Wikipedia:Peer review/Chemetco/archive1
- 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 December 2008.
This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because recently, the former Chief Executive of the corporation, Denis L. Feron, was placed on the federal US EPA's 'most wanted' list.
He features on this list because he was indicted for criminal environmental actions at Chemetco that he sanctioned between 1986 and 1996. These included Clean Water Act offences at the most extreme end of the scale: he ordered the construction of a secret pipe at Chemetco that was used to discharge sludge bearing heavy metals into a tributary of the Mississippi River. Denis L. Feron fled the country rather than face a jury trial. Because of the increased prominence now given to his and Chemetco's bevaviour, the Wikipedia Chemetco page is now therefore a likely 'landing' page for anyone following links from the Wikipedia Denis L. Feron entry.
Chemetco had a long history of environmental delinquency, spanning the entire thirty years of its existence before EPA inspectors discovered the crime that was to lead to its downfall. Many readers will be interested to hear that this privately-owned company was once also the highest producer of atmospheric lead in the entire United States.
Thanks, Astral highway (talk) 14:45, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Ruhrfisch comments: Very briefly, here are some suggestions for improvement. This needs a lot of work.
- Major cleanup tag on possible conflict of interest at the top is a major concern. This also raises concerns that the article may not follow a neutral point of view. If they were as bad as the article makes them out to be, a dispassionate recitation of the facts will condemn them more effectively than a clearly skewed POV screed.
- The lead should be an accessible and inviting overview of the whole article and no more than four paragraphs long. Nothing important should be in the lead only - since it is a summary, it should all be repeated in the body of the article itself. My rule of thumb is to include every header in the lead in some way. Please see WP:LEAD
- Per WP:CITE references come AFTER punctuation, and are usually at the end of a sentence or phrase.
- Article needs more references, for example four of five paragraphs in Location have no refs. Or this direct quote does not have a ref: A trade magazine covering metals industry news has noted that "The closing of the Chemetco Inc. secondary smelter in Hartford, Ill., in 2001 marked the end of large-scale secondary copper smelting in the United States." My rule of thumb is that every quote, every statistic, every extraordinary claim and every paragraph needs a ref. See WP:CITE and WP:V
- Per WP:MOSQUOTE, {{blockquote}} should be used for quotes of four lines of text or more, but in many places the quote is not even a full line on my monitor.
- Article has very many short (one or two sentence) paragraphs that impede the flow of the article. These should be combined with other paragraphs or perhaps expanded.
- Per WP:MOS#Images, images should be set to thumb width to allow reader preferences to take over. For portrait format images, "upright" can be used to make the image narrower.
- See also is generally for links that are not also in the article - most, if not all of the See also links are already linked in the article.
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 ><>°° 03:38, 6 January 2009 (UTC)