Talk:Childbirth in Sri Lanka
 | Childbirth in Sri Lanka was nominated as a Natural sciences good article, but it did not meet the good article criteria at the time (May 7, 2011). There are suggestions below for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated. |
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GA Review
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- This review is transcluded from Talk:Birth in Sri Lanka/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
I am very sorry to say this, but I have read the article and am not able to list it as a GA at this time.
There are some smaller problems, but the most important is the failure to meet GA criteria #3b, "stays focused on the topic". Repairing this will take a lot of work, so I am closing this as not listed, and sincerely hope that the editors here will work, without any stress of a deadline, on focusing the article on its actual subject. When it is improved, please feel free to nominate the article again.
Focus on the topic
From the title, some readers might guess that the subject is childbirth itself, but I believe the actual subject of the article is broader: the social and medical aspects of having children in Sri Lanka, including pregnancy, childbirth, and rituals and care for babies.
Almost half of the article has nothing to do with pregnancy, childbirth, or baby care at all. In the entire introduction to the article, only the first sentence even mentions mothers or babies. The rest is material that belongs in Sri Lanka (the article about the country), not an article about giving birth in Sri Lanka.
I recommend the following as a starting point:
- Remove almost all of the lead and the entire ==Background== section. Shorten the non-birth related parts of ==Health information==. Most of that information does not belong in this article at all. Its presence keeps the reader from finding the real subject of the article.
- Remove information for which no sources exist, such as the ==Extrinsic factors== sections.
- Create a new section on mothers in Sri Lanka, which can include (as subsections) contraception, infertility, marriage, and the ideas regarding pregnancy, as well as anything else that really describes mothers.
- Merge both ==Circumcision== and ==Birth traditions== into the ==Newborn rites of passage==.
- Wherever necessary, add back in the details removed from "Background". For example, rather than having a paragraph about the number of Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians in the country, add that information to the newborn rites: "About 7% of people in Sri Lanka are Muslim. Muslim boys are circumcised between the ages of..." Information about women's literacy might be added to the section on mothers. This way, the reader will see what connection that fact has to the actual subject at hand. This is better than asking the reader to slog through a long paragraph of apparently irrelevant information, in the hope that perhaps later he will need to know it.
Other issues
After you have finished focusing the article on the main topic, but before re-nominating, please have someone check the article for typos and other small grammar errors. It is very easy to leave out a small word or punctuation mark. A common thing to do is to ask a friend or to leave a note with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors.
Again, while the article needs some significant work to meet the Good article criteria, I am impressed with the progress that has been made in just two weeks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
Too much background
I think the ==Background== section contains too much information with no obvious connection to childbirth. For example:
Sri Lanka is a small island nation in the Indian Ocean, off the southeast coast of India – and this matters because specialized medical care is limited in small places? Or it's never too far away, because nothing is more than 300 km away from wherever you are? Or maybe because it's just a short flight to an Indian hospital?
The island is characterized by a tropical monsoon climate that is divided into the northeast monsoon (December to March) and southwest monsoon (June to October) – and, um, maybe it's hard to get medical care when the weather's bad? Or there are seasonal infection risks? Or something?
The terrain is mostly low, flat to rolling fertile plains. Highlands with deep valleys exist in the central-southern interior of the country. – Does this means that if you have to walk to reach medical care, it shouldn't be too difficult? What connection does this have to childbirth?
If the information in the ==Background== section doesn't have a clear connection to childbirth, then we should probably remove it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:43, 12 September 2020 (UTC)