Talk:Gene Schoor/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Drmies (talk) 23:37, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Review in progress

General remarks

It's an interesting enough article, but at this time it cannot be promoted to GA. I will outline a few of the issues below. It's not badly written and seems somewhat comprehensive, though also incomplete. For instance, "Death" comes pretty quickly, and the latter part of Schoor's life (certainly the "Litigation" section) is dealt with by only indicating a few highlights--and that's really the period from 1959 to 2000.

Lead

This is little more than a list of jobs, many of which are hardly notable--that is, they're not what the person is noted for. It needs to be in prose, it needs to be more selective, and it needs to outline in prose who the subject is and what their claim to fame is.

Section titles

The alternation (in the career section) between individual nouns and longer phrases is neither elegant nor effective.

Copyedits

I noted a few minor things, like the spelling of Kallman--none too serious though. But the "partial list of books" is improperly formatted (titles need to be italicized, bibliographical information needs to be given), not very informative (who published these books? in what quantities? etc.), and without verification (where are the secondary sources with reviews or even verification of the basic raw data, including a rationale for the selection of these titles?).

References etc.

I don't understand why there is a section with footnotes including complete bibliographical information and a separate section with the same bibliographical information. And there are other issues. References would look cleaner with citation templates, but that's not a must--however, to have some eight individual notes to the same article by Appel, that can't be (and three to an article by Olsen, etc.).

Sourcing

This is the weakest spot. A lot of the info comes from this, and that simply cannot be called a reliable source. Where does the text from the Kennedy letter come from? Note 24, "Information in the above paragraphs collected from", that's not OK either. Now, Google Books doesn't have much to offer, but Google News does (URLs aren't included with the references currently). Also, a quick LexisNexis search produced a number of hits from reliable sources--that's what this article needs if it is to go further.

Some examples of claims/sentences that desperately need reliable sourcing and for now count as original research:

That his books were found across America in school libraries;

That the particular list of juvenile non-fiction is "representative";

That Appel's enthusiasm was typical of school children;

etc.

Criteria

In progress

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

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): well, there aren't any. The article would obviously benefit from some images, but in the meantime

7. Overall:

   Not at this time, no. If new better sources are added, if the referencing system is improved and cleaned up, and if the biography becomes more complete, then it can be relisted. Drmies (talk) 02:30, 12 May 2011 (UTC)