Talk:Macedonia naming dispute/GA1

GA Review

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This is nowhere close to Good Article status. It's poorly structured, overly wordy, a perennial POV magnet, the whole "Greek position" and "Ethnic Macedonian position" sections are a tendentious POV/OR/ POV-fork nightmare, and the "List of Countries" section has massive and continuous OR and sourcing issues, with frequent edit wars. Fut.Perf. ☼ 05:44, 2 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Excuse me, but who initiated this review? And what is exactly this comment of yours here? Are you going to GA review this article? I am not sure if you are the right person to do that, but, let's say you are, these two sentences of you is no proper review at all! You should go the GA criteria one by one, and elaborate.--Yannismarou (talk) 21:39, 2 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I have never reviewed "GA"s, have no idea about the process, have no intention of doing so, and most certainly not here. Somebody posted the tag on the article talk page inviting a review, so I entered my concerns here, as a simple talk page contribution. I would consider "promoting" this article an extremely ill-judged move, in its present state. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:26, 2 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The article was nominated by User:Oneiros, a German guy as I can see, who is not one of the article's main editors. Anyway ... The nomination seems ill-suited to have any future, but, in GAC page there are concrete instructions about an article's GAC review. So, let's wait this review to come (actually you opened it before its time!), and contribute your comments there. As a matter of fact, I could provide a thorough review, but I am afraid that nobody will be interested in implementing what I'll propose. So, I probably won't!--Yannismarou (talk) 22:52, 2 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This article had to go for a peer review first. The list of countries is weak. The references in this section are terrible and sometimes not NPOV. I wonder why the article ended here, there is no way to establish "stability" until we have some good references from third-party sources. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:56, 14 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Review

Ok. I'm going to have a read over this and let you know what I think. It's a decent sized article, so it may be one or two days. ∗ \ / (⁂) 12:44, 13 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've read through the article, and I would have to agree with Future Perfect's comments above. Reading the article I came across frequent concerns, far too many to raise here. Since you've expressed your wish for a list of how it fails the criteria, I made the following.

GA review (see here for criteria)

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose): b (MoS):
Frequent prose and flow issues. GA doesn't require professional writing, but I frequently found myself having to go back over sentences, to stop and try and parse what some sections were saying. Prose usually suffers when there is frequent editing disputes, so when you get the article to a somewhat stable version, get one or two experienced copyeditors to do their thing. I didn't look so much at MoS, but getting someone to do a MoS audit would be a good idea.
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
I do not know Greek, so I cannot comment on how reliable your Greek sources are. There are many OR concerns, as Fut. Perf. pointed out above, in the Macedonian and Greek viewpoints section. You all know what OR is so going through those sections again looking for it will be beneficial. There are many large sections that simply do not have sources - the first four paragraphs of the 'Controversy and conflict' section for example. Please make a concerted effort to reference sections like those.
It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
I think the article does a good job of covering all aspects, unless I've missed something
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
It is stable.
No edit wars etc.:
An article on such a... contentious subject is likely to suffer edit warring. It doesn't appear to have been too bad over the last couple of days, but there are many many POV issues in the text, and I don't have to go back too far to see the instability.
It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
After a cursory glance at the images, everything seems ok.
Overall:
Pass/Fail:
In a nutshell, go through the article, and go crazy with the referencing. Cite anything and everything - that'll reveal OR and other unverifiable information while helping with the referencing issues. Get experienced copyeditor(s) to run through the article for prose issues. The article desperately needs stability also, so try to do your best to resolve all the disputes before the next GA Review. If you have any further issues, don't hesitate to contact me. ∗ \ / (⁂) 00:25, 14 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]