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Nominator: Reconrabbit (talk · contribs) 14:57, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 17:05, 30 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• The article failed its GA1 on grounds of prose, underlinking, lack of discussion of interaction with humans and conservation, and the poor state of the dentition and fossils/evolution sections. A cladogram was requested.
  • Prose: most of it seems pretty much ok. I've done a tiny bit of copy-editing.
  • Underlinking: more linking is certainly needed, e.g. Canis must be linked at first appearance in main text (in Taxonomy). Please check all text again.

    Links have been added all around where it seemed appropriate.

  • Interaction with humans: the section seems skimpy but is at least reasonable and cited.
  • Conservation: I can't see the point of splitting Conservation from Threats as they are intimately related.

    I am unsure how to combine these sections effectively. Conservation is now a subheading of "Threats and human interaction".

  • Dentition: astonishingly, this gives no dentition formulae at all: this must be a basic requirement here. Even the mention of dental formula in 'Taxonomy' is not accompanied by the formula.

    Added what Nel and Maas had to say about the dentition.

  • Fossils/evolution: still a very sketchy section. A cladogram: has now been supplied; it needs to be moved to the Fossils/evolution section, renamed to 'Evolution' as the fossil side is so skimpy, and refocused to explain the cladogram, i.e. what does the cladogram show about evolution of Otocyon? What is its nearest neighbour/sister group? When did it diverge from that group? How does it relate to fossil canids? The material in 'Taxonomy' from "However, this species..." onwards is all Phylogeny, by the way.

• home ranges of groups either overlap substantially or very little - so, ranges overlap a lot or not ... my car is either slow or fast ... this sounds as if it's saying something, but it isn't. Please turn it into a substantive statement (expand: when do ranges overlap? why? when don't they?).

  I attempted to address this; the source describes behaviors as differing based on geographic location, but these two geographically separated populations differ in that they are two different subspecies.

  Are you confusing "range" of a subspecies (all of Southern Africa, say) with "home range" of an individual pack of dogs (some square kilometres, which may or may not overlap with the home range of the neighbouring pack)? I don't get what the original statement meant, or how the same sources can indicate what is now stated. Please explain.

  I found the source of the issue - this is closely paraphrased from the Mammalian Species article, which is at the end of the paragraph, that states "Home ranges of groups show substantial or little overlap." without elaborating. It's already stated previously what the size of the home ranges are, and this seems like a superfluous detail to include.

• Nice map!

• All the photographs are on Commons and plausibly licensed.

• I'd consider cropping the threat display image to lose the uninformative grass and fencing background. You could also blur the background slightly.

• [9] Wang needs page number.

  Page number added.

• It is not clear why this article currently uses Vancouver citations. Historically, like the overwhelming majority of Biology including Species articles, it used Last, First (e.g. "Doe, John F.") author format. Indeed it was still in that format on 3 November 2024 just before you started editing the article. Policy states directly that citation format is not to be changed without wide consensus. What happened and why? The default position is that the citation style should revert to the established style of Last, First.

  I am partial to the Vancouver citation style because it standardizes cases where the first name is only given in an initial and spelled out across multiple references. I changed the config back to serial style. Will keep this in mind in the future. I always set the config to use Vancouver name conventions when starting new articles.

• I think this article is almost ready for GA, just a few small comments above. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:55, 31 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]