Talk:Irrigation in Peru

Nomination

Please, review Irrigation in Peru and share your comments regarding editing, content and/or applications. Anunezsanchez (talk) 20:22, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

I would add as an historic fact that the sharp decrease of the indigenous population following the events of the hispanic conquest (mainly due to the new diseases brought by the europeans) was a mayor contributor to the failure of the irrigation infrastructure, an analog process to what happened to mesopothamia after the mongolic and timurid conquest. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.30.108.219 (talk) 21:32, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Page references

This is a well informed and heavily referenced article which are good things. However, it desperately needs page references. Wikipedia articles are required to be verifiable thus, readers should be able to compare the article with its sources. For that it is necessary to provide page references so that readers know in what part of books or pdf documents to look for. Also, as a minor suggestion, it might be a good idea to have the "References" section above the "Sources" section as this is the standard academic practice. --Victor12 (talk) 22:46, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Comments before this article gets reviewed

This article is using a unique referencing system that I have never seen in a Wikipedia article before. Anyways, before this article gets reviewed, the references should all be placed after any punctuation marks per WP:FN. Gary King (talk) 01:07, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Done. --Victor12 (talk) 01:25, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Is there any specific reason why this referencing method is used? Also, I recommend adding references to paragraphs without one, just to show that all of the information is indeed referenced. Gary King (talk) 01:33, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I have added references to each paragraph. Also, Gary King, I use the Harvard Citation Style. I use it because is the citation method I normally use when writing papers. I like it because it allows you to see the name of the author in the main text. So after reading it, and before going into the references you already have a sense of who is the main author referenced in the text and/or who says what. But, again this citation method is just another option to choose from those allowed by Wikipedia.--anunezsanchez (talk) 14:31, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Comments from Scartol

Let me start by apologizing for only now reviewing this article. You've asked me for some time to have a look, and I feel bad that I'm only able to provide these comments while it's listed at GAN. Hopefully I'll be more of a help than a burden. =)

You've got some excellent info here, and it's well organized. You've obviously done a lot of work on this, and you are to be commended for your arduous labor. There are some things that need fixing, but I've no doubt you can remedy them without too many headaches.

• Irrigation in Peru has been – and is expected to remain – a major contributor to increasing the country's food security, agricultural growth, and human development in rural areas. This sentence (the article's first) presents a problem which appears throughout the piece: the appearance of a particular point of view. The use of passive voice is chiefly to blame here: Who expects irrigation to remain a major contributor to improving these elements?

• The second sentence is also problematic: Water resources and irrigation infrastructure are unequally distributed throughout the country, creating very different realities. While this may be a point most (or even all) people agree with, it's still an opinion. The word "unequally" and the phrase "very different realities" are heavy with inference – we should try something more fact-based, like "Water resources and irrigation infrastructure vary throughout the country."

• Speaking of the lead, it should be a summary of the article as a whole; for a page of this length, I recommend 3-4 paragraphs, with short descriptions of each major section featured in the article body itself. If you haven't already, please read WP:LEAD.

• The article could stand some reorganization. I recommend moving "History of the irrigation sector" to the top of the article's body, since the page is meant to provide an overall view of the entire topic of irrigation in Peru. (Chronology is not the only way to approach such a thing, obviously, but in this case – and in most such articles, I've found – it's the best way.)

• Other suggestions about the article's structure:

• Let's rename "Government strategy on the irrigation sector" into "National Irrigation Strategy", and make it a sub-section of "Irrigation development".
• How about combining "Environmental impacts of irrigation" and "Possible climate change impacts on irrigated agriculture" into subheads of a section titled something like "Environmental impacts and effects"?
• I recommend making "Water tariff and cost recovery", "Investment and financing", and "External cooperation" into subheads of a section titled something like "Economics".
• "Annex 1: Lessons learned from the Peruvian model" seems opinionated. I recommend incorporating the information here into the rest of the article. (For example, the paragraph which begins: "Part of the success comes from the Government and WUBs sharing investment responsibilities..." could go in the "Economics" section.) You'll also want to revise wording like "delivering positive results", which is vague and POV. Instead, focus only on facts: in this case, you can just jump to the bit about "combining financial support and capacity building with regularization of water rights".

If you agree with these structural changes, go ahead and make them (or let's discuss them), and then I'll be happy to have a closer look at the individual sections. Kudos again on all of your hard work here. – Scartol • Tok 15:30, 23 July 2008 (UTC)