Talk:Texas State University/GA2

GA Review

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Reviewer: Astrocog (talk · contribs) 15:27, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

   • Parts of this article are copyright violations, due to the close paraphrasing of the university's own PR copy. For just one example, the section on the College of Health Professions, the text is just massaged from here. Even though it's cited (poorly, by the way), it is not appropriate to do this.
   • Links to external sites should not appear in the main article, as happens in the "Students" section.
   • The lead is an unruly mess of trivia about the university, when it should concisely summarize the contents of each main section of the article.
   • The entire article needs a copy edit for spelling, grammar, and other MOS issues. A GA review is not a peer review or a copy edit. I found a couple easily fixable things: one footnote had a space between it and the preceding sentence, and an unnecessary contraction ("didn't"). I'm not going through the rest of the article to fix more of this kind of thing.
   • Lots of unnecessary lists. For example, the "History" section goes through all the name changes, so why rehash them in a list? It's not necessary to list all the departments, etc within colleges.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to ?): c (OR):

   • While there are references throughout, the vast majority are to the university itself. While this is a reliable source for some basic information, primary sources shouldn't be the foundation of an entire article.
   • Many of the citations lack basic information, such as author, date, publisher. This isn't a deal killer for GA, but it's still problematic.
   • There are TONS of dead links, making it impossible to verify some of the references. Archived versions of webpages should be used when possible.
   • Really? A link to a ghost hunter website is your "reliable source" about a ghost legend? Those people think just about any place is haunted. And then the next sentence says, "In honor of this spirit Alpha Psi Omega the Honor Theatre Fraternity gives Ramsey Awards for (their version of the Tony’s) for the yearly production season." Click on the reference and it says nothing of the sort!

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   As a general reader, I feel pummeled by the onslaught of trivia and prose that is in public-relations-speak. Who cares that the cafeteria has Chick-fil-A? Much of the information here is just rehashing the type of thing a freshman or their parents will read on the university website. What a general reader wants is history, broad context, etc. Just give the basics, and expand on that. Don't just retell what the university says about itself in its various webpages. A model GA article will help. For example, Georgia Institute of Technology is a good model to follow. It has a nice layout and prose, its sections are simple, and it avoids the kind of PR creep and trivia that this article is suffering from.

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

   The prose in many places is just paraphrased from the university's website, biasing this article to the university's own view of itself.

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

   Looks relatively stable.

6. 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):

   • None of the images have alt-text.
   • Almost none of the image have a suitable caption that connects it to the text of the article.
   • The image gallery is an unnecessary eyesore. Some of the images, such as the one of Old Main, should be placed in appropriate locations within the text of the article to illustrate it. The rest should be removed.

7. Overall: This is a decent start to the subject matter, but this article is not anywhere near meeting the GA criteria. I suggest getting a peer review, rewriting this article by modeling it after another university GA (like the one I mentioned above), and then renominating in the future.

   Pass/Fail: