Wikipedia:Peer review/History of Florida State University/archive1

History of Florida State 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 July 2009.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Hello...I have been working on the History of Florida State University for some time and I think it is ready for peer review. While clearly additional work needs to be done, I now need the critical eye, suggestions and contributions of other Wikipedians to make the article better, hopefully culminating in GA or FA status.

Thank you in advance for any help with this work!

Sirberus (talk) 00:17, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: This is interesting and a good start. I have several suggestions for further improvement.

MOS:BOLD suggests limiting the use of bolding to a few special cases such as the article name in the first paragraph of an article. Since this article's title is descriptive, it doesn't need to reappear in the first paragraph. So far, so good. But I don't think the bolding of the university's names later in the article meet the guidelines. They leaped out at me, which is why I'm mentioning them first. Perhaps just title case with no bolding would be better; e.g., Florida State University. Done

WP:ITALICS says in part, "It is normally incorrect to put quotations in italics." The long sections of italicized words in the main text and the footnotes should be changed to normal type. The one in "Student activism and racial integration" is one example, but the big swatches of italics in "References" are the main culprits. Done

*The "Pathways of Excellence" section has too much booster language and jargon and too many peacock terms. Something like "which are intended to have a dramatic transformational effect on the overall academic quality and scholarly productivity of the university" is meaningless. I don't mean to be rude, but it's better to look for sources outside of the university for material that evaluates the university. The university's public relations or public information office can probably be relied on for information about enrollment, new buildings, faculty size, and a lot of other things, but the people there are hired to put a positive spin on things. Where did the money come from to hire 200 new faculty members and to build these new buildings? Was any part of this "aggressive expansion" controversial? Done

MOS:IMAGES says in part, "Images should be inside the section they belong to (after the heading and after any links to other articles), and not above the heading. MOS:IMAGES also says, "Avoid sandwiching text between two images that face each other." I see instances of both problems in this article. You might be able to solve the problem simply by re-locating the images, although short sections might not be big enough to accommodate more than one image without crowding. Done

Much of the article seems to be well-sourced. However, some paragraphs with information that is not common knowledge lack sources. An example is the second paragraph of "Presbyterian influence". A good rule of thumb is to provide sources for each direct quotation, each unusual claim, each set of statistics, and each paragraph.

Update: In process. Sirberus (talk) 20:02, 2 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Curiously, no equivalent building exists on the campus of Florida State University." - This sentence in the "Buckman Act" section got my attention because of the sly humor. Alas, "curiously" is POVish and should be deleted if the article is to be neutral. In fact, the whole sentence should be deleted to avoid making an anti-Buckman judgment introduced by Wikipedia. On the other hand, if you can quote a reliable source who makes the Buckman joke... Done

The reference section is in disarray. Some of the citations use the "cite" family of templates, while others do not. The result is a hodge-podge. I'd suggest using the "cite" templates throughout and trying "cite book" or "cite journal" or some of the others when "cite web" is inadequate. You can read more about these at WP:CIT. Be careful not to mix the "Citation" family of templates with the "cite" family; they are explained together at WP:CIT, and it's fairly easy to confuse them. Alternatively, you could avoid using any citation templates and do the citations all "by hand", making sure that the elements are in the proper order and that the formatting is consistent from one citation to the next. All of the dates in the citations, for example, should either be in m-d-y format or yyyy-mm-dd format but not a mixture. Sorry this is so complicated. You might be able to imitate what others have successfully used in featured articles about education. You can find a complete list of these articles at WP:FA#Education.

I hope these few comments prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 18:56, 13 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

- Sirberus acknowledgement to Finetooth:
- Thank you for the feedback! These are very helpful remarks and I will work to improve the article accordingly. Sirberus (talk) 14:08, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]