting it not showing the relationship with the Tasmanian Devil, etc. Perhaps this could be improved?
• That's about all I can see at the moment. Allens (talk) 02:39, 24 January 2012 (UTC)