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Talk:Ron Paul 1988 presidential campaign/GA1

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GA Review

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I am failing this one off the bat - it's a nice article, but there's a lot to do before it is of a GA standard. To wit:

  • The lead is brief and could be clearer and more aptly summarise the contents of the article
  • The background section is one sentence. This could and should be a fully-fledged section.
  • The nomination section isn't particularly well-written - it doesn't even mention who he was running against until the second paragraph in the context of the debate
  • The Convention section needs a good copyedit and some expansion - there are also unreferenced claims in here
  • In the campaign section, the references don't tightly back up the claims made (i.e. the first sentence of the campaign says that he visited universities, and is sourced to an article about a visit to one university)
  • The writing here also needs a lot of work - sentences like "In November 1987, Paul traveled to Rome, Georgia, where he appeared at the downtown Holiday Inn, and labeled himself as a different candidate" are not GA-quality
  • The article says that "newspapers across the country" had endorsed him. Who? Where? These are the sort of details which are missing from the article.
  • The "results" and "aftermath" sections are teeny, and both of these need a solid expansion. Rebecca (talk) 23:53, 27 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
There's not much information on the subject, anything else would not really add much. I disagree with your review but I have no desire to file for a reassessment. Considering that it's been months that I've waited for this, you could've given me a chance to respond and/or make corrections. Thanks for nothing. --William S. Saturn (talk) 01:47, 28 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You've chosen a challenging topic to take to GA status, and I admire that, but the fact is that it's just not comprehensive enough as is.

Here's some more precise suggestions that might get you going:

  • The background section is two lines. It doesn't attempt to explain who Paul is, what his views are, or why he's notable.
  • In the campaign section, what was his platform? It mentions press attention for his ideas, and then skims over it, almost as if it's assuming that someone's already familiar with what Paul believes.
  • In the campaign section, it mentions that Paul and Means were from the right and left wings of the party. Were there any major differences in policy between them? Was there much of a contest besides name-recognition? It sounds like there must have been some drama if Marrou was nearly drafted a compromise candidate.
  • You might want to try and get an editor to rework the prose in a number of places. Phrases like "Means tried to portray himself as a better candidate than Paul" and "As the convention approached, Paul was one of seven candidates vying for the party's nomination. However, he and Means were the only candidates mentioned in the press." aren't that stellar. I'd offer to do this one myself, but it's really not my specialty.
  • One thing I notice looking at the campaign section is a problem that you can really easily get when you're relying on news articles as a sole source - the press reports are documented chronologically as you find something of value - at the expense of a logical article structure. You might want to take another look at you've got and attempt to rework it so that it gives a better summary of what actually occurred.
  • The "aftermath" section is two sentences. This could very easily be expanded.

I certainly sympathise with you on trying to take articles to GA or FA which can be challenging to research (I've done it myself), but you might have to look further afield than the internet to bring this up to scratch. I spot at least three books about Paul's life on Amazon - surely at least one of them would have some helpful content about his 1988 campaign. You're also probably going to have to look to offline newspapers and such from the period - taking a look at the Google News Archive (which is far better for current news than for things as far back as 1988), I see just under 5,000 articles about Bob Barr's Libertarian candidacy last year. I think you might find there's a lot more out there than you realise.

I'm certainly not trying to kill your nomination, and considering that you were waiting so long for a review, I'll happily get someone to conduct a second review if you're prepared to put in the energy to improve this further. Rebecca (talk) 04:36, 28 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate the detailed response. I'll see what I can do. --William S. Saturn (talk) 05:08, 28 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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