Wikipedia:Peer review/Social liberalism/archive1

Social liberalism

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I've listed this article for peer review because this article is rated "High-importance" and "B-class" in both WikiProject Politics and WikiProject Politics. I and several other editors have worked to improve the article but I believe that wider input is required to improve the article further.

Thanks, TFD (talk) 19:04, 1 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Social liberalism may refer to the theories developed by the New Liberal English philosophers, T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, and John A. Hobson in the late 19th century, the Liberal welfare reforms of the UK government (1906-1914), the economic and welfare policies developed by John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge and implimented by the Labour Party after the Second World War, similar policies implimented by other governments, or to Liberal Parties that have adopted these policies. The term is also used in an unrelated way to mean being socially liberal, i.e., open-minded. There are also numerous terms sometimes used as synonyms, but are actually overlapping, such as left-liberalism, modern liberalism. This has provided some difficulty in writing the article. TFD (talk) 19:40, 1 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: The prose here is excellent; the article is highly readable and well-organized. The article seems neutral and stable and probably illustrated well enough for GA. To reach GA, though, I think you will need to broaden the coverage here and there, re-work the lead, and make a few more adjustments to conform to the guidelines in the Manual of Style. Here are my suggestions:

Lead

The ideal lead should be a summary or abstract of the rest of the article. If you can imagine a reader who can read nothing but the lead, you will see how to write it. A good rule of thumb is to include in the lead at least a mention of each of the main text sections and not to include anything important in the lead that is not mentioned in the main text. The existing lead seems to be a set of introductory paragraphs rather than a summary of the rest of the article. It fails to mention the 19th century, for example, and it defines liberalism even though no definition appears in the main text. Part of the solution here might be to create a "Definition" section that appears immediately below the lead and to move most of the definition material from the lead into that new section, which could be expanded slightly to include examples. The other thing I would recommend is to put off the final re-write of the lead until after the main-text expansions and revisions are complete or nearly so. It's usually not possible to write a good abstract of an incomplete article, although it's possible to write a series of ever-changing temporary ones.

I think the article should be expanded to include at least something in the main text about countries outside of the U.K., the U.S., and northern Europe. It might also be helpful to add something about where social liberalism has not fared well and why.

It might be helpful to add a bit more detail about terms like "classical liberalism". Although they are linked, it's much easier on a general reader to see something like "classical liberalism, committed to the ideals of X, Y, and Z", then to click through to another article to get the basic idea.

I'd suggest adding a few more dates to help readers keep the chronologies straight; e.g., dates for the German Republic, the Weimar Republic, and "modern Germany". Would it also be useful to mention what happened to social liberalism in Nazi Germany? Another example: not all readers will know when France was in its Third Republic phase.

In the Implementation section, the United Kingdom subsection and the first paragraph of the Europe subsection are completely unsourced. A good rule of thumb is to provide at least one source for every paragraph except the lead paragraphs, as well as sources for statistics, direct quotes, and any claim that has been challenged or is apt to be challenged.

Done. The source for the UK subsection had been deleted, while the first paragraph for the Europe subsection has the same source as the first part of the second paragraph. TFD (talk) 05:46, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Manual of Style suggests converting lists to straight prose when it is feasible. The existing article ends with two long lists, and I would think about ways to change them into prose or to reduce their importance. With the first list, it might be possible to write a paragraph about each of the items in the list. No easy task, I'm sure, but probably possible, possibly illuminating. I don't see an easy way to alter the list of people unless it can be shortened to the most essential 10 or so, each of whom gets a paragraph. Just a suggestion.

Wiklink on first use: laissez-faire? capitalism? bourgeois? proletarian? Victorian?

Numbers from 10 up are usually written as digits unless they start a sentence. I see "20th century" in the lead, which follows the guideline, but in the main text "nineteenth century" and so on appear here and there.

Abbreviations like ALDE should be spelled out and abbreviated on first use, thus: Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE). This also applies to the three abbreviated organizations in the Notes.

Page ranges and date ranges take en dashes rather than hyphens. I ran a script to fix three dozen or so of these in the existing article.

The Dawn of Hope image overlaps two sections, which is a layout no-no, and Alexander Ruestow bumps a subhead, which is another no-no. The two images form a text sandwich between them, a third no-no. The Dawn of Hope image is so big and its caption so long that I don't see a quick fix. Perhaps the text in this section will eventually expand enough that the image will fit entirely inside the section. The Ruestow image can simply be moved down a bit to eliminate the head bump and the sandwich. Should Rüstow be spelled with the umlaut, by the way? One more thought about the Rüstow image; if you can make the layout work, it's better to place directional images so that they look into the page rather than out. Rüstow would be better on the right, and perhaps Naumann would be a little better on the left.

Some of the citations are incomplete. For example citation 7 doesn't mention the authors or editors; citation 22 doesn't list a publisher or place of publication. Citation 77 lacks a page number or numbers. Other citations are malformed. Citation 22 puts the author last instead of first.

Other

The link checker in the toolbox at the top of this review page finds six dead citation urls.
The alt-text tool shows that most of the images lack alt text, meant for readers who can't see the images. WP:ALT has details.
The dab tool finds one link that goes to a disambiguation page instead of its intended target.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 04:21, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]