Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Highland cattle/archive1

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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 archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 14:47, 30 July 2015 [1].

Highland cattle[edit]

Nominator(s): TheMagikCow (talk) 10:42, 25 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about a breed of cattle. This would be the first FA for cattle breeds. I have been working on this for a while and have done 2 peer reviews which have been addressed. It passed GA and a subsequent DYK, all new experiences for me! First FAC so I await all comments! TheMagikCow (talk) 10:42, 25 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Squeamish Ossifrage[edit]

First, welcome to FAC! The review process for prospective featured articles is markedly more stringent than the DYK or GA process. Unfortunately, I don't think this article is quite ready to meet the criteria here:

  • There are several maintenance tags (clarification needed), which are considered to be a quick-fail condition at FAC.
  • Reference formatting is a problem. As the primary editor, you're free to choose from any of several citation styles, but you need to pick one and apply it consistently (I prefer the cite family of templates, myself). Templatization (or strict manual adherence to a standard) would fix a number of formatting problems.
  • There's some art to dealing with web sources: identifying what should be deemed the website's name versus what (if anything) should be listed as its publisher. As a guideline, unless the site uses the ".com" suffix prominently in its branding, it's probably part of neither.
  • Many of these references are simply incomplete. Reference 2, 12, 16, 17... there's just not enough bibliographic information included here.
  • Formatting aside, I'm uncertain that some of these constitute the best, high-quality sources available. A to Z Animals is a tertiary source aimed at a youth audience. Temperature Climate Permaculture is a blog, as is Willow Brook Park. Cruachan Highland Cattle is the personal website of a specific Australian farm.
  • One of the hardest requirements of the FA standard is comprehensiveness. That is, an FA-quality article is expected to have evaluated as broad a selection of sources as reasonably possible. This article is cited almost exclusively to websites, mostly to breeders, breeding organizations, and local interest groups. But there are some print sources, especially a number of scholarly journal articles, that discuss aspects of the topic not currently represented: social behavior (here and here), (lack of) heat tolerance (here), and diet (here). I did not look for books germane to the topic, but I imagine that there will be valuable references of that type as well.
  • Prose could probably be tightened somewhat. In particular, I suspect the breed standard bullet-points are better discussed in prose. Because I think there's quite a bit more information available to add, I'm not going to provide a truly detailed prose review at this time. I did note some duplicate links (house cow, Limousin) and some probably overlinking (Canada, for example).

I'm sorry to have to recommend against promotion for your first visit to FAC. Please don't be discouraged; take a look at the commentary on other candidates to get a feel for the particular expectations of this process. I do believe there is quite a bit of work to do for this article before it meets the FA standard, but I hope to see this article back here once it is ready. It's a hard process, but in the end, elevating an article to stand among the project's best work is worth the effort. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 14:48, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for those comments Squeamish Ossifrage (talk · contribs)! I have began to work on them and will hopefully re submit this article when it is truly ready. TheMagikCow (talk) 10:09, 28 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, per above, I'll archive this review. When you've completed your improvements (and after a minimum of two weeks from today, per FAC instructions), you're welcome to renominate. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 14:46, 30 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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