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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I have listed this article to be reviewed because I feel that it's a highly important article and I'm at an impasse to what I should do next (as far as improvement) I know there are probably things that I would overlook that others would easily spot. Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated and noted.
Thanks, Ncboy2010 (talk) 16:59, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
- Comments by Dana Boomer
Hi! I see that you have done quite a bit of work on this article and made a nice start. Here are some thoughts for improvement:
- First, references are probably the biggest issue with the article at the moment:
- There are a ton of dead links. These need to be fixed, as they essentially leave the information they support unreferenced.
- Local government section has three fact tags.
- Besides the fact tags, there are quite a few areas missing references. The majority of the history section is unreferenced, as is the majority of the Boundaries section, the entire Geology and terrain section, significant chunks of the Elections section, etc.
- References need more information. Web refs should have a title, publisher and access date at the very least - authors, publication dates, etc. should be given where applicable.
- The weight given to various facets of the article seems a little disproportionate to me. For instance, the governance of the state is give over three times the amount of space that the history section is... Is two sentences really all that can be said about the geology and terrain?
- There are a lot of short, choppy sections, which make the article flow poorly. These should be expanded or combined with other sections for better flow. Same with lots of short, choppy paragraphs - some are OK, but lots of successive ones lead to poor flow.
- There is a clarification needed tag in the Boundaries section.
Overall, I think this articles needs quite a bit of work on the references before much else happens. Because of the amount of referencing work that is needed, I have not done close checks of prose, reference reliability or images, as these often change as significant referencing work is done. Despite all of these comments, I think you have done a good job in beginning to improve and reference the article. Please let me know if you have any questions, Dana boomer (talk) 03:25, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
- Comments by Disavian
Glancing over the article, I have a few suggestions, many of which Dana has already covered:
- It looks like the History section does not adequately summarize the history of the state - certainly something has happened since 1870!
- Now that I look at it, I feel that a lot of the sections - for example, sports - do not give a detailed enough summary of that aspect of the state.
- Consider using citation templates for all of the references present in the article. {{cite web}} and {{cite news}} are the two I use the most.
- Remove specific image sizes so that the user's set image size preference makes a difference. Also consider adding alt text.
- You may want to combine a few of the shorter sections. For example, cities might fit under geography, and education might fit under infrastructure.
- Sourcing absolutely has to be a priority. As a good guideline, every paragraph should have at least one citation. This will also help you expand each section.
- I'd suggest looking at a high-quality article that covers a similar subject matter. After poking around, I discovered that Virginia is a featured article, so you can probably get some good ideas by comparing this article to that one.
You're doing a good job so far, though :) Disavian (talk) 17:39, 17 February 2012 (UTC)