Talk:Peak water/GA1

Latest comment: 15 years ago by Daniel Case

I am failing this article for a number of reasons. Extremely representative among them is this statement:

Turkmenistan, one of the republics of the Soviet Union ...

Oh ... my ... God. That casts the credibility of the entire article into deep doubt, and keeps Wikipedia's critics in business (among many others). It's one thing to read quaint things like that in my parents' vintage 1950s World Book set. It's another to read it here. Was this just cut-and-pasted from source text? I actually hope so, for the editor's sake.

Beyond that, despite its 41 footnotes there's still plenty of places where citations are needed ("However, over-exploitation often results in a Hubbert peak nonetheless.", everything in the "water supply" section after footnote 7, "Agriculture, industrialization and urbanization all serve to increase water consumption.". I could go on but I won't). (However, someone thought to cite "Water conservation refers to reducing the use of water". Priorities ...)

There's also uses of words to avoid like "but" and "however" at the beginning of sentences. Inconsistent switching between metric and English units. Peacock terms like "the mighty Indus and Ganges". Unencyclopedic sentences like "Whenever possible gray waste water should be used to irrigate trees or lawns." It almost reads like an essay, particularly when the very first section after the intro tells us about the similarities between peak water and peak oil.

Much of the article consists of indiscriminate, sketchy, sometimes single-sentence grafs broken by tables. For some reason we have short discussions of issues related to a few specific countries, without any indication as to why they were chosen, and hatnote links to longer articles. We have a "See Also" section with way more links than it needs (that whole "peak resources" section should really be a navbox).

If this were handed to me as a paper in response to an assignment, I would have no reservations about giving it an F. Since it isn't, and this is Wikipedia, I'm tagging it with {{cleanup-rewrite}}. Daniel Case (talk) 08:00, 12 February 2009 (UTC)Reply