Wikipedia:Peer review/Bill Clinton/archive3

Bill Clinton

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I've listed this article for peer review because i would like to make it a GA and then an FA

Thanks, Pedro J. ^{the rookie} 17:46, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Headings shouldn’t start with “the” – change “The Oslo Accords” to “Oslo Accords”
HUGE table of contents – consider reducing it, possibly by merging some of the shorter sections
At 132 kilobytes, the article itself is too long – should move some of the details / less important information to daughter pages and simply summarize here.
Current ref 197 is mis-titled
No contractions should be used outside of quotation marks
Some of your wikilinks lead to disambiguation pages – should point directly to the intended article
WP:ALT is a requirement for FA – none of your images have alt text except those that get it automatically
Dead links and inconsistent referencing styles are prominent in the References section. All links should be live, websites should have an access date and a title (and author/publisher where available), most if not all books should have ISBNs
Avoid run-on sentences
Needs a general copy edit for clarity and flow
Avoid linking to the same article multiple times
Referencing might be adequate for GA, depending on how stringent the reviewer is, but definitely is not adequate for FA. There should be at minimum 1 reference per paragraph, usually more, references for all statistics, and any potentially controversial statement must be referenced. Remember that as a BLP article, the standards for referencing are higher than a normal FAC
Take a look at WP:WTA and WP:Weasel – certain words introduce and editorial bias and should be avoided. There’s also some non-neutral-sounding phrasing that doesn’t fall under either policy, but that should probably also be reworded
Avoid one- or two-sentence paragraphs
Captions are meant to be a succinct summary of the picture – in the 1988 primary section, for example, the caption is the same size as the image itself – far too long
The blockquote format is used inconsistently – it should not be used for the short quote in the First term section, but probably should be used for the longer quote about the Vietnam War issue.
Should be consistent in referring to Hillary as Hillary Clinton or Hillary Rodham Clinton. “That same year Hillary Clinton shepherded the Adoption and Safe Families Act through Congress and two years later Rodham Clinton succeeded…” – inconsistent.
Under the heading “Travelgate controversy”, a) the text does not use that term, and b) the files controversy is also discussed.
Some of the issues in “Military and foreign events” chronologically belong under the first term. Is there a better way to organize this?
”The Oslo Accords” only mentions the accords and doesn’t actually discuss them – the focus is Camp David
A number of the section titles don’t mesh exactly with the material that the section actually covers
In general, the organization of the article could be done better
There are some problems with the use or lack of hyphens and dashes
Conditional verb tenses should be used sparingly if at all
In “Personal health”, there seems to be a sentence or two missing at the beginning of the section
File:Senate in session.jpg is tagged as lacking author information
File:Bill Clinton 1995 im Parlament in London.jpg uses a deprecated tag that should be replaced

As it stands, I'd say the article would be put on hold at GAN, and might be passed if some of these concerns were addressed. Cheers Nikkimaria (talk) 23:30, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Brief comments

Most of the above comments concern stylistic and organizational issues, most of which I agree with. However, I do not think the article is too long: at 55 kB (8820 words) readable prose size it is still within the suggested boundaries of WP:SIZE. Any major political figure BLP like this is going to be long, because there is much ground to cover and there has to be statement-by-statement citing.

But in addition, the article also has real substance issues, some of which were brought out in Talk:Bill Clinton/GA1 when the article lost its previous GA. For this article to reach GA/FA level, it requires the serious attention of a researcher/writer who's willing to spend time in the library. I'm interested in doing it in the fairly near future (I've done similar work on a number of other political BLPs), but I can't right now as there are some other articles I'm part way through on that I want to finish first. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:57, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As well as i, so let us finish are proyects we have and then come back to deal with the artical and it may reach the GA/FA. --Pedro J. ^{the rookie} 01:06, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

One comment I would like to make is that the 2008 presidential election is far too long compared with the rest of the article – half as long as the section on the first term. It's natural for recentism to creep in during prominent current events, but it's time now to cut back dramatically. A single paragraph should suffice. Good luck! Skomorokh, barbarian 09:59, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]