Wikipedia:Peer review/Black Death in England/archive1

Black Death in England

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A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for January 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I think it's pretty close to FA-level. But every time I nominate an article for FA the main concerns seem to be with the language. I may be a bit sloppy with my English at times, so if anyone could check that all the commas are in the right place etc., and that the meaning comes across clearly, that would be great.

Thanks, Lampman (talk) 19:33, 7 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ruhrfisch comments: Very interesting and generally well done - here are some suggestions for improvement.

I do not do copyedits but agree this could use a light polish. Have you tried asking in the copyedit section at WP:PRV?
Section headers do not follow WP:HEAD in that they repeat parts of the higher section headers, so as one example in the "Consequences" section, "Economic, social and political consequences" should just be "Economic, social and political" (we already know they are consequences). While the word "Plague" is not in the title, what do you think of calling the "Victims of the plague" section just "Victims"? In any case "Who were the victims" should be changed - perhaps to "Identities"??
I thought the article did a good job on the start of the pandemic and then kind of petered out towards the end (of the article and pandemic). The whole "Recurrences" section, especially the part about the Great Plague of London in 1666 seems too brief. What about the village that quarantined itself and stopped the further spread of the plague (forget the name)? Or else it needs to make clearer that the Black Death part is just the first occurrence of the pandemic.
Should some words in the first sentence of the lead be bolded? Perhaps The pandemic known to history as the Black Death entered England in 1348, and caused the death of between a third and more than half of the nation's inhabitants.
The lead image is OK, but kind of bland - keep it in the article, but perhaps File:Plague victims blessed by priest.jpg would be a better lead image? Or are there any English Dance of Death murals such as one finds on the Continent?

Hope this helps. If my comments are useful, please consider peer reviewing an article, especially one at Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog (which is how I found this article). Yours, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 21:35, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]