Wikipedia:Peer review/September 11 attacks/archive1

September 11 attacks

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I'd like to get the article to featured article status. It recently passed the Good article review and I'd like to identify any potental issues or things to improve before submitting it to FAC. Thanks, A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 01:46, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

• Step One: Go through every single reference and make sure they work and change the access date to the current date...external links here are mostly sound.--MONGO 03:13, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Before I submitted the article to WP:GA review, I ran the article through webchecklinks and fixed all the broken links. I just ran it again, and there are no dead links, but there are a few redirects. I can look into those, but do you really think it's necessary to update all the access dates? There are nearly 300 links in the article. Should I check each one manually or does running webchecklinks count? Manually checking each one is going to take a lot of time. A Quest For Knowledge (talk)
    • quick observation based on reading fac, check them all, cause someone else will and will make a stink about it. --Rocksanddirt (talk) 18:37, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

• Have a think about WP:ACCESSIBILITY, and how the article would be viewed by those using a screen-reader. If you don't supply alt text for an image, a screen-reader is likely to announce the filename in its place. For some filenames that can be very annoying, and you can give much better information to visually-impaired readers with well-chosen alt text. Remember the caption is announced immediately afterwards, so pick your alt text to complement the caption, not repeat it. There's a tutorial on improving the accessibility of data tables that's worth a read. For example, the table in the article would benefit functionally from changing the first row "Deaths (excluding hijackers)" into a caption – although you may not find the way it is rendered as aesthetically pleasing, it is worth it for the benefit it brings to the visually-impaired. Hope that helps, on behalf of the "entourage", --RexxS (talk) 12:03, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
  • OK, I'm not familiar with WP:ACCESSIBILITY, but I'll read through it and work on it over the weekend. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 12:25, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

• The lead section should not contain any references. Instead, these references should be transferred to the article's body, unless they are redundant.  Cs32en Talk to me  01:56, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
  • That's not accurate, read WP:LEADCITE. Information in the lead that is not general and is likely to be challenged may still need a citation. The MOS further advises that complex, current or controversial subjects may require many citations in the lead, and 9/11 is arguably all three. If the lead contains a statement that is not repeated in the article body then that needs a citation regardless. Hut 8.5 10:27, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

For a non-featured article, that's true. A featured article, however, should have a perfect lead section, and a perfect lead section does not contain any content that is not included in the text's body. In many cases, the disputes that have occured are not about any specific content was supported by some reliable source, but about whether the source is up-to-date, whether the words used in the source are encyclopedic, what the majority of sources say. In many cases, the sources that are actually being used in the lead have not played a central role in bringing these discussions forward.  Cs32en Talk to me  11:52, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

• • • • Again that's not accurate. WP:LEAD says that "this does not mean that everything in the lead must be repeated in the body of the text", and it is not correct to say that "a perfect lead section does not contain any content that is not included in the text's body". It's not a case of "remove all citations from the lead", they have to be considered on a case-by-case basis and evaluated by editors. Hut 8.5 12:50, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

FWIW, I took a look at the last 4 featured articles that appeared on Wikipedia's main page (Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia, Oort cloud, Kylfings, HMS Lion (1910)) and 3 have cites in their lede and 1 doesn't (although for one of the articles, they only have 2 cites in their lede). But there doesn't seem to be any rule against having cites in the lede so I would think what we have now is fine. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 13:44, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

There is some ambiguity regarding citing leads in FA's, but I think it should either have many or none...I also think that since this has been at peer review for almost 3 weeks and there have been few issues discussed, it needs to be taken on to featured article candidates.--MONGO 17:41, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

I can't say that I'm a fan of formulaic 'rules' to determine issues like citations in leads. I rather think rational analysis should guide us. The best lead sections should serve to define and introduce a subject, and then summarise the rest of the article. I can see little value in citing the summary part of the lead, since it will already be cited in the relevant part of the body of the article. But surely where the definition and introduction bring up a claim that is likely to be challenged, we ought to be citing that? Such claims are most likely not repeated and cited elsewhere in the article.

Having said that, I agree with Mongo, you've probably got as much as you can from peer review, and the article looks in pretty good shape to me (at least once you've finished the alt text), so why not move on to FAC? --RexxS (talk) 00:40, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

I just finished adding alt text, so if there are no more suggestions being made (after over two weeks in PR), it's time to get it to FAC. Shirtwaist ☎ 11:51, 23 August 2011 (UTC)