Talk:Water supply and sanitation in Colombia

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Good article Water supply and sanitation in Colombia has been listed as one of the Geography and places good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
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Contents

[edit] review

I've signed up to review this, but have been delayed for various reasons, will start next week, and count hold time from then. I note that there are many unreferenced statements, and the article needs careful copyediting as per manual of style - as an obvious example, some headings are capitalised other than on first word. Jimfbleak (talk) 06:38, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your collaboration! If you have any questions or need help, feel free to contact me or post it on the discussion page.--Kerres (talk) 09:27, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Good Article nomination

GA review (see here for criteria)
  1. It is reasonably well written.
    a (prose): b (MoS):
  2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.
    a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
  3. It is broad in its coverage.
    a (major aspects): b (focused):
  4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.
    Fair representation without bias:
  5. It is stable.
    No edit wars etc.:
  6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
    a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
  7. Overall:
    Pass/Fail:
  1. many unreferenced statements
  2. needs careful copyediting as per manual of style - as an obvious example, some headings are capitalised other than on first word.
  3. References are a mess - I fixed the formatting for refs 1,2,16,17, but we still have references and sources - if the sources are used, in-line them using the <ref name = > format if necessary, if not take them out. The very first ref, immediately after the first table, is not in-lined to appear in refist
  4. Does not conform to WP:LEAD
  5. unclear if the Colombian government has waived its copyright on the banknote shown.

[edit] Renomination

The issues raised above have now been fixed and the articles has been renominated. Looking forward to comments.--Mschiffler (talk) 02:14, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] GA review comments

I will place the nomination on hold. In my opinion this article is close to GA status. I think with a little work it can pass. Here are my comments based from the Good article criteria

  • Well written:
    • Lead: The section "History and recent developments" is not adequately summarized in the WP:LEAD. Expand the lead slightly to cover more.
    • spectacular - This word could be considered a Peacock term. Unless the source used says this, I wouldn't use this word.
    • "Coverage in rural areas is lower than could be supposed," Supposed implies speculation. Suggest changing to something like "Coverage in rural areas is below average."
    • There are sections that are only one sentence long, these either need to be expanded or merged with other sections: "Water use", "Efficiency" "Change in tariff" and "Investment". "Water use" could be merged with "History" I suggest merging all of the tariff sections. Investment could easily be merged with Financing.
    • Merge "External cooperation" with "External links"
  • Factually accurate and verifiable:
    • Last paragraph under the section "Policy and regulation" needs a source.
    • References: While not explicitly required, most GA articles have a consistent style for references, either using the inline citations or Harvard Referencing. This article has 2 sections for citations, "References" and "Sources". I strongly suggest merging these two sections and using inline citations. Anything that is in the sources section that is not used in-line should be deleted or moved to External links. My personal choice is to use: Wikipedia:Citation templates. From past experience this will take about an hour to convert footnotes to use these templates. But it does make it easier to expand the article later. These templates force me to include the relevant details. Plus your sources will match the formatting used for sources of the same type across Wikipedia.
  • Broad in its coverage: Yes.
  • NPOV: Yes, well done.
  • Stable: Yes
  • Images: 3 used, all with PD,CC or GNU license

[edit] Other suggestions

These are not required in the GA criteria, but are friendly suggestions:

  • Suggest renaming some of the headings. In my opinion headings should have short names:
    • History and recent developments -> History
    • Centralization under INSFOPAL -> Centralization
    • Strong public utilities in the largest cities ->Urban areas
    • Successful private sector participation -> Private sector
    • Successful examples of community-based service provision in peri-urban areas -> Peri-urban areas
    • The situation in rural areas -> Rural areas
  • Access: The caption for this chart doesn't look right to me. However, I have never used a chart in any article I've worked on. So I don't know if this is how captions to charts are typically done.

Davemeistermoab (talk) 05:54, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Reaction to comments

These are very useful comments. I just have two points of clarification: First, the lead section is so short, because when the same article was reviewed to become a good article on the Spanish Wikipedia we were told the lead section was too long, so we moved most of its content to the overview section below the lead section. What you'd like to see in the lead section (a summary of the sector history) is included in that overview section. Second, external cooperation and external links are actually quite different subjects. I have expanded the external cooperation section somewhat to make that clear. Ideally the external cooperation section should have more explanatory text, thus making it clearer that it is not just a collection of links, as it was in the initial version.--Mschiffler (talk) 15:35, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Update

With the recent changes, most of the items mentioned have been resolved. One that remains is the separate sources and references sections.Davemeistermoab (talk) 02:19, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

done --Kerres (Talk) 15:07, 2 March 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Successful good article nomination

I am glad to report that this article nomination for good article status has been promoted. This is how the article, as of March 2, 2008, compares against the six good article criteria:

1. Well written?: You have done a good job of translating spanish material
2. Factually accurate?: Article is well sourced using authoritative sources.
3. Broad in coverage?: Very
4. Neutral point of view?: Yes
5. Article stability? No edit wars, some expansion occurred during the GA review
6. Images?: All tagged with GPL, CC, or PD license

The article is quite long. If any further expansions are attempted, I would be careful to compress existing sections that may no longer be relevant. There is a large backlog of GA nominated articles. I encourage you to help in the review of an article. If you feel that this review is in error, feel free to take it to Good article reassessment. Thank you to all of the editors who worked hard to bring it to this status, and congratulations.— Davemeistermoab (talk) 16:33, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Comments

I've read part of the article so far and it generally looks good. Well done. In the Access section, I find this sentence confusing: "Data for water[17] and sanitation[18] based on "Reproductive and Sexual Health in Colombia".[19]" What data is it referring to -- the table above it? But then why does the table also have footnotes? And if the data are based on footnote 19, then what are footnotes 17 and 18 for? I suggest putting the name of the study "Reproductive and Sexual Health in Colombia" inside a footnote only, unless there's some reason to mention it and then use it in a full sentence, which that isn't.

I find that this sounds too repetitive, having already appeared in the lead section: "...access to water increased only slightly from 92% to 93%..." If it could be put into different words, maybe expanded with a little more information or using a different word from "slightly", then I think it would sound better. For example, maybe "In 2004, access to water was only 1% higher than in 1990 (93% versus 92%)."

Good work. Thanks for doing these articles. --Coppertwig (talk) 21:37, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for putting in my suggestion, but I changed my mind and reverted it. Maybe it's OK, but now I'm wondering whether it wasn't right to subtract 92% from 93% and conclude that there was a 1% change. For example, if 92% was rounded off and was really 92.4%, and 93% was rounded off and was really 92.6%, then the difference would only be 0.2% which might round off to 0% but would not round off to 1%. Sorry about that. Maybe it's better to leave it the way it was, even if repetitive. Also, I think it's good to mention the sanitation numbers there too. The lead is supposed to be a summary of the article. There can be information in the lead that's not in the rest of the article, I think, such as how to pronounce a word, but usually it's better to have the information in the body of the article and if possible expand on it. See WP:LEAD.
"The water and sanitation sector in Colombia has undergone a cycle of centralization and decentralization over the past decades." Could you be more specific about when "over the past decades" is, so that the statement won't go out of date? If it means a period of time of several decades ending in 1994, perhaps the order of the sentences could be rearranged and the sentences could be reworded to make this clear. (Maybe not necessary to specify, actually, since it's specified later in the article.) -- after reading further in the article, I see now that "a cycle" means one cycle. I thought it meant repeating many times. Maybe I'm the only one who would misinterpret it like that -- I'm not sure. Maybe "a cycle" is ambiguous and can mean something that goes around and around many times, or it can mean going around once. The phrase "over the past decades" seems to suggest something that happened many times during the past decades, rather than something that included a steady state for 4 decades. Maybe just changing it to "within the past decades" would help make it clearer. Changing "a cycle" to "one cycle" would help a lot. I think I'll make these changes.
Names of organizations: I did Google searches setting preferences to English articles only and searched for "Instituto de Fomento Municipal" Colombia (372 hits) and "Municipal Development Institute" Colombia (768 hits). So it seems that the English-language name for the organization is more common in English-language text. I suggest using the English-language name in the sentence with the Spanish name and acronym both in parentheses. It would be good to try to be consistent, i.e. use the English name for the other organization too, (with Spanish and acronym in parentheses). The other organization had zero google hits for either the English or Spanish name, except this Wikipedia article! If another organization elsewhere in the article is known much more often by its Spanish name even in English text a different convention could be used, though. I.e. being consistent is nice but not necessary. I would avoid having "or" between the two names in the sentence, except maybe between the two things within parentheses. That's so that the reader can read just one of the names and skip what's in parentheses, to save time for the reader, and still have a meaningful sentence.
"At the national level the water sector institutionally depended on the Ministry of Health" If this is still true, use present tense. If not, it would be good to indicate what time period or at least an approximate ending date.
(I've read to the end of Decentralization section.) --Coppertwig (talk) 20:32, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
Can you specify which organization you mean when you say "the other organization" with zero Google hits? Concerning the Ministry of Health, the article mentions that at the end of the 1980s responsibility was transferred to the Ministry of Economic Development.--Mschiffler (talk) 22:08, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I should have been more specific. By "the other organization" I meant "Empresas Departamentales de Acueducto y Alcantarillado". I suggest putting the English name of the organization first unless the Spanish name is used a lot in English publications; except that I think that if one organization happens to have the Spanish name used more often than the other, it still may be best to put the same language first for both of them. WP:Use English might provide some guidance, although it seems to be talking only about article titles. These are just suggestions -- some other ways of doing it may be fine, too. --Coppertwig (talk) 00:59, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lead section and overview

I'm not completely sure of this, but I think Wikipedia articles are not supposed to have a section with a title like "Overview" or "Introduction". Instead, they're supposed to have a lead section of up to 4 paragraphs at the beginning which has no section heading, (that is, it's the part before the first section title,) then some sections with titles and (I think) those titles are supposed to be about meaningful subtopics such as "History" etc., not general such as "Overview". (See WP:LEAD.) Currently the article has a lead section of one paragraph, and an overview of 4 paragraphs. I suggest that the heading "Overview" be deleted to combine the lead section with the overview, and that the combined section be shorted to four paragraphs, perhaps a little shorter than the paragraphs are now. Some of the information about 1994, for example, sounds a lot like what is presented later in the article; it could be shortened more in the lead in order to reduce repetition. (Shortened but not completely removed. "The lead should be able to stand alone as a concise overview of the article.") I hope this suggestion is helpful. --Coppertwig (talk) 17:34, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Good point. Will look into it. By the way, do you think we should try to nominate the article as a featured article candidate?--Mschiffler (talk) 22:05, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I don't have enough experience with the featured article process to provide an opinion on whether to nominate it. (However, why not be bold?) --Coppertwig (talk) 01:39, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] More comments

  • "Drinking water use has decreased by 25% between 1996 and 2001. Tariff increases and the inclusion of low income users who did not have access to piped water before influenced this trend." Does this mean people are actually drinking less water? I don't think so: I think it means they're using less water for things other than drinking. I'm not sure. Perhaps it would be clearer if it said "Drinking-quality water use...". If part of the decrease is because low income users are being counted who were not counted before, then "has decreased" isn't really accurate. It would be more accurate to say that per-capita use by people with piped water has decreased. I would think that supplying piped water to the low-income people would lead to a real increase, even if the per-capita use by those with piped water decreased. I would also think there would be an overall increase in the amount of piped water used, since more people are using piped water.
  • "Departamento Nacional de Planificación (DNP) or National Planning Department." Again, I would suggest using just one name (either the Spanish or the English) in the main sentence, and putting the other in parentheses. Just to clarify what I was saying before: it's OK to use the Spanish first for some and the English first for others, I think, if there's a good reason to do so, but within the same sentence or paragraph (or section of the article) it may be easier for the reader if all organizations have the same language first. Maybe English first is better because this is English Wikipedia, or maybe Spanish first is better because that's the real name of the organization, especially if we don't have examples of the English name being used in English-language publications. Sorry to get so complicated. Basically, I'm just suggesting to take out the word "or" and put one name in parentheses.
  • "Colombian municipalities are responsible for “securing that their inhabitants are given domestic services of water supply and sanitation in an efficient way by public companies”." If the original is Spanish, then the original Spanish needs to be provided too, I think (maybe in parentheses or in a footnote). If this is a translation by a Wikipedian, I suggest changing "securing" to "ensuring". (If it's an original quote in English, don't change it.)
  • "Over the last years, the number of companies had increased and the direct service provision by municipalities had decreased. " I suggest inserting "few" before "years". I suggest changing "had" to "has" in both cases, unless there is some reason for using that verb tense. If there is some reason, then probably some more words are needed to set the context of when this is all happening. --Coppertwig (talk) 01:39, 29 March 2008 (UTC)