Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Bangladesh

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[edit] Bangladesh

This is about Bangladesh, a south Asian country. This article has improved a lot in a recent month or two. There are lot's of references, the language in NPOV, and the article now has sufficient pictures. Thanks,--ppm 15:44, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Is it at all possible to make the boxes at the bottom be larger so they can be readable? Homestarmy 15:46, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
(done--ppm 15:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC))
  • Strong Support: Of course, I've been working on improving the article, and after handling all the issues raised in the peer review, I feel this article has become worthy of being a featured article. Thanks. --Ragib 16:03, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Support: Very well-written and well-sourced. I have followed it through the peer review and major issues have been addressed. One of the best country articles. This one is definitely worthy of becoming an FA. Thanks.--Dwaipayanc 16:14, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. All the issues raised have been adequately addressed. Here are a few more suggestions for improvements, that are entirely optional per my views. In the second paragraph of "Geography and climate", there's an external link within text. See if it can be chaged to inline ref and moved at the bottom. Also, the colour of "medium" in "HDI" is difficult to read. If its not a part of standard template (prescribed), change it to something easier to read. Also, in 1024x768 resolution, there's very high image density in "Subdivisions", "Geography and climate" and "Economy". What I have seen in many FAs is that they goagainst the MOS norm of right-aligned image and make the images alternate between left-aligned and right aligned so that the article looks beautiful. Rest looks great enough to have my support vote.Oppose as of now. I am able to find a few glaring mistakes even without going in detail. The name of the country in Bangla is written as "বাংলাদশ" while it should be "বাংলাদেশ". The size of Bangla fonts is so small throughout that its very difficult to read. See Rabindranath Tagore for the size I would request. There is no mention whatsoever that the article uses Indic scripts. Another example of improper spelling can be found in "Subdivisions" section. The administrative division "Sylhet" is written as "সিেলট" while it should be "সিলেট". Make these corrections and I will revisit it in detail. -Ambuj Saxena (talk) 17:27, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
    I changed HDI/medium to ordinary black, FA's India and Pakistan do the same. The geography issue has been handled.--ppm 07:55, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • I have fixed both of the spelling issues. I added the {{IndicText}} template as suggested. I also increased the font size of Bangla text (though it seems to be a client side issue, rendered fine in IE before) to make the font as big as in Rabindranath Tagore. Please check it now. Thanks a lot for pointing these out. --Ragib 17:46, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
More observations: The article has absolutely nil wikilinking of dates. The only date wikilink I could find (outside of infobox) was of the day when Operation Searchlight started. There has to be a lot of them for the users. The date of Bangladesh getting independence is also stated only in the infobox, and should also be stated in relevant places elsewhere like either the lead or in History. There is incinsistancy in English and Bangla. In English its written "Gôno Projatontri" while in Bangla its "গনপ্রজাতন্ত্রী". Decide if its single word or different and stick to it throughout. The wikilink to MP in second paragraph in "Government and politics" goes to a disambiguation page; fix it. Similarly Bihari in "Demographics" and few other places. Check for others too. I was able to find a couple in a random check, not extensive. The religion break-up claims source as CIA, I think it should be clearly specified as "CIA World Factbook", which I believe is the source. In "Subdivisions", it says "Each police station, except for those in metropolitan areas, is divided into several unions". I think its the region of jurisdiction that is divided (its common for us in Indian Subcontinent to use it but we shouldn't assume others will also understand what it means). Fix these and I will have a look again. -Ambuj Saxena (talk) 18:17, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Dates are linked correctly as per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). It's pointless to link lone years. Dates like April 12, 2006 are worth linking and this article does that. Sheehan (Talk) 18:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Though its not always useful to wikilink lone years, I prefer doing them in years of related activity. For example, if someone sees an year of starting of a rebellion, he might be interested having a look at the related events that happened around or before it. Initially even I found it pointless to wikilink years. Even for complete dates, I never found any urge to click and explore. But over past few days I have realized that it might be useful for people too much interested in history. But still as the rule says, do it with the idea in mind whether it would help the reader. Obviously it was a bit too much to say "there has to be lot more...", but this article completely lacks them. I myself don't object to the article for this only. But there are other things that I want to be fixed before I give my support vote. -Ambuj Saxena (talk) 18:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
The year 1971 is already linked. I'm not sure if the other years need to be wikilinked. Thanks for pointing out the other issues, which I belive have been fixed by now. Let us know what other corrections you want to see. Thanks. --Ragib 18:59, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
In fact, this article was de-datewikilinkified (awful terminology, I admit) to a great extent after a previous peer review.--ppm 19:10, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
More observations: Here are a few more things to consider. That Bangladesh is "under-developed and overpopulated" are both measurable and hence neutral, however I find writing it "ill-governed" a hint of POV. A bit more addition to the wikilinking dates debate, I would like to see in particular wikifying of "1947" in the lead as its both the independence year for India and Pakistan and hence highly relevant. Adding wikilink to "Bollywood" when discussed in "Culture" should also help. Another minor issue is that "Culture" section refers to Kabadi as national game, while infobox in "Government and Politics" refers to as sport. Rest looks fine and if these issues are addressed (which shouldn't be a problem), I would gladly give my support for this article. -Ambuj Saxena (talk) 19:16, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Removed ill-governed (the governance issue gets mention later -- thanks), changed game -> sport, wikilinked the first appearance of 1947--ppm 19:37, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Dates: Ambuj, please don't encourage contributors to make trivial chronological links. This issue has been firing away on the appropriate talk pages; please have a look. Tony 04:57, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
I have already accepted my mistake, Tony. So please don't pursue the matter further. The only suggestion I made after that was to wikilink 1947, which I believe is an important year. Anyway, it wasn't something for which I held back my support vote. -Ambuj Saxena (talk) 12:29, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Other issue raised have been handled. Thanks,--ppm 18:48, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support Wonderful article and a model of proper date wikification - overwikification of dates is one of the great plagues of wikipedia.... Bwithh 21:41, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Support: This article has gone through some major revisions in the past two months and most of the edits were done cleanly - resulting in a good and stable version. A good point worth noting would be the fact that all(as far as I'm concerned) of the issues raised in the peer review were acknowledged and corrected quickly. As for style, the article uses MediaWiki footnotes combined with havard refs which works well for citing references. External links also follow general Wikipedia style guidelines like including the access date. The Bangla displays fine on IE and Firefox once East Asian language support is enabled in XP. Sheehan (Talk) 18:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support Congratulations to Ragib on the excellent work. Rama's Arrow 20:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment- What's up with the question marks? --Osbus 23:53, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
    There are no question marks. In case you see some, that means you are missing the fonts, which is a client side issue. {{IndicText}} was added to indicate that you might need to have the rendering support. Thanks.

--Ragib 23:59, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

All right, sounds good. --Osbus 14:03, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support Looks spiffy to me, good enough for an FA if all that stuff about the language spellings is correct of course. Homestarmy 00:05, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Extreme Support This is the model of what an article should be, especially with the references. It looks much better than any article I've read about Bangladesh in a print encyclopedia. In fact, Image:Dhaka-panorama.jpg looks good enough to be a featured picture itself (even though it contrasts with the big and crowded Dhaka I know). ςפקιДИτς ☺ ☻ 03:40, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support Looking at the edit history, I think ppm has done quite a bit of work on this as well. One of the authors may wish to post a message at Wikipedia talk:Notice board for India-related topics or contact Nichalp and others to get further critique. Saravask 04:55, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Comments. There has been a consensus around removing the countries navigational templates like {{Southern Asia}} and {{Asia}} and using instead "International ties" templates (like {{Pakistan ties}} and {{India ties}}). Could someone create {{Bangladesh ties}}? CG 16:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I created it. Please feel free to improve it. I have not added it yet though, will wait for some other comments on the topic.--ppm 17:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Ok, I completed the change proposed.--ppm 20:24, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support - although I feel it should benefit with a light copyedit by a professional. I have one issue: êktara, đhol, Môemonshingha gitika, and Ţhakurmar Jhuli are witten with non-English text, which would be hard for a normal user to guess what the character is. Please convert it the normal English alphabet. =Nichalp «Talk»= 17:52, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
conversion done--ppm 18:30, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. (Although it is a long time since I did any Latin): in regards to country articles, si erat sic omnium. Batmanand | Talk 21:35, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Support: I hope the team that worked on this article will bring more BD articles to FA standard. --Blacksun 21:39, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. This is an excellent article. —Eternal Equinox | talk 01:32, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support, excellent work. --Terence Ong 02:35, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Robust Support as per all the above. --Shawn 17:38, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment. Why does this article have something on the order of three times as many sources as the average geography article? Has there been any attempt to achieve economy in references? For example, to verify if several facts can be found in the same source rather than using two (or more). / Peter Isotalo 21:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
    Well, there are some references that cover more than one citations. But most of the facts couldn't be found in the same source, to the best of my knowledge (which may be wrong of course). Anyway, the cite.php tool came out from January this year, and this made references easier. The older geography related articles haven't converted to this reference format, and hence may have signifantly less references. I think it is always better to have detailed citations for each fact (WP:V). Anyway, for a comparison with other articles, check Pakistan, which got FA status last week or so, and has 39 references. So, I think the number of references here in Bangladesh are fine, and comparable to other similar articles. Thanks. --Ragib 21:27, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
    I'm referring to sources, not footnotes. Pakistan has 14 separate references. And I'd say it's absolutely ludicrous to have one footnote per fact, since that means at least one footnote per sentence. You've obviously managed to avoid that. / Peter Isotalo 21:47, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
The reason for many references in this. 1) Not too many books are devoted to Bangladesh, specially not recent ones. So its hard to get hold of one book that will conver lot of facts. 2) Some facts are quite recent, many (scholarly) papers are from 2000's, for example. I belive this is a strength of the article, rather than using a single older reference (even if available). There is one point of possible economy, though. We refer to banglapedia multiple times, and each article is listed as a seperate source. Merging this will lower the ref count. I will wait for input. --ppm 21:56, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Sounds good. There's a certain point when the amount of sources used for a single article will simply overwhelm the reader and actually make the article less verifiable. More of everything isn't always a good thing.
Peter Isotalo 22:12, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Okay, with that and other changes, I brough down the source count by 13 5, without reducing referencing. I'll keep looking for optimizations.Suggestions are welcome--ppm 22:41, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Good work. Support. / Peter Isotalo 10:11, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. Great job, guys! The article is asthetically pleasing and thorough to boot. --Ttownfeen 22:51, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment—It's good, but needs a copy-edit before promotion. Tony 05:02, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Support I believe that this article is very good compared to other articles that have been featured. If those have been featured then why can't this article? Astuto 22:05, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support I'm giving my support, although it looks like the article has more than enough. Sean WI 00:43, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Oppose Need more subdivisions. EKN 04:42, 16 April 2006 (UTC)EKN
  • Would you be a bit more specific please? Do you mean you want to see more info on subdivisions? The country is not so big (144,000 sq km), and *all* the subdivision information is presented currently. The subdivisions section is supposed to be a summary, and more detailed information is linked to in the section. Other featured articles, such as India, Pakistan also have similar summarized subdivisions sections. Thanks. --Ragib 04:49, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong support as per Ambuj Saxena. 72.137.62.171 04:51, 16 April 2006 (UTC)