Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Sri Lanka/archive3

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by Ian Rose 04:02, 5 April 2012 [1].

Sri Lanka edit

Nominator(s): Distributor108 (talk) 09:58, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because I feel we have adequately addressed the issues in the previous peer review. Distributor108 (talk) 09:58, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Sorry to post a negative comment so soon after the review was started, but there are unreferenced sentences throughout the article. I note also that page numbers haven't been provided for any of the PDF documents used as references. I haven't looked at the article in detail. Nick-D (talk) 10:09, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If you could be specific about the unreferenced sentences and and the PDF documents, It'll help us fix those up. Distributor108 (talk) 10:14, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are too many sentences to be specific about - it's pretty obvious from just skimming through the article (though as some examples "As a British crown colony, the island was known as Ceylon, and achieved independence under the name Dominion of Ceylon in 1948.", and "as do aquatic sports, athletics, football (soccer) and tennis. Sri Lanka's schools and colleges regularly organise sports and athletics teams, competing on provincial and national levels." from the first and second-last sections of the article - there are lots more). All the PDF documents appear to be missing page numbers. Nick-D (talk) 10:24, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As a more detailed review, here are my comments:

The article's grammar is a bit rough in places, and it would benefit from a through copy edit for compliance with WP:MOS.
Some data appears to be out of date (eg, figures are often provided for 2010 rather than 2011 or 2012)
Quoting impressive-sounding percentage changes without noting the underlying figures is unsatisfactory. For instance noting that the country has a very fast growing stock stock exchange isn't as impressive as it sounds given that the period of growth was marked by the end of a major war. Is the current market value of the companies listed on the stock exchange very high in comparison to similar countries? The same applies to many of the economic growth and other statistics in the article (eg "Sri Lanka's cellular subscriber base has shown a staggering 550% growth").
Lots of common terms are linked when they don't need to be (for instance "Sri Lanka has a birth rate of 17.6 births per 1,000 people and a death rate of 6.2 deaths per 1,000 people." and "Nearly 50% of them were repatriated following independence in 1948")
"Sri Lanka has also been a center of the Buddhist religion and culture from ancient times, being the nation where the Buddhist teachings were first written down as well as the oldest continually Buddhist country" - the word 'Buddhist' doesn't need to be used three times in one sentence
What's SAARC?
"As of 2010, Sri Lanka was one of the fastest growing economies of the world." - is this still true for 2011?
The history section is probably a bit over-long
"The average yearly temperature ranges from 28 °C (82.4 °F) to nearly 31 °C (87.8 °F). Day and night temperatures may vary by 14 °C (57.2 °F) to 18 °C (64.4 °F)." - where are the locations for these temperature ranges? (I assume that the high temperatures are somewhere in the lowlands and the low ones in the mountains)
The 'Politics' section seems to taken an unduly positive view of the country's credentials as a democracy: Freedom House rates Sri Lanka as 'partly free' and states that "Sri Lanka is not an electoral democracy" and notes problems with the 2010 election which aren't mentioned in the article.
What point in time do the population figures in the (unreferenced) 'Administrative Divisions of Sri Lanka' refer to?
The second paragraph in the 'Foreign relations and military' section is over-long and rather heavy going; it would be better to just summarise the key aspects of the country's foreign relationships
Why is 'The Military Balance 2010' being used to reference some details on the country's military? The 2011 edition is available.
"Sri Lanka claimed itself the first country in the modern world to eradicate terrorism on its own soil." - seems dubious (and rather early to be claiming this)
What makes the ministry of defence a reliable source for the statement that "Marking a rare occurrence in modern military history, Sri Lankan military was able to bring a decisive end to the Sri Lankan Civil War in May 2009."?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sri_lanka_Navy.jpg - lacks any metadata or a source, and can't be assumed to be in the public domain
"it is estimated that GDP will grow by 9.5% in 2011" - did it?
"In 2010, The New York Times placed Sri Lanka at number 1 position in 31 places to visit" - what's the relevance of this?
What's a "A and B class road network"?
"The rich cultural traditions is the basis of the country's long life expectancy, advanced health standards and high literacy rate" - this reads like puffery, and is basically meaningless (how do "rich cultural traditions" lead to to "advanced health standards", for instance, and why do these traditions only explain the good things about the country?)
Why are the country's human rights problems discussed only in the 'media' section?
I'm not going to perform a detailed reference check, but from a quick scan some of the sources don't appear to be reliable. For instance, reference 10 and www.lankalibrary.com (which is referenced seven times) doesn't appear to be reliable sources
I note also that some of the references are to works in Google books, but don't include page numbers.
Why are 50-60 year old histories of Sri Lanka and India listed in the 'further reading' section? These are surely greatly out of date by now. The works in this section should be placed in alphabetic order by the name of their author. Also, some of the works in this section have been used as references.
The number of external links seems excessive (why do we need links to all those board-of commerce/exporters type organisations, and some primary sources about historic visits to the country for instance?) Some of the links in this section also appear to have been used as references. Nick-D (talk) 11:25, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose this version. The referencing is completely at sea, and needs a good looking at. Take the references to the BBC as an example. Ref 26 includes the author, uses yyyy-mm-dd date formatting, and calls the BBC the publisher. Ref 127 doesn't include the author, uses dd Month yyyy date formatting and calls the the BBC the work. Ref 299 throws in (London) for good measure and wikilinks one of the two words of BBC Sport. Refs 12 and 13 have the BBC as publisher for reasons which are not clear to me. Mr Stephen (talk) 11:46, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the comments, they have been helpful, We will address each of these points and resubmit for FaC Distributor108 (talk) 13:22, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.