Wikipedia:Peer review/Durham University/archive1

Durham University

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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 February 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I've been working on the article over the past few days, mainly expanding small sections and adding references, and wish to gain some feedback on any areas that I may have missed out or that need changing, also if possible I'd like to see what is needed to make the article into a GA article.

Many Thanks, Allialliw (talk) 17:56, 19 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just a few comments on a quick scan of article -

The sections on Governance & Alumni are unreferenced
The references need to be moved to follow punctuation as per the MOS - Punctuation and inline citations
There needs to be some layout changes e.g the table under "List of colleges" goes behind the images and the table under ranking causes a left right scroll as it is too wide so overlapping into the border.

Hope they help you. Keith D (talk) 23:24, 19 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: You have interesting material here, broad in coverage, and the illustrations are generally good. However, the article is a long way from GA.

The lead of a Wikipedia article ideally is an abstract or summary of the main points of the entire article. The existing lead only mentions a fraction of the main ideas.

Many parts of the article are not sourced and should be. A good rule of thumb is to source every paragraph, every set of statistics, every direct quotation, and every claim that is unusual or that is apt to be challenged.

Orphan paragraphs that consist of a single sentence are generally deprecated. Two solutions are possible. You can either expand the orphans or merge them with another paragraph.

The Manual of Style frowns on fancy quotes. Blockquotes are good for quotations of four lines or longer. The short quote in "Origins" should go back into the main text inside ordinary quotation marks.

Generally, straight prose is preferred to lists. The list in the "Durham City" section could easily be rendered as straight prose. The "Schools and faculties" section is another list. I'd be inclined to reduce this list to the first paragraph plus a sentence or two about anything that makes the Durham list different from the typical university list of departments and course offerings.

I'd suggest greatly shortening the "Alumni" section, which is another long list.

A lot of the citations are bot-generated and incomplete. The "cite" family of citation templates is recommended. I see that they have been used for many of the citations in the article, and they should be used for the rest. Citations to web sites should include author, title, publisher, publication date, url, and access date, insofar as these are available.

Some of the citations are circular and puzzling. For example, in the "Sport" section, it appears that the name "Center of Cricketing Excellence" is an internal designation. The citation seems to show that the source says that the source is excellent. Well, yes, but when the university is promoting itself, it is not a reliable source. Please see WP:RS for more details. In the same sentence, "rowing" and "fencing" are sourced. But why?

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 07:00, 26 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Finetooth and Keith D for your feedback, I'll work on the issues raised over the next few weeks and have already started with a few minor changes such as moving some material to new pages and re-arranging paras etc. I've been trying to follow the Duke University article as a guide considering that it has been featured and many of the UK GA University articles don't seem that good. With the centre of excellence it's funded by the England and Wales Cricket Board and the same with fencing and rowing from their respective bodies, as they too are centre of excellence, so I shall get a citation and clear that up ASAP. Once again thanks for your feedback it is useful to know where the article needs to go. Allialliw (talk) 17:53, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]