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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I've put a lot of work into it and I'd like to see it reach Good Article or Featured article status. Please point out where the article needs improvement, some tips for doing so, citations that are required and I will source them and complete the article.
Thanks, Biatch (talk) 05:22, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
Finetooth comments: Ballarat is certainly interesting, and this article looks promising. However, it will need a good deal of work to bring it up to GA standards. This is not a complete line-by-line review, but here are several suggestions for further improvement:
Claims, sourcing
- My rule of thumb for meeting WP:V is to provide a source for every paragraph as well as every direct quotation, every set of statistics, and every unusual claim. Many paragraphs in the existing article include no inline citations to sources. Claims such as "Greater Ballarat also has some semi-rural suburbs of 2-acre (8,100 m2) to 20-acre (81,000 m2) blocks within 15 minutes of the CBD that are very popular with families which include Miners Rest and Bunkers Hill" are not common knowledge and should be backed up by reliable sources. Other examples of statistics needing sources appear in the "Demographics" section. These are only examples, not a complete list.
Done have removed the claim stated
Sections and subsections
- To keep articles from looking choppy, it's a good idea to merge or expand extremely short paragraphs and extremely short sections and subsections. This article has an awful lot of short subsections and one-sentence orphan paragraphs, at least some of which could be merged to good effect.
Images
- I added a second colon to the file names on File:Ballarat montage.png so that the linked file names would appear without the images. I used to have trouble with this until another editor showed me the work-around, which is to add a colon before the word "File".
- The license page for the montage has other problems, as indicated by the tag. I've never done a montage, so I scrambled around a bit this morning to find an example of how a featured article uses and licenses a montage. If I were doing a montage, I'd think about organizing the information in the same way as File:NYC Montage 12 by Jleon.jpg. I would also upload the montage to the Commons. There's a bit of a learning curve associated with Commons uploads, but adding free-use (not fair-use) images there makes them more widely available to Wikipedia projects.
- MOS#IMAGES advises against displacing heads, subheads, and edit buttons with images, overlapping section boundaries with images, and creating text sandwiches between images on the opposite sides of the page. The existing article has all of these layout problems, which can usually be solved by moving images to different locations and by making sections big enough to accommodate the images. Sometimes, though, a section or subsection simply has too many images.
References
- Many of the citations are incomplete. For example, citation 5 is a bare url, as are many other citations in the article. Citations to Internet sources should include author, title, publisher, date of publication, URL, and date of most recent access, if all of those are known or can be found. I like using the "cite" family of templates to help me organize my citations. You can find these at WP:CIT. (Don't mix them with the Citation family, also found at WP:CIT.) Since citation 84, for example, uses "cite web", and is complete, you could simply imitate its form. The template family includes "cite book", "cite journal" and so on, each with its own parameters.
Heads and subheads
- Rather than repeating "Ballarat", which is part of the article title, it's better to recast heads and subheads per WP:MOSHEAD. Something like "Since 1990" would be preferred to "Contemporary Ballarat". Done
Other
- The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page find 13 dead urls in the citations and 4 links in the main text that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets. Done
I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 19:40, 5 February 2011 (UTC)