Wikipedia:Peer review/John Adams/archive2

John Adams

Previous peer review

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like a thorough read-through of this article, as I intend to preferably get this up to GA status. Any comments, suggestions, or edits will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Connormah (talk) 01:39, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Note: I have been asked to look at this as a preliminary to some possibly extensive revision with a view to the possible nomination of the article for GA or FA. I won't be doing a close review of the text, but will try to identify the main areas on which the editors working on the revision ought to concentrate. It may be a few days before I post anything here, but please be patient; the work is under way. Brianboulton (talk) 21:26, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Brianboulton comments:-

• General prose standard: This looks a little uneven; though some parts read well, there is some clumsy writing. Here are a few suspect sentences, from the early parts of the article – though perhaps most of these will be lost in rewriting. I would recommend that when redrafting is finished a thorough copyedit is arranged:-
  • "obtaining important loans from Amsterdam" (with link to city) is uninformative (Lead)
  • "President of the United States" and "president of the United States" both occur in lead
  • Successive lead sentences begin "During his one term" and "During his term..."
  • Early life: "Adams was not a popular leader..." Ambiguous; I think "populist" is probably what is meant.
  • Opponent of the Stamp Act: "...the Stamp Act of 1765, which was imposed by the British Parliament to pay off British war debts as well as the expense of keeping a standing army in the American colonies." Suggest reword: "to pay off British war debts, and to meet the expense..."
  • Continental congress: "His influence in Congress was great, and almost from the beginning, he sought permanent separation from Britain." It's not clear that this refers to Adams - the last person mentioned is Washington
• Article structure and organisation
  • Structure looks generally sound, but the lead needs to be a better reflection of the whole article content.
• Comprehensiveness
  • The detailed list of contents suggests that all aspects of Adams's life have been covered. Without any expert knowledge I can't comment on the comprehensiveness within sections, but on the face of it, this is probably not a problem. However, the lead should mention that Adams was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence.
• MoS compliance: I found several instances of a double hyphen that ought to be an en-dash or em-dash (e.g. "preparation for war--and perhaps..." in the Foreign policy section of his Presidency). I have not carried out a full compliance check, though.
• Referencing and citations: This is the weakest part of the article as it stands at present.
  • The refimprove banner should not have been removed. Parts of the article are still very lightly cited - many complete paragraphs, and at least one whole section (Dispute concerning Parliament's authority) has no citations at all.
  • Some book refs show page numbers, others only chapters, also other inconsistencies
  • Use of "ibid" discouraged in reference lists. New references may be inserted, which destroy the ibid.
  • Online refs are unformatted. Each needs to show, minimally, title, publisher, last access date.
  • Some "references" are unreferenced footnotes
  • Some works are included in references but are not listed in the bibliography. Many books in the bibliography are not cited as sources. If they are not used in the article they ought to be either in "Further reading" or dropped.
  • The bibliography should not include POV comments on the character or usefulness of these books.
• Image issues.
  • alt text required for all images
  • The Declaration image is tiny, and needs to be resized
  • Consider increasing the number of images, and introducing some variety. Do we need two "old age" images?
  • Images appear to all be free, but some image descriptions are lacking/inadequate, and we need to be sure that each has the correct licence

I hope that these comments will be of some use as you work on the article. I will be happy to look at it again when the work has been carried out. Brianboulton (talk) 22:16, 31 January 2010 (UTC)