Wikipedia:Peer review/Postclassical Era/archive1

Postclassical Era

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because… I've been working on this article for awhile now, and while I've done a lot, I think it needs more. To make sure I am doing everything correctly and to garner some help, I would like to hear some feedback. I would like to have this article's quality and importance assessed, see if it qualifies to have its "needs additional citations" alert removed, and to establish it as a useful "umbrella" to cover the Medieval age throughout the entire world's history.

Thanks, Cito (talk) 21:16, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Dana Boomer

First, you have done an impressive job in expanding what was a small, stub-class article! I have assessed the article for the History WikiProject at Top importance (this doesn't change, regardless of the quality of the article) and C-class quality (this does change, based on the quality of the article). You can read more about the quality assessments by clicking on the links in the WikiProject banner on the talk page. Now, some specific comments on the article:

In general, you do not need quotes for every reference. In fact, unnecessary quotes can make you run into problems with copyright compliance. Unless it is a very controversial fact, a potentially controversial translation, etc., you don't need quotes in the references.
Using the named refs feature to combine identical refs would cut down on the sheer amount of text in the references section, and make it easier to see at a glance how much information is being sourced to each ref. If you would like, and haven't used this feature before, I can do one as an example, or you can find examples in almost any good or featured article.
There is still quite a bit of referencing that needs to be done, to the point that I can't see removing the cleanup (references needed) banner at this point on time. For example, the Main trends, Silk Road, Japan/Korea/Vietnam, and The Americans sections/subsections are all completely unreferenced. Other sections have some references, but there are still full paragraphs without - the first two paragraphs of the Eastern Europe section and the first and third paragraphs of the Africa section, for example.
The fact that all of the references currently in the article are to one source is also slightly worrying. Depending solely on one source can create POV problems if the source is biased (even unintentionally) one way or another, or spends more time discussing one area of a topic than another. A quick look on WorldCat and Google Scholar shows some good book and journal sources out there, as well as plenty of stuff that's on web-based reliable sources.
The Main trends section should be turned into prose - bullet pointed lists are discouraged when the information can easily be presented as prose, which it can in this case. A minor amount of expansion on each topic would probably be good. It also is one of the most pressing areas to reference, given that you're presenting themes here that tie the rest of the article together.
The Americas section also needs expansion and a switch to prose instead of bullet points.

Overall, as I said above, this article is much improved for your efforts. I hope the above comments give you some ideas for continued improvement. Please let me know if you have any questions, Dana boomer (talk) 19:29, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]