Wikipedia:Peer review/Geography of India/archive2

Geography of India[edit]

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A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for November 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
This article was original promoted to FA status in 2005 due to the efforts of User:Nichalp but demoted in 2007. With him, I am working on improving the article so that it can regain FA status. After some deliberation, the section on climate was integrated with the rest of the article by stating climate next to the relevant region - for more details, we simply defer to Climate of India. The issues I think still need to be worked on are:

Copyediting and grammar checks
Writing a good, succinct lead
Having enough citations for the important facts (I'd like to know what other facts need citations)

Thanks, Shiva (Visnu) 07:21, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Kensplanet

No all CAPS as in Citation 1
Images should be oriented properly for best visual effect. Check the FA Mangalore.
Please review atleast one article listed at WP:PR, if you want more comments from people.
REF1 is a deadlink.
All facts need to be cited irrespective of whether it's important or no. Most of the facts deal with figures. Citations are recommended.
References need to be exquisitely refined by a copyeditor. For example, pg should be p.
Wikilinks for Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal missing in the Lead.
REF7 (http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rowley/Rowley/Collision_Age_files/J%20Geol%202005%20Zhu.pdf) is used to cite The Indian Plate was originally a part of the ancient continent of Gondwanaland from which it split off, eventually becoming a major plate. In the late Cretaceous Period about 90 million years ago, subsequent to the splitting off from Gondwanaland of conjoined Madagascar and India, the Indian Plate split from Madagascar. It began moving north at about 15 cm/yr (6 in/yr)
- I checked the entire PDF. These facts are not mentioned in the PDF. Please be careful. Recheck all REFS. It may be a painstaking research. But do it.

More comments as the review proceeds. Kensplanet^Talk_{Contributions} 09:33, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from GDibyendu

The map used in geology section looks inaccurate, many parts look somewhat different. Compare the Uttarakhand/Nepal area of this map and the other maps used: it will be obvious why the map looks inaccurate. More evidently, Sri Lanka looks different. I guess it will be all clean when right base map is used. More comments later. Thanks. --GDibyendu (talk) 13:42, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Links that need dabfix, can be viewed here.
~~Last section on treaties, can be either prose or simple table, now it looks like a borderless table.~~
~~Closure of Kolar mines needs a ref.~~--GDibyendu (talk) 14:16, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Some links need to be fixed, please use this link.
Navboxes should be at the end as per WP:Layout#Navigational_footers.2C_categories.2C_interlanguage_links_etc.. --GDibyendu (talk) 18:48, 6 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from User:Redtigerxyz

Highest point - K2: "India officially regards K2, located in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir as its highest peak." The neutrality of this statement is going to be questioned in a FAC. The other highest point, according to a non-Indian source, may be mentioned in the infobox.
IMO, a separate climate section with temperatures table may be needed.
A map with locations of lakes will be a nice addition.
I am not so sure if "International agreements" fits in the article. --Redtigerxyz (talk) 13:13, 22 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from User:Nichalp

Good work. I had a preliminary glance at it.

To answer you query on citations, almost every statement needs a citation since these are hard facts. It's going to be a task. These facts have numbers: The great plains are sometimes classified into four divisions: 7-15 km -- all these need a cite.
Bullets should be converted to prose
Remove the maps I made: Rivers, hilly regions, geology
Remove international agreements – it used to be a prose section but it now needs a separate article.
Islands should be expanded: coral islands, freshwater islands,
Ignore the lead and prose for now. That is reviewed at the last step
Check the precision of the convert templates: Values such as these: 900 km (559 mi) do not need such a high precision value. Set the precision value to negative.
Check the usage of dashes WP:DASH. I think you are using the mdash incorrectly.
History section seems rather sparse
Right align the Indo-gangetic plains image. Notice how left alignment hampers the alignment of bulleted text? It's much neater if left aligned images do not obstruct section headers or bullets; also avoid placing a left-aligned image at the beginning of a section.
3 reefs and 5 --> spell out numbers less than 10
Give more importance to the Sunderbans and Rann of Kutch. Also the backwaters of Kerala and Kuttanad can be incorporated
Poach information from Climate of India into this article to augment instances where geography plays a crucial role in the climate of a state or region.
Focus on how the river system is crucial to agriculture, wildlife and the Indian economy. It's too full of facts.
shrink into rivulets -- not necessarily.
Mention why Thar is a desert. Climate of India might have some answers

=Nichalp «Talk»= 15:28, 23 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from P.Marlow: Something that could really improve the article would be a "Climate" section contains a short summary and a link to the main article Climate of India (as a hatnote). The summary would simply describe the climate as a whole and would introduce a reader to the climate and conditions of the the country in general. Such a section would compliment the others' descriptions of each region, as within the main article there is a detailed description of all their climates. I, myself, will also try and help to develop it.

I don't think having a section on climate is useful. Rather, I have suggested that we meld climate-information as to how a geographical feature of each place affects the climate of the region. So, we can say how the Thar desert is in the leeward side of the Aravalli mountain range, or the coastal regions of western India get more rain because of orthographic rainfall. =Nichalp «Talk»= 08:01, 24 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I had written in the climate details exactly as Nichalp suggests, and I support that way. However, I restored the Climate section since Redtigerxyz and P. Marlow called for it. I also see that the only other FA of this kind, Geography of Ireland, has a climate section. An argument supporting a climate section would be that having the data in one place is easier to read and understand. Shiva (Visnu) 18:23, 24 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My view is that the geography of India should be limited to physical geography. Yes, I did base the FA on Geography of Ireland, but since we do have a dedicated and mature article on the climate, I feel having a sections on climate and geology is an overkill. We can link to these articles in the =see also= section. =Nichalp «Talk»= 18:31, 24 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The "Climate" section integrated into the relevant sections. Shiva (Visnu) 18:47, 24 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I can understand Nichalp's point on a section on climate being overkill, and indeed the existing article is of a good quality and is more than sufficient to tackle the subject on Wikipedia, but I am not proposing a huge section or a replacement for the existing article. Essentially my idea is to have a short introduction paragraph to the subject and link to the main article, which would then deal with the topic properly. Indeed it doesn't have to be anything more than a context or aspect as in the beginning of a standard article.

However, I would very much argue against his view that The Geography of India should be limited solely to physical geography. An article that titles itself as addressing the geography of a given area as a whole, must actually do so. The term is not limited to physical geography and and applies to many other areas, (for example human geography and climate). Of course this article should not be attempting deal with everything geography related, (there should be separate articles dealing with each subject in depth), but rather as a collation and aggregate which gathers together all the information that the reader might need.

Geography is a very loose term, which is why most people wanting to find out about the climate of India might well type in geography instead. An article that doesn't address things like this makes for a very two-dimensional article on a narrow subject matter. This is why Geography of Ireland is effective enough to be a FA, and why we need to follow in its footsteps.--P.Marlow (talk) 22:54, 24 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But doesn't the integration of climate details into the paras on the relevant geographic areas satisfy the need to have climate introduced and briefly discussed? Shiva (Visnu) 19:40, 5 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I see what you mean, and I think that the brief introductions that you've included have helped to improve the relevant sections, however I don't think that they can work as a preamble or an antecedent for the main article Climate of India. Unless we have a "See Also" there is no way of easily linking the the other article-certainly not as a hatnote. Furthermore a casual reader looking to find out more about the climate of India as a whole, or even someone searching for specific climate related information, would look for a section clearly labelled "Climate", and would not browse through each region-related section looking for data that might relate to the whole country. Of course the small section introducing the reader to the climate of the country that I've got in mind wouldn't actually contain with all the information the reader could be looking for, but it would serve as a easier way to link the Climate of India to Geography of India, and so would serve the reader regardless. Having climate info incorporated into the article sections doesn't address the need for a "Climate" section as the that information still remains difficult to navigate and to utilise. After all, the point of having this section is to make the article more balanced and make it easier for the reader to find what he's looking for.--P.Marlow (talk) 17:30, 6 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've restored the "Climate" section and agree with your points. It is simpler to have small section to introduce the subject with specific relevance to geographic areas. Shiva (Visnu) 18:00, 6 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]