Talk:Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority/GA1

GA Review

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I am failing this article because it does not come close to meeting WP:GACR criteria #3: broad coverage of the subject.

The article consists of an overly detailed, somewhat disjointed six-paragraph lead section (note that WP:LEAD specifies a limit of four paragraphs). There is then a section with nothing but a table. There is then a long section dealing with a very recent (2010) privatizing discussion. There there is a section that is mostly just a list.

But this agency has existed since 1934. There is no history of the agency in this article, no discussion of how it came to be created (an effect of Prohibition repeal; there's a brief mention of the Virginia Department of Prohibition Enforcement being merged into it in the article, but nothing else), no description of what role it has played over the years, no account of its pattern of growth or changes in responsibilities if any, no discussion of how the revenues brought in by the agency have changed over the years. There is no discussion of how effective it is in law enforcement or whether its assigned powers have changed or whether it gets into turf wars with other law enforcement agencies or how it interacts with the federal ATF. There is no discussion of how societal changes or the changes in drinking age or the greater attention to the dangers of drunk driving may have affected the agency's role over the years. There's no naming of the current board members/commissioners who run it or discussion of past notable board members/commissioners. There's no discussion of past thoughts of privatizing it; the 2010 section comes out of the blue and is badly overweighted compared to the rest of the current article.

Some of this history is plainly visible at department web site, see here and here for example, but good secondary sources should also be used to give a balanced picture. Google News Archives shows 3,400 hits for <virginia abc alcohol>, for example.

These coverage problems are fundamental and will require more than a one week period to fix, so I am not placing the GAN on hold. Of course the article can be renominated without prejudice at some later time. I have not evaluated the article based on any of the other GACR criteria.

Reviewer: Wasted Time R (talk) 15:00, 30 December 2010 (UTC)