Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/United States constitutional criminal procedure/1
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First of all, the content seems like a good contribution to free & shareable media. It seems competently written and is probably a great start for developing a GA-class article. Unfortunately there is a gigantic blocking issue here that means it really can't be a Wikipedia GA article as is: WP:PRIMARY, massive overdependence on primary sources, failing GA2b, referenced to reliable sources. Maybe this is the style for an article in a legal review journal, but it's not Wikipedia GA-class referencing style. Of the 179 references, 3 of them are to secondary sources, and 176 are to case law or the Constitution directly. Now, having case law citations "on the side" is fine and useful (whether integrated into citations like "Secondary source p. X, citing Devouard v Wales", or in a separate references group), but there needs to be sources to, say, the kind of textbooks law students in the US read. Citing case law directly is even worse than articles that are heavily reliant on, say, Herodotus; at least with classical-era writers, what they wrote is all we have to work with at times and clearly relevant even when wrong. But there are tens of thousands of modern case law decisions handed down, many of which are ignored as far as precedent, and others that are outright overturned. And others where the dissent is considered more controlling and cited! Citing these can potentially be very misleading. We need a secondary source to mediate which cases are considered relevant. If we're lucky, maybe the article doesn't have to change that much, but someone really does need to go check it against modern high-quality secondary sources and add in references to the secondary sources.
As a secondary concern... and this one is less pressing.. GA3A, broad in coverage. The references mostly peter out after 2012 or so. My understanding is that there has been some changes since due to the Roberts Court (e.g. weakening the exclusionary rule, which seems not to be discussed at all currently). Further, this article appears to be heavily set in the contemporary of ~2012. Maybe a new spinoff article needs to be created on "Evolution of United States constitutional criminal procedure" or the like, but the history of US law is relevant, too. What was procedure like in 1783-1955? That seems completely unexplored currently. So we need both updates on 2012-2024, and possibly some more acknowledgement of historical criminal procedure (even if this might be spun out into a new article). SnowFire (talk) 02:53, 16 December 2024 (UTC)