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Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/United States/1

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United States

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Result: Kept. That said, thanks epicadam for bringing it up here; I think some more improvement will take place as a result, which is always good. —Giggy 09:11, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have nominated this article for reassessment because it has been a year since the article has undergone any sort of nomination, peer review, or detailed assessment. There are currently sections and paragraphs which go entire unreferenced and I feel like the article may have changed substantially since its last review. Best, epicadam (talk) 15:05, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the article isn't ideal in its current form. My main axegrinding is over the length and WP:SUMMARY issues and I've pointed this out on the talk page. As someone pointed out there, GA/FA review of this article will run into questions of "pet facts": is the geography or the military more important? Is Prohibition a critical period in American history or just an item to cover in the main history article? I would urge any reviewer to be extremely cautious before recommending adding more material. Somedumbyankee (talk) 16:50, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. There's only one section lacking in-line citations, namely, the section on "States", which is a short summary of another main article. At first glance I see no content in the States section which requires in-line citations. There is no requirement that each paragraph requires in-line citations. Are there specific statements you have in mind which need citations? The concern on article length is interesting. No doubt, this one is a whopper. Yet certain topics require longer-than-normal articles in order to be reasonably complete. Take, for example United Kingdom, which is also lengthy. I'd suggest that too short a an article on a major topic does the encyclopedia's readers a disservice. Perhaps Somedumbyankee can provide some additional information on the Summary concerns. In the meanwhile I'll try to take a closer look at the article. Cheers, Majoreditor (talk) 17:48, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn't really make a determination about whether to recommend delisting the article, as it is true that not every place needs citations. I just wanted to put the article up for GAR because as important as it is, it hasn't undergone any sort of reassessment for at least a year. Having said that, I think there are some things that should and could be cited, such as the population of the American colonies in 1770, and other hard-number figures that should have citations. And then there are things about the 2008 election in the history section? What? How can that already be history and in the whole grand scheme of American history, the 2008 election is the one to be highlighted on the main page? There are just a number of things like that where I feel like people added things just to get their two-cents in, or to highlight whatever the current topic du jour. epicAdam (talk) 18:01, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This diff is an example of some of my concerns about level of detail in the article. Somedumbyankee (talk) 18:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for providing some specific examples, Somedumbyankee. I'd tend to agree that several of them don't need to be in the article. My hope is that these sort of content issues can be resolved through discussion on the article's talk page or Peer Review rather than through GAR. Frankly, those may be better forums for tuning up this article than GAR. What are your thoughts? Majoreditor (talk) 02:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see a problem with leaving it as a GA (keep), it just needs some disciplined slash and burn. Somedumbyankee (talk) 01:23, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]


  • Note. This page seems to have been hacked in such a way that all links to this page are redirected to something else unless the user is logged in. This needs to be fixed or the page should be flagged. User:StageCraftColin
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