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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I have recently dealt with several issues which were identified on its GA review page. It would be nice to have some feedback on anything else which needs to be done to get the article upto a GA standard.
Thanks, Sansonic (talk) 16:01, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Finetooth comments: A lot of work has gone into this article, but it will need even more work to achieve GA. Here are a few suggestions for improvement.
- The lead should be a concise and inviting summary of the whole article. My rule of thumb is to try to include in the lead at least a mention of the main points of each of the text sections. The existing lead says nothing about culture, economics, media, politics, health, and some other topics covered in the main text. WP:LEAD has more information about writing a lead.
- Extremely short paragraphs and extremely short sections and subsections give an article a choppy look and feel. The existing article has many examples of both, starting with the one-sentence orphan paragraph in the lead. Two solutions to the problem are to expand or merge, depending on the situation.
- The article includes an unusual number of tables, some of which may contain unnecessary detail. In the "Education" section, for example, the table and accompanying graphs about GCSE pass rates include a lot of small details. Are the pass rates in 2004 in the London Borough of Redbridge and the London Borough of Ealing (or any of the others) necessary? Couldn't the essence of the tables simply be summarized in a sentence or two?
- Other tables could be summarized nicely in a single paragraph of prose. The table in the "Religion" section is an example.
- Although the article includes many citations, some parts of the article are not supported by reliable sources. For example, the "Radio" subsection is unsourced as are the last two paragraphs of the "Print" subsection. Most of the "London" subsection of the "Notable communities" section lacks sources. My rule of thumb is to provide at least one source for every paragraph in an article in addition to sources for unusual claims, statistics, and direct quotations.
- The Manual of Style suggests using straight prose paragraphs where feasible rather than numbered or bulleted lists. For example, it would be easy to replace the short list in "Awards and societies" with a single paragraph of prose. WP:MOS#Bulleted and numbered lists has details.
- Some of the citation urls link to Google Books previews. Since the previews are incomplete and unstable, they don't make good permanent references. (As Google says, " ...you won't be able to see more pages than the copyright holder has made available... When you've accessed the maximum number of pages allowed for a book, any remaining pages will be omitted from your preview." I use the Google previews to help determine whether a book is apt to be useful to me or not; the previews can be very handy. However, I generally try to find printed copies of books that I want to cite in Wikipedia articles; then I can look at all of the pages (possibly including important material not included in the preview) and source article claims to stable and permanent sources. Most, if not all, of the Google books should be available in lending libraries.
- The link checker at the top of this review page finds three dead urls in the citations.
- Other citations are incomplete or malformed. My rule of thumb for citations to Internet sources is to include author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and date of most recent access, if those are known or can be found.
- When all other changes and revisions are made, it would be good to seek a copyeditor to go over the fine points and to check the article against the Manual of Style guidelines. I see many small errors such as sentences that start with digits instead of words, but I don't have time for a line-by-line review. You might be able to get copyediting help via WP:GOCE.
I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. I don't usually watch the PR archives or check corrections or changes. If my comments are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 04:27, 20 November 2010 (UTC)